14-Way SSD Hard Drive Roundup

Super Talent Masterdrive MX 60 GB 2.5”: Unbalanced

This drive’s attributes are already well-known, as we looked at it in our last flash SSD analysis. We really like that Super Talent spent some time to find a decent product name that people can actually remember. All the other drives are simply called “flash SSD”, which doesn’t help to separate the wheat from the chaff. This one seems to offer good bang for the buck, although it cannot beat the premium drives from MemoRight, Mtron, OCZ and Samsung.

The Masterdrive MX is an MLC-based flash SSD designed for desktop or notebook applications. It can read at almost 110 MB/s, delivering great performance for desktop users, but it writes at a slow 30 MB/s. The 60 GB capacity is somewhat unusual, but a tribute to the MLC flash memory. The 0.5 ms access time can be considered slow for flash SSDs, but this is in line with the I/O performance: it is superior to a conventional hard drive, but isn’t exciting when compared to other flash SSDs.

The idle and peak power requirements of 1.2 W and 2.2 W aren’t special when compared to 1.0 W and less idle for Hama, MemoRight, OCZ and Samsung, and down to 0.8 W peak for OCZ and Samsung. This drive still provides better efficiency than an average conventional hard drive, but you should not get it in an attempt to improve battery life on your notebook, as you probably will never see that.

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