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Print E-mail del.icio.us 59 comment(s) - last by mindless1.. on May 14 at 5:29 AM

Super Talent's new 32GB MasterDrive MX SSD is priced at a "reasonable" $299.
Super Talent goes on an SSD price-slashing spree.

Solid-state drives (SSDs) are seen as the next frontier in the area of storage technology for personal computers. SSDs are remarkably fast, generate less heat, make no noise, and are lighter than their HDD counterparts.

One factor that has kept SSDs from wide-spread adoption, however, has been the high price of entry. OCZ recently announced 32GB and 64GB SATA-II SSDs use single-level cell (SLC) NAND flash and are priced at $599 and $1,099 respectively. Likewise, Super Talent's new 256GB SATA is priced at a whopping $5,995.

Luckily for end-users, prices are starting to drop and Super Talent is looking to populate the lower-end of the market with a new lineup of SSDs. The company today announced new MasterDrive MX 30GB, 60GB, and 120GB SSDs -- incredibly, all are priced under $1,000. The drives retail for $299, $449, and $649 respectively.

All of the drives use a SATA-II interface and contain multi-level cell (MLC) NAND memory. The use of MLC memory means that these new "budget" drives can't hold a candle to SLC drives when it comes to write performance. However, all three drives manage to achieve read speeds of 120MB/sec and write speeds of 40MB/sec.

On a slightly higher performance plane -- and with a notable increase in pricing -- are the new MasterDrive DX 30GB and 60GB SSDs. Both use SLC memory and offer read speeds of 120MB/sec and write speeds of 70MB/sec -- they are priced at $699 and $1,299 respectively.

"These new SSDs are a rugged, lightning fast, low power storage alternative for mobile professionals and enthusiasts. With such overwhelming benefits, MasterDrive SSDs are sure to revolutionize mobile storage," said Joe James, Super Talent's Marketing Director.

The Super Talent MasterDrive MX SSDs are currently listed on Newegg's website and are in stock. The MasterDrive DX SSDs, however, are not currently available.

It remains to be seen if other SSD manufacturers will follow Super Talent’s lead with lower pricing across the board on their hardware, but it’s nice to see that the ball is finally rolling. Super Talent’s MasterDrive MX may leave a little to be desired in write performance, but the price tags should allow SSDs to reach a much larger audience.

Comments     Threshold


Still too much
By archcommus on 5/5/2008 8:45:24 PM , Rating: 2
Vista loads in under 30 seconds and even my most taxing games load levels in about the same time or not much more. For my desktop that doesn't move and just sits on my floor, I'll take 500 GB for $100 easily. Maybe in 3-4 years these SSDs will be more appealing. Really those speeds don't sound all THAT impressive, not for the price anyway.




RE: Still too much
By xsilver on 5/5/2008 9:39:45 PM , Rating: 1
For regular use, I dont see SSD's really coming to replace anything. Hybrid drives however could take off provided they match the price/storage ratio accordingly.

samsung has 128mb/256mb hybrid drives which I think are still too small but a hybrid drive with 4/8gb flash and 500gb HDD priced at a 10% premium to regular drives I think could do well.
Great software implementation could pre-define the OS/common apps stay on the flash.


RE: Still too much
By mmcdonalataocdotgov on 5/6/2008 11:04:22 AM , Rating: 2
When memristors come on the market, we may wonder why we ever used a device as slow as an SSD, much less HDD.


RE: Still too much
By snipermav on 5/6/2008 2:05:27 PM , Rating: 2
I'm betting that's another ~20 years away before the technology is mature and affordable enough for consumer markets.


RE: Still too much
By Omega215D on 5/6/2008 12:59:39 PM , Rating: 2
At least there's always the WD VelociRaptor that is a more reasonable $1 USD per gig. Quite competitive with current SSDs I think.


RE: Still too much
By DeepBlue1975 on 5/6/2008 2:52:25 PM , Rating: 4
You people aren't get the point of SSD...
And nor does the article, for what matters...

