Super Talent launches “affordable” 512GB SSD

Written by Ben Hardwidge

April 10, 2009 | 10:45

Tags: #512gb #affordable #disk #drive #jeremy #mlc #raid #slc #solid #speed #ssd #state #super #talent

Companies: #super-talent

Someone should probably tell Super Talent what “affordable” really means, unless the company intends it to mean “only affordable to wealthy willy wavers”, but that doesn’t appear to be the case here.

Describing its new 512GB MasterDrive RX SSD, Super Talent says that SSDs are “no longer just for the military, enterprise and elite users, the MasterDrive RX SSD is truly affordable.” Sadly, Super Talent’s definition of “truly affordable” means $1,449.99 US (£985.32), which may be significantly cheaper than previous top-end SSDs, but is still a ludicrous price when a 500GB hard drive can be bought for less than £50.

That said, if you have the money then the drive promises some interesting features. At the top of the list is the use of RAID inside the SSD to boost performance. It’s a system that Super Talent claims to have patented, and the company’s senior product marketing manager, Jeremy Werner, explained that “from a performance standpoint it’s like having two SSDs in the space of one, and it extends our standard 2.5in SATA-II product line to include a 512GB SSD.”

Super Talent’s RAIDSSD technology was first revealed earlier this month in the details of a new PCI-E SSD card, and the company claims that it helps to enable the new 2.5in SATA II drives to offer “the fastest sequential read and write speeds in the market.” These range from a maximum sequential read and write speed of 230MB/sec and 160MB/sec respectively on MLC-based units, and 230MB/sec and 200MB/sec on SLC-based drives.

As a point of comparison, Corsair’s recently-announced P256 boasts an identical quoted sequential write speed of 200MB/sec and a slightly slower read speed of 220MB/sec. Meanwhile, Intel’s flagship X25-E has a higher quoted sequential read speed of 250MB/sec, but a slower quoted sequential write speed of 170MB/sec. Super Talent’s MLC drives will have a two-year warranty, and will be available in capacities of 128GB, 256GB and 512GB. Meanwhile, the SLC drives will have a three-year warranty and will come in 128GB and 256GB flavours.

With capacities of 512GB, solid state disks are certainly starting to catch up with hard drives, and while their prices are still very high, they’re gradually starting to come down. When do you think it will be worth making the switch to solid state storage in your PC, or have you done so already? Let us know your thoughts in the forums.
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