14-Way SSD Hard Drive Roundup

Mtron Pro 7500 3.5” SATA 32 GB: Workstation Drives

Mtron was the first SSD maker to provide a solid state drive that would clearly outperform mechanical hard drives. The latest drive we received for testing, the Mtron Pro 7500, is now a 3.5” model specifically targeting the enterprise space. Hence it doesn’t come as a surprise that the drive is not particularly energy efficient — 1.6 W idle and 2.4 W peak power — although it does provide great performance per watt.

Actually, the Mtron Pro 7500 is the best drive in our performance per watt tests that look at streaming read and workstation I/O performance. It offers good I/O performance, but it seems optimized for Web servers, where it blows away the competition. It also does superbly at the PCMark05 application benchmarks when it comes to writing files and in Windows XP startup performance: 117 MB/s read throughput and 116 MB/s write performance are excellent results. This drive will make you forget your old hard drive quickly if you are willing to fork out the $1,300 price tag.