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New SSD has a 128MB DRAM cache and up to 200 MBps read speed

SSDs continue to debut with higher storage capacities, more performance, and lower price tags. As the technology matures, it will be easier for the average consumer to upgrade or switch to an SSD rather than a traditional HDD.

Super Talent has announced a new SSD called the MasterDrive SX that boasts a 128MB DRAM cache. The massive DRAM cache allows the drive to offer high performance levels and take full advantage of the 3 Gbps SATA-II interface bandwidth. Super Talent reports the drive can reach sequential read speeds of 220MB/sec and sequential write speeds of up to 200MB/sec.

The drives will be offered in 64GB, 128GB, and 256GB capacities. The 64GB drive will have read speed of 200MB/sec and a write speed of 120MB/sec. The 128GB and 256GB SSDs will offer the 220/200 Mbps read/write speeds.

The drives have undergone extensive validation and stresses for Linux and Windows environments and promise to be one of the most reliable SSDs available. The drives are 2.5-inch units and are housed in aluminum cases that are resistant to shock and vibration. Power efficiency is another big feature with the MasterDrive SX needing only 0.15 watts of power at idle.

We developed the MasterDrive SX series to offer extreme reliability at an aggressive price point that makes sense for mobile professionals and enthusiasts. Moreover, these drives boast power efficiency and write speeds that few SSDs can match", said Super Talent Director of Marketing Joe James.

MasterDrive SX SSDs are available now in up to 256GB capacity at Newegg with the 128GB drive selling for about $359. Super Talent also recently unveiled a line of SSD upgrade drives for Asus Eee netbooks.

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Aluminum cases?
By SublimeSimplicity on 6/18/2009 11:45:31 AM , Rating: 3
I realize they look shiny and pretty, but why do all SSD have metal cases? Its not like a HDD where you need to keep some structural integrity or the thing will destroy itself. This is a bunch of chips on a circuit board, make the casing out of plastic and knock $20 off the price.




RE: Aluminum cases?
By smackababy on 6/18/2009 11:49:37 AM , Rating: 2
Then it would lose durability and probably some heat dissipation.


RE: Aluminum cases?
By mindless1 on 6/18/2009 2:08:12 PM , Rating: 5
Show me an SSD which has it's heat producing parts 'sunk to the aluminum case? If it's not the heat dissipation factor is minor, but if it is you lose the durability because the thin metal casing will flex which would flex the chips and PCB which can't be allowed to flex.

The prior comment was correct, it does not need a metal casing at all, in fact it would probably be most durable if it were set in a block of fiber-filled epoxy, in that case you could probably pound it with a hammer or run over it with a car at high speed. Set in epoxy it would also 'sink away heat better, and since it is so thick a solid piece the flexure issue wouldn't be a factor in any but a very severe attempt to destroy it like an axe, bullet, or fire, etc.


RE: Aluminum cases?
By smackababy on 6/18/09, Rating: -1
RE: Aluminum cases?
By Howard on 6/18/2009 2:40:17 PM , Rating: 2
no


RE: Aluminum cases?
By Cypherdude1 on 6/18/2009 10:03:55 PM , Rating: 2
I wouldn't buy any SSD until the end of the year. DailyTech just wrote a story about a new SSD controller which will cut the price of SSD's in half. So it's probably best to wait until December or even January 2011.


RE: Aluminum cases?
By Trippytiger on 6/18/2009 11:45:00 PM , Rating: 5
It's always best to wait. Every computer component gets better and cheaper with time; eventually you just have to decide that you want something now.


RE: Aluminum cases?
By Samus on 6/19/2009 2:02:49 AM , Rating: 3
Does anyone here actually own an SSD. Seriously people, I just purchased my 3rd one for a media center I'm building (OCZ Vertex) and over the past week it runs at room temperature, like every other SSD I own. They don't create ANY heat. And if they did, it wouldn't matter, because it doesn't have any negative effect on them.

Putting them in aluminum cases is about as stupid as putting RAM in an aluminum heat spreader. It has virtually no impact on cooling performance because memory's natural operating temperature is well within its thermal envelope.

I say ditch the friggin' aluminum case and put it in a piece of plastic or rubber that costs substantially less (and wont rattle in a laptop case)


RE: Aluminum cases?
By lennylim on 6/18/2009 4:08:50 PM , Rating: 2
Aluminum cases don't do anything to keep your computer cooler compared to steel cases. The airflow from well-placed fans are what cools your cases down. However, there are cases with heat producing parts sunk to the case. Check out Zalman's TNN-300 and TNN-500.

http://www.silentpcreview.com/article302-page1.htm...

Aluminum looks pretty and feels expensive. Reliable.. it depends.


RE: Aluminum cases?
By Baov on 6/20/2009 12:40:14 PM , Rating: 2
Feeling expensive sure is important for a part i'm gonna burry in my laptop's internals.


