Super Talent ships decently priced UltraDrive ME / LE SSDs

In terms of affordability, solid state drives still have quite some ways to go before they can actually be considered as viable replacements for most consumers. That being true, Super Talent is still doing its best to narrow the gap with the lower-priced UltraDrive families. Both the ME and the LE crews began shipping today, with the former arriving in 32GB, 64GB, 128GB and 256GB flavors and the latter in 32GB, 64GB, and 128GB capacities. The LE lot rolls a touch faster at 230MB/sec (maximum read) and 170MB/sec (maximum write), while the ME editions are rated at 200MB/sec write and 160MB/sec read. There's no mention of the LE prices, but the UltraDrive ME drives can be snapped up now for $128 (32GB), $205 (64GB), $379 (128GB) and $645 (256GB) from NewEgg.

[Via HotHardware]

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 19th 2009 6:12AM]

200MB/sec write and 160MB/sec read ?????? is it possible?

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 19th 2009 1:59AM]

Still with those crazy prices for faster speeds. I'll be waiting for a while to see a 1 TB SSD that wont clean me out.

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 19th 2009 2:09AM]

Try 2014, I reckon by then you'll be able to afford one at that size :)

[excelsium Posted Mar 19th 2009 2:13AM]

meh by 2014 I want everything memrister based.

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 19th 2009 8:41AM]

This all just smell a little off to me. They are so darned expensive either the companies have to keep them this way to make a profit or they are price fixing.

I would imagine if all the hard drive vendors came out and said they were going to make large capacity SSDs affordable and widely available we would see some drastic decreases in cost. I think they are just passing the early cost of switching to SSD manufacturing on to the consumer and to keep people buying spinners. They figure if we can get people to pay big $ for them now once they have the ability to really mass produce these things they won't have recover a loss.

It also disturbs me how we have them in 2.5" and those weird PCI Express ones, but not a single 3.5" the most common size hard drive in existence. I have read a bunch of articles where people want to use an SSD for the desktops OS and a Spinner for for their data.

This all wreaks of that same crap that went down with the LCD panel thing with Samsung, LG, and all their buddies.

[loujob Posted Mar 19th 2009 2:12AM]

So, will we be seeing another price drop for the X25-M & X18-M

[jackchance Posted Mar 19th 2009 2:47AM]

How much benefit would one get by configuring a system with one of these drives as swap / system disk.

Are their any benchmarks out there?

[jimgadgetman Posted Mar 19th 2009 4:54PM]

So, I just did several days worth of research on SSDs, as I wanted a fast (fast!) Vista OS drive. My conclusion: Don't waste the money. I bought a 300gb 10krpm WD Velociraptor from NewEgg for $199 shipped (after $30 rebate) instead. The Velociraptor beats most SSDs in real world tests, it's half the cost and more than double the size, with a 5 year warranty. I ran benchmarks on three SSDs borrowed from my employer, one being a high end Intel unit; write speeds were abysmal and read speeds only slightly better than your run-of-the-mill SATA hard drive. (Random-reads were significantly faster on the SSDs, naturally.) Attempting to read & write an SSD at the same time generally results in the thing grinding to a near halt speed-wise.

I don't think these things are ready for prime time. They certainly aren't ready for me. In 5 years, when my Velociraptor's warranty expires, perhaps things will be different. Until then, I expect my drive performance to double over the cheap SATA drive I'm using now when the Velociraptor arrives next week.

[Adamgs Posted Mar 19th 2009 2:51AM]

Hate to be a bother but i think you may have mixed up the read and write speeds for the ME

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 19th 2009 3:01AM]

For anyone who wants to know more about SSD performance, this article from AnandTech is excellent.
http://anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3531

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 19th 2009 5:54AM]

Ha! For a second there, I thought you said "decently priced". Oh,... that is what you said. You crazy, sardonic fool!

[AbSoluTc Posted Mar 19th 2009 9:34AM]

I did some research on Super Talent when I was trying to purchase a flash drive. The reviews for ALL of their products are less than stellar. Specifically, the Pico C. Failure after failure was reported with them. As well as a lot of other products by the company. I would not trust my data on their devices ever.

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 19th 2009 9:47AM]

I've had a couple Pico-C drives that I've carried in my wallet for over a year without a problem. I think the people that have the problem complain the most and you get a biased sample :)

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 19th 2009 11:53AM]

Mr. Darren Murph, its not so much about the read/write speeds but about the random access performance. Where are those stats? Your reporting makes your ignorance of this subject obvious. And everyone else is equally ignorant, so its a shame you can't inform them better.

What is the random access read write compared to Intel X25-M? That's what matters. If it compares, then they just ate a huge portion of the market that Intel drive has been owning recently.

[DorianGrey Posted Mar 19th 2009 12:14PM]

@ithkuil
"Your reporting makes your ignorance of this subject obvious."

Hmm, more likely that you read an article once and now you feel superior to everyone who doesn't throw around terms like "Sequential Read IOPS" or "Random Write IOPS". Oh wait, perhaps you just now learned those terms because you READ THE ARTICLE DARREN MURPH LINKED TO?

This is not my yard, so I won't ask you to not come around here -- but when you do, don't be a prick...

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 19th 2009 1:11PM]

Darren Murph didn't link to any really useful articles here, unfortunately.

I read a lot of articles about SSDs and many other things and in fact I have been quite familiar with the technical terms I used as well as many others for some time.

Every single person commenting on this device missed the point, and it is really frustrating. Its not nice to say people are ignorant, but its also not nice to have to constantly listen to a bunch of ignorant people either. Its always the same misguided discussion when it comes to SSDs.

[(Unverified) Posted Apr 14th 2009 12:38AM]

I have to agree with Ithkuil. It has been well known since last year when the problems with the JMicron based SSDs were revealed that 4k Random Write IOPS are the metric everyone should be looking at when purchasing SSDs. Many terrible, cheap SSDs offer 150+ MB/s sequential transfers, but only the good SSDs offer >1000 4k Random Write IOPS.