Super Talent UltraDrive SSD - the world's fastest?

This week should be considered a milestone in world of SSD hard drive production if guys from Super Talent are honest about what they have prepared for the early January '09. They say they will hit the market with world's fastest SSD. They are called UltraDrive LE SSDs which are aimed for enterprise servers and data centers, and UltraDrive ME SSDs for notebooks. OK, let Super Talent be the fastest in this field for instance, but what then to say about SanDisk? Mind you that this November '08 they have unveiled their ExtremeFFS (Extreme Flash File System). What they have said about it was that ExtremeFFS increases random read and write speeds up to 100 faster than the existing once. Such kind of result is achieved by splitting physical and logical location of data on the disk. However Super Talent is not likely to say how they achieve their speeds and just present us the figures.

The figures of Super Talent UltraDrive are quite impressive I should say. Let us start with LE series, the one for enterprise servers and data centers. Why primarily those? That is because manufacturer declares "a quantum leap forward in storage performance", and better reliability. As long as reliability seems to be the only parameter in which SSDs don't outperform HDDs, enhancing it is a key to success. Super Talent is exactly right about IOPS and MTBF (Input / Output operations Per Second and Mean Time Between Failures) are essential for servers and data services, but I bet end users will like to have it too. UltraDrive provides 230 MBps read speed and 170 MBps write speed. Such a way it can outdo 10.000 rpm HDDs if we say that SSDs have vrpm (virtual revolutions per minute) as SanDisk likes to call it. 2.5 inch disk is built on SLC NAND Flash technology, requires SATA interafce and comes with 32 GB, 64 GB and 128 GB of storage space, which is odd because ME has up to 256 GB.

Super Talent UltraDisk ME SSD is very much like the LE, but obviously there are differences. The biggest difference is the speed. It is a bit lower – 200 MBps read speed and 160 MB write speed. Not a big difference actually, and no difference in the size at all, ME also has 2.5 inches. As it was said before, capacity can be twice as bit as top LE which brings it to 256 GB on it, and all that for yet unknown price.

Anyway, prices on SSDs are higher than on HDDs, but this is not for long. Experts say prices are going to average out till '10, but by that time I'm looking forward to see Super Talent SSD versus SanDisk's.