RE: Aluminum cases?
By mindless1 on 6/18/09, Rating: 0
RE: Aluminum cases?
By feraltoad on 6/19/2009 1:37:53 AM , Rating: 3
Grandpa would have been dead from a bullet wound to the chest if not for the epoxy SSD filled to the brim with pr0n in his shirt pocket.


RE: Aluminum cases?
By inperfectdarkness on 6/18/2009 11:42:53 PM , Rating: 2
carbon fiber casing ftmfw.


RE: Aluminum cases?
By randomposter on 6/18/2009 11:50:17 AM , Rating: 5
Or just give the thing some mounting points and leave it naked, just like all the other components in my system.


RE: Aluminum cases?
By mindless1 on 6/18/2009 7:37:47 PM , Rating: 3
2.5" drives have mounting points on the sides, you'd need a frame then, so you might as well just put a top cover on that frame even if not a bottom one, plus considering how expensive SSDs are and that in a laptop the only insulation between drive and mainboard PCB may be a plastic sheet or sticker, and it becomes highly worthwhile to put a couple dollars worth of plastic casing on a drive.

Plus, the casing can help reinforce the SATA data/power connectors since they may be merely surface-mount soldered on which can be a problem for parts subject to the stress of mechanical connection.


RE: Aluminum cases?
By GoodBytes on 6/18/2009 12:10:25 PM , Rating: 2
Maybe because it cost nothing to produce. I would prefer to have a metal case and pay 5 penny more, then not have it.


RE: Aluminum cases?
By TomZ on 6/18/2009 12:12:23 PM , Rating: 2
No, aluminum enclosures cost a lot more than plastic, even in large production volumes.

Aluminum is a good choice for a product like this because it is durable - it protects against flexing - and it dissipates heat well.


RE: Aluminum cases?
By SublimeSimplicity on 6/18/2009 1:53:00 PM , Rating: 2
If its a good choice or needed by this product, why don't memory chips for laptops come in aluminum cases?


RE: Aluminum cases?
By smackababy on 6/18/2009 1:54:50 PM , Rating: 2
If 5-point racing harnesses are the good, proven choice for seat belts, why aren't they in all cars? Price...


RE: Aluminum cases?
By phattyboombatty on 6/18/2009 6:36:54 PM , Rating: 2
...and comfort/convenience


RE: Aluminum cases?
By mindless1 on 6/18/2009 2:15:23 PM , Rating: 3
With the smallest, 128GB version selling for $359, making the shell aluminum instead of plastic is a trivial additional expense, perhaps $2.

Aluminum is not particularly durable when it is a thin shell instead of the thick frame needed to make a mechanical drive completely rigid within reason.

Aluminum shells do not dissipate heat well, because a thin shell flexes the board and chips cannot be directly 'sunk to it, at best a compressible thermal pad would be used which has far worse thermal transfer efficiency. Odds are there is no 'sinking it is an air gap, so the difference in 'sinking of plastic versus aluminum is trivial, swamped by the inefficiency of the air gap.

There really isn't a good reason to use aluminum except to try and trick a naive consumer into thinking a relative simple, electronically, bunch of chips on a PCB are worth hundreds of dollars.

Put in perspective in ten years it will sell for a couple dozen bucks on some surplus parts 'site, and only that much due to rarity. We really are being tech whores to buy into SSD today with such a terrible price:capacity ratio instead of just waiting for flash density to rise enough to make them more cost effective, performance is not THAT important as we did manage to survive (somehow, LOL) years ago when we had an order of magnitude less performance than today.


RE: Aluminum cases?
By smackababy on 6/18/2009 2:23:02 PM , Rating: 2
What exactly do you think pays for the advancement of technology? I can assure you those who paid a heck of a lot more than what they want for this drive for a 56MB HDD helped procude higher capacity storage mediums. Yes, I own 2 Vertex 60GB SSDs and I love both of them. Paid less than this 128GB for both as well. Much better than my first HDD upgrade years ago.


RE: Aluminum cases?
By afkrotch on 6/19/2009 4:20:32 AM , Rating: 2
What pays for the advancement of technology is current technology. Do you really think they made enough money off SSDs alone to further it's development? Hell no, they use the profit from their other current technology products.


RE: Aluminum cases?
By TomZ on 6/18/2009 2:24:54 PM , Rating: 2
I disagree. Direct contact or thermal pads are not needed between the parts and the case in order to dissipate heat. Yes, having contact or a pad is better than not having it, but that's not the point. The point is that we're comparing the relative dissipative properties of aluminum versus plastic.

Also, aluminum at a given thickness is going to be much more rigid than most plastics at the same thickness. Again, the question is not whether the use of aluminum has been absolutely maximized; it's how it compares to the other material being discussed, plastic.


