We've had a little love affair going on with storage vendor Mtron ever since we saw that "battleship" SSD RAID array, and it looks like the company is after our hearts once again, this time with the Pro 7500 series of SSDs, which it says are the fastest around. That's really only half-true -- while the 120MB/s write speed is definitely the fastest we've seen, the 130MB/s read speed is the same those Greenhouse DH-SSDGD drives we just saw a couple days ago. Still, that's mighty fast -- too bad these are probably going to be priced into the stratosphere like Mtron's other SSDs.

We've already seen a couple 2.5-inch SSDs hit 128GB, but Mtron, our new favorite crazy storage vendor, has just announced a 1.8-inch 128GB SSD. That's the same size as the drives in the MacBook Air, Latitude XT, and Lenovo X300 -- and since drive height isn't as closely related to storage capacity for SSDs, look for 1.8-inch SSDs to become the new standard in most new laptops as capacities increase and prices fall. Of course, "prices fall" is the operative phrase here -- Mtron's 1.8-inch 128GB disk will probably set you back some $1600 when it ships in April. Yeah, we'll stick with the platters for now.

[Via jkOnTheRun]

SSD is really going mainstream this year, and while Mtron has been showing up with the goods -- and powering our favorite RAID array ever -- it looks like it took a brand like Imation to take it to the next level. The two companies are teaming up for two new SSD product lines: Imation SSD MOBI 3000 for laptop and mobile use, and Imation SSD PRO 7000 for enterprise purposes. The MOBI 3000 sports 100MBps read times and 80MBps write, with 0.1ms random access times, which supposedly makes it the fastest SSD product on the consumer market -- the drive purportedly cuts boot times in half. The SSD PRO 7000 does 120MBps read and 90MBps write, and has a mean time between failure greater than one million hours. Price and availability will be announced in the "coming months." It can't come soon enough, believe you us.

Listen, we know you think your RAID setup is pretty snazzy, and, truth be told, it probably makes our rig look silly by comparison. However, in the computer world, there's always someone out there with a bigger, nastier system -- and we've just spotted one of the nastiest of them all. Next Level Hardware is a site that specializes in putting outrageous setups to the test, and this time they haven't disappointed with their benchmarks on the Mtron 16GB SSD (reportedly the fastest SATA drive in the world). Oh, did we mention the test was on a RAID 0 array of nine drives? Dubbed the "Battleship Mtron," the sickening collection of hardware blazed past the competition (a WD Raptor, less stacked Mtron RAID setups), delivering mind-boggling data swaps like copying a 1GB folder in four seconds. You read that right: four seconds. Like where this is headed? Truck over to the test page and peep all the stats... seriously, it's upsetting.

[Thanks, David]

It's one thing to toot your own horn, but it looks like Mtron has gone a bit overboard with this one. Apparently, the company firmly believes that its new SSD lineup is faster than anything similar on the planet, but in all honestly, it's not. Nevertheless, the firm is hyping up its new 16GB, 32GB and 64GB solid state discs, claiming that the read speed of 120MB/s and write speed of 90MB/s trumps that of "other SSD" drives. 'Course, it must not be counting those SLC NAND flash-based iterations (like the Simpletech ZeusIOPS) as true competitors, and until we see unbiased benchmarks to prove these claims, we're ain't buyin'.

[Via DailyTech]