The advantage of SSD from a performance standpoint is NOT sequential transfer rates as it is low access times, typically around 100 times better than normal hard drives.

What does that mean, that your games are going to load singificantly faster? No.

It means that if you have 5 apps open at a time and an archiving utility running in the background, disk accesses will become increasingly painful as your multitasking demands increase and as your system needs to use the swapping file more often.

In that kind of scenario an SSD will help.

If you're a "single task" kind of user, well, then an SSD is not and probably will never be better for you than a horrible obsolete thing with rotating plates and mechanical actuators (the long name for hard disk).


RE: Still too much
By mindless1 on 5/6/2008 7:09:55 PM , Rating: 1
Actually, the advantage IS soon to be sequential transfer rates, or hadn't you noticed that a typical consumer hard drive does NOT have 120MB/s across the entirety of it's platters like these do.

Low access times do not matter in multitasking like you suggest, any moreso than other disk intensive small IO scenarios.

It is wrong to think it's about the swapping or pagefile, that is easily enough handled by the several gigs of main system memory - nobody should ever be thinking about pagefile performance in the context of a system costly enough to have a several hundred dollar SSD but not enough main memory.

If you're a single task user, SSD has one very important benefit in that mechanical hard drives tend to die at a much higher rate within the viable life of the system installed within.

Wow, it seems you're wrong on practically every point, it's a wonder people rated you up to a 4.


RE: Still too much
By xsilver on 5/6/2008 7:56:04 PM , Rating: 2
exactly,
I said loading the entire OS onto the SSD portion of the drive where the most common and frequent access is. It solves both problems of multitasking and fast transfer rates.
Therfore you will have the best of both worlds with large storage space as well as fast speeds.

What is more interesting to me is if you had a stand alone 4/8gb ssd running together with a 500gb hdd, what kind of penalties would occur as opposed to a hybrid drive?


RE: Still too much
By DeepBlue1975 on 5/7/2008 9:39:25 AM , Rating: 2
You said it yourself: "is soon to be transfer rates".
Now IT IS NOT.

Modern mechanical drives are having STRs in excess of 100mb/s...

And low access times DO matter in multitasking. If it weren't so, why do you think that we are now using 7200rpm drives instead of 5400 ones?

What factor do you think makes a 10.000 rpm faster than your best 7200rpm drive? Only STR?

Do you know what rotational latency is, right?
You also know how a hard drive works, don't you?

Do you know what the principle behind "readyboost" in vista is for using a really slow STR USB drive to speed up a machine with a low quantity of system ram, and when I say slow I mean around 10mb/sec in comparison to around 70mb/sec and beyond for an hdd?

Please read some tests around, read why a stripe of disks (badly called raid 0, as it has no redundancy), which improves the STR drastically, does not improve real usage scenarios that much, unless your apps are mostly demanding of high STRs.

I think anand has a test in which they show how standard test figures don't get that much better with an SSD, but how heavy multitasking scenarios do.

And... Several gigs? How many gigs do you have in your rig?
how many instances of Adobe Photoshop, 3d studio, video converting tools and the likes can you run at the same time without making your system RAM choke?

Yeah, 4 gigs is enough to not swap if your only mulititasking involves browsing the net and reading a PDF document, but that's not what one would call "heavy multitasking".

And another more: why do you think newest drives started to implement such things as NCQ? to improve STR, or to help avoid random accesses to be more likely to get an STR scenario, which is the kind of operation an HDD can do better?


RE: Still too much
By mindless1 on 5/7/2008 12:08:47 PM , Rating: 2
My post was correct and no, modern mechanical drives don't sustain the same speed over their entire platter surface if they do even on the fastest part. Being able to peak at over 100Mb/s is not the same as having 120MB/s over their entirety.

Low access times matter in multitasking, but not particularly so which was the distinction trying to be made - it could be said of many other scenarios which invalidates the point of the statement.