RE: Aluminum cases?
By mindless1 on 6/18/2009 7:48:56 PM , Rating: 3
Then you're completely wrong. Feel the side of your computer case, if it is hot your case has inadequate airflow. If it is cool there is insufficient thermal gradient between it and the ambient air.

Either way the only time a metal case significantly cools the parts within is when that case has a completely air-tight seal so it get very hot.

The relative dissipative properties of aluminum versus steel in a non-airtight case are completely swamped by the far inferior properties of the air inbetween. Even then, passive air circulation results from it's increase in temperature to again swamp the difference between plastic and metal when it's not heatsunk.

Aluminum at a given thickness is irrelevant because it is not a solid block of aluminum it is a thin shell versus a less expensive block of plastic which can be inexpensively molded. What do you plan on subjecting the drive to anyway, that you think plastic won't suffice? Structural parts in most laptops are plastic, as are the connectors themselves, cables, etc. All of these will fail long before enough force to flex a thick molded plastic casing. Further if you want to talk about them being the same thickness the plastic will weigh less which is useful in the portable applications 2.5" drives are often found in.

The one benefit of metal is the inherent ability to suppress EMI, but a spray can be applied to a plastic casing to serve the same purpose.

In use there is no real benefit. As already stated I would much prefer it were potted in a thermally conductive fiber reinforced epoxy. That would tend to reduce formation of tin whiskers too, as well as sealing out UV and moisture.


RE: Aluminum cases?
By kkwst2 on 6/19/2009 10:50:34 AM , Rating: 2
So your choices for reinforced epoxy are molded or machined. While some epoxy parts can be machined fairly well, it is generally much cheaper and easier to generate machined aluminum parts. Molded epoxy will be significantly cheaper in high volume, but this part may be too low a volume to make that economical. The turnaround time for a molded epoxy part also can be longer. Finally, while reinforced epoxy can be made quite rigid, the fancier reinforcements to make it more rigid than aluminum also make it expensive.

I suspect the engineers are not stupid. It probably either came back to the fact that the aluminum parts were cheaper or that the turnaround time was shorter that made them choose aluminum.


RE: Aluminum cases?
By strikeback03 on 6/18/2009 3:59:05 PM , Rating: 3
What computer component won't be worth a fraction of its' current cost in 10 years? Most hard drives from 10 years ago are smaller than some USB flash drives today. The same can be said about RAM, processors, etc.

As is always the question with SSDs, what controller does it use?


RE: Aluminum cases?
By Continuation on 6/20/2009 2:07:24 PM , Rating: 2
quote:
As is always the question with SSDs, what controller does it use?


Actually the real question with SSDs is, "Is it SLC or MLC?"

MLC drives are basically crap, with horrible write speed and IOPS. The only SSD worth buying are the SLC ones.


RE: Aluminum cases?
By kkwst2 on 6/19/2009 10:54:49 AM , Rating: 2
As a generalization that's not always true. High quality reinforced plastic in low volume runs can be more expensive than aluminum.

quote:
even in large production volumes


High volume generally favors plastic, not hurts it.


RE: Aluminum cases?
By inighthawki on 6/18/2009 1:42:29 PM , Rating: 2
If the drive were < $100 i would agree with you but chances are the cost of the aluminum housing will be negligible to the price of the drive itself, especially once you get past the 32GB versions of SSD drives...


RE: Aluminum cases?
By TomZ on 6/18/2009 2:27:01 PM , Rating: 2
It depends on the manufacturing volume. If something is produced in the millions, then even a $0.05 cost reduction is worth pursuing.


RE: Aluminum cases?
By inighthawki on 6/18/2009 7:10:14 PM , Rating: 2
in the eyes of the producer, yes most definately, even $.05 is a lot from a mass-production standpoint, but the thing is, if u pass that $.05 on to the customer as $1, something essentially negligible from their end, u make a lot of money. Granted you COULD do this with plastics too, but its simply a matter of upping the price a little more to get what you want out of it. With SSD's still easily being in the $200-$500 range, i think making them nice with aluminum casing really isnt all that bad of an idea.


RE: Aluminum cases?
By mindless1 on 6/18/2009 7:54:38 PM , Rating: 2
It makes no substantial difference to the function of the product, they are simply trying to make it look fancier, to differtiate the product. In that case they don't care about the 5 cents on a $300 drive, they care about volume sold.

Further, it is usually not worth pursuing a 5 cent difference for millions of products if the lower cost part is inferior as the support or RMA and replacement costs far exceed the 5 cent savings. However in this case it really doesn't matter, either material would do the job as it isn't the weakness of the drive, haven't you seen videos of people throwing SSDs off of buildings and surviving in a plastic casing?


