SuperTalent's MasterDrive KX: almost affordable 1.8-inch SSD drives
Looking for a small form-factor Solid State Disk for that UMPC, sub-notebook or mobile thingamajig? SuperTalent has the goods and the prices are way down from what they were a year ago. The company has MLC or multi-level cell flash-based drives in a 1.8-inch size with a 5mm height that should fit anywhere you can find a micro-SATA interface in these three capacities:
- 30 GB for $299
- 60 GB for $449
- 120 GB for $679
Access time is a speedy 0.1ms and you'll get sequential read and write speeds of 120- and 40 MBps from the MasterDriveKX. Folks at Computex can see the new drives this week. The rest of us can hit up online retailer NewBiiz and order us some speedy SSD.
Weeee let the SSD fun begin!!!!
Posted by: andrew beery | June 02, 2008 at 08:20 PM
Odd capacity listings. They must be rounding down from 32, 64, and 128, respectively.
Posted by: Sumocat | June 02, 2008 at 09:32 PM
Guess they are advertising the 'real' formatted capacity.
Posted by: Gavin Miller | June 03, 2008 at 04:34 AM
Argh MLC = less writes before this thing dies. I guess SLC would be too expensive though.
Posted by: Chrisboff | June 03, 2008 at 06:03 AM
But what can I put it in? Will it go in my Samsung Q1? And why is MLC vs. SLC bad? Slower? Dies like an electro-magnetic mechanical hard disk drive dies?
Posted by: bluespapa | June 03, 2008 at 07:10 AM
Would these work with the P1610?
Posted by: borax99 (Alain C.) | June 03, 2008 at 10:16 AM
SLC is where data (1s and 0s) are stored at only 2 charge levels in each cell: high charge is 1 and low charge is 0
With MLC, data is stored at 4 charge levels so double the density and as a result cheaper to make higher capacities.
Over time as cells are written and re-written to the difference in charge levels deteriorate and since there is less of a difference in charge between levels when the total charge is split into 4 there is a higher likeliness of errors occuring sooner. With SLC, since the difference in charge is only split into two, it will take longer before the cells deteriorate enough for errors to occur.
(Disclaimer: I am by no means an expert in this field so this is probably a severely dumbed down version of the way this works)
Posted by: Chrisboff | June 03, 2008 at 11:09 AM
The NewBiiz/eWiz order page shows these as 2.5" drives... are the 1.8" units actually for sale?
Posted by: JimAtLaw | June 03, 2008 at 11:11 AM