Just because a heavy multitasking test benefits does not change that other tasks do as well, a test is not a distinction it is only one point of validation.


RE: Still too much
By DeepBlue1975 on 5/8/2008 1:48:54 PM , Rating: 2
Watch a disk test at anand's, in which SSDs almost exclusively hold the upper hand in multitasking tests and are about even on all of the standard, "single task scenario" ones.


RE: Still too much
By mindless1 on 5/14/2008 5:29:54 AM , Rating: 2
You still aren't getting the point, that I never wrote there wasn't any multitasking scenario where they wouldn't help but rather, it is wrong to claim that is their benefit as if it was some exceptional use.

Multitasking is NOT something that we need bother be concerned about. It's not a data access patern, whether more than one app instead of one is requiring IO is fairly irrelevant, a distraction from the issues.


RE: Still too much
By onwisconsin on 5/5/2008 10:09:17 PM , Rating: 3
Yes, but I wouldn't mind having one in my laptop because it would be an overall improvement (noise, heat, power consumption, and resistance to dropping) over the 5400RPM one that came from the factory


RE: Still too much
By Souka on 5/6/2008 2:21:52 AM , Rating: 2
I saw the claims on "heat" and "power consumption" and had to make a comment.

I seem to recall a review on this very site showing that a 160GB 5400rpm drive had lower power consumption and therefore less "heat" compared to a SSD option.
(actually everything, but latency, the HD had the SSD beat)

Anyhow.... I'll be happy when SSD's hit the desktop market and take out the one of the noiser components in my PC.

:)


RE: Still too much
By PlasmaBomb on 5/6/2008 8:20:20 AM , Rating: 4
Macbook air with HDD swapped for SSD
http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=3226&p... (performance review)
http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=3226&p... (power usage review)

MTRON 32GB SSD: Better in a Notebook?
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=30...
The SSD wins - its power draw is 0.55W vs the 160Gb 7200 rpm Seagates 2.89 W, and its operating temp is 29/31°C idle/load vs the Seagates 33/37°C

SSD on the desktop
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=31...


RE: Still too much
By porkpie on 5/6/2008 11:56:01 AM , Rating: 2
Yeah, I get a little tired of the idiots slamming SSDs simply because they can't afford them. Sure, the price is much higher now, but the drives ARE better. The question of whether the increased performance and battery life are worth the cost is up to each individual. I know plenty of 'road warriors' willing to pay thousands for a little extra battery life.


RE: Still too much
By mindless1 on 5/6/2008 7:16:14 PM , Rating: 2
Battery life differences are inconsequential in the context of one drive per an entire computer system - including laptops.

Durability and lifespan are much much more important, as well as performance. It's just troubling to see the new products having MLC flash when they're priced high enough that the justification isn't there just to reach the capacity. 2GB USB thumbdrives now cost $10, it wouldn't be too unreasonable to have a 32GB SSD for $160 and that would place them in the price range that many are willing to pay.


RE: Still too much
By AmazighQ on 5/6/2008 11:58:31 AM , Rating: 2
ssd are a waste of money on a desktop
really buy 2 velociraptor 300 gb put them in raid 0+1
and you have the 'cheapest'solution
so for desktop's ill will take more then a price drop to make people buy ssd

and no, fast boot time is useless when performances goes down in normal usage


RE: Still too much
By Crassus on 5/6/2008 12:21:18 PM , Rating: 3
So, you want to put 2 HDDs in RAID 0+1 ... HOW?! AFAIK you need a min of 4 drives for that...

As for SSDs-- the 30GB is certainly appealing for notebook on-the-go usage. Noiseless, less power draw, and shock resistant, and now in a price range that is not beyond good and evil. Since I tend to keep HDDs longer than other components (still using an original 32Gig Raptor), it's an appealing upgrade.

However, Newegg lists them as External drives - is that correct?!


RE: Still too much
By InternetGeek on 5/5/2008 10:22:38 PM , Rating: 2