RE: Aluminum cases?
By ClownPuncher on 6/18/2009 2:25:41 PM , Rating: 2
If you're paying $20 at the manufacturing level for aluminum casing you would be out of business in no time.


RE: Aluminum cases?
By mindless1 on 6/18/2009 7:56:55 PM , Rating: 2
Stamped out metal casings don't cost close to $20 each, even when buying single unit volume of things like aluminum kitchenware at retail you can get them for $2 each at thrift stores.


RE: Aluminum cases?
By Spectator on 6/18/2009 2:28:58 PM , Rating: 2
Plastic is fine, its the size thats just rediculous when you can get 128gig on a usb drive. lol

http://hothardware.com/News/Kingston-Puts-128GB-in...

Normally the logic follows when you make something much smaller it becomes more expensive?(ignoring chip fab concept)

So the question is.. when are they going to develop the "Raid" style blocks onto single chips. So you dont have to have 10/20 mem chips planted onto the 2.5" SSD to get performance.

Why would I want a big 2.5" drive when I can get 128gig on a much smaller USB memory stick. Chukkle


RE: Aluminum cases?
By ClownPuncher on 6/18/2009 2:32:58 PM , Rating: 2
You do know that a USB stick and a hard drive are different, right?


RE: Aluminum cases?
By Spectator on 6/18/2009 2:47:06 PM , Rating: 1
yes :(

I should have put USB Drive.

The overall logic seems sound though, with an addition that for the normal size usb "Stick's" you can pay about $1 a gig and they make a profit selling the chips and have to mess with all that usb packaging.

but when you stick 10+ of these nand chips together in a bigger single package you seem to have to pay hundreds of dollars extra for just a controller.

The overall logic seems broken, If it was just sheer profit everyone would be jumping all over SSD tech for the cash.
Hmmm. wait a minute?. /Smile


RE: Aluminum cases?
By ClownPuncher on 6/18/2009 3:04:41 PM , Rating: 2
We have to help pay for the R&D that went into it as well as the R&D that will go into the next generation of SSD.


RE: Aluminum cases?
By ipay on 6/18/2009 3:09:28 PM , Rating: 1
Have you heard of a USB flash drive that can read at 200MB/s and write at 100MB/s? No? That's because they don't exist, and they don't exist because the NAND chips used in flash drives are different to the NAND used in SSDs.

The only logic that is broken is yours.


RE: Aluminum cases?
By afkrotch on 6/19/2009 4:51:45 AM , Rating: 2
It's not that the chips are different, it's that they are used differently.

Take for example a usb key with like 128 GB of storage and an SSD. The key will probably only use like 2-4 chips, while an SSD of comparable size will use more than that.

The transfer rate for a single chip is terrible, but when you add in more chips, you can essentially stripe them together to increase those transfer rates. So if a single chip only gets like a 15 MB/s transfer rate, then 14 of them will get you 210 MB/s.


RE: Aluminum cases?
By mindless1 on 6/18/2009 8:03:31 PM , Rating: 2
To have single chip raid-style flash you would have to develop a custom chip, that chip would not be so usable in other devices that don't need the bandwidth, it would require more pins per chip and a larger die making manufacturing of both the drive and chip more costly.

It would require a die shrink and really why do we care about the size so long as it fits in the 1.8" or 2.5" form factor since that is the size casing it has to have to mount in the myriad devices designed for removable drives.

Someday we'll abandon the idea of removable drives in portable devices and it'll just be soldered onto the board like we now see with flash based MP3 players, but that day is a ways off still because it makes a single part (Mainboard with drive on it) too expensive for most markets.

As others mentioned the performance of an SSD is much higher, plus the controller is larger, plus you have the DRAM cache memory, plus the SATA power plug and data plug themselves dictate a minimum width the drive could be.

The question is not, why shrink it, the question is when are they going to start using twin PCBs to double the # of chips it can hold.

However, there are flash chips with stacked dies now, but there is a practical limit to how much stacking is cost effective and when looking at SSDs, the flash is the most expensive part so increasing that component cost doesn't seem the right move at this point.


Critical Detail...
By deputc26 on 6/18/2009 11:43:16 AM , Rating: 4
What controller does this use? Indilinx drives all idle at ~.4w but perhaps that's not due to the controller.




RE: Critical Detail...
By drakore on 6/18/2009 11:50:53 AM , Rating: 3
it uses a Samsung controller


I wonder...
By Souka on 6/18/2009 12:00:58 PM , Rating: 3
Any real-world benchmarks?

Also, are these MLC or SLC based tech?

Not a lot of info in this article to go on... :(
But I am liking what I'm seeing! :)




RE: I wonder...
By TomZ on 6/18/2009 12:21:18 PM , Rating: 3
It's MLC. DT doesn't do benchmark testing, and they typically write product news based on press releases which come out before other sites release benchmark data.


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