Solid progress
Memory outfit OCZ has announced its new high-end series of SSDs, which it's calling Vertex. At the same time, contemporary Super Talent has also unveiled a new line of SSDs called UltraDrive, which it's saying are "twice as fast as the world's speediest SATA hard drives".
"The new Vertex series of SSD drives are a premium MLC based SSD solution that are designed for consumers that require fast, rugged, and reliable solid state storage," said Eugene Chang, director of product management for OCZ.
"The Vertex makes use of our newest architecture and controller design complete with 64MB of cache to offer faster transfers and superior overall system response times in a broad range of applications and games."
"The UltraDrive LE represents a quantum leap forward in storage performance that is simply staggering," said Super Talent COO, Mr. C.H. Lee. "It excels in every metric that's relevant to data centers: sequential and random read and write speeds, transaction rates and access and seek times. It also has a considerable advantage over 10,000 RPM hard drives in power consumption and MTBF."
The new Super Talent SSDs are in fact subdivided into the LE class, which is designed for enterprise use, and the ME class, which is a set of 2.5 inch notebook SSDs. The OCZ Vertex series is entirely comprised of consumer focused 2.5 inch SSDs.
The Vertex series claims a read speed of 200 MB/s and write speed of 60MB/s. It appears to already be available to buy and the capacities and pricing are as follows:
| 30GB | $129 |
| 60GB | $249 |
| 120GB | $469 |
| 150GB | $869 |
Super Talent isn't making its new products available until next January and thus hasn't released pricing. It also makes no mention of cache. It does seem to offer superior performance, however, with the LE series claiming read/write speeds of 230/170 MB/s and the ME series 200/160 MB/s.
The capacities follow the more traditional powers of two model, in both cases starting at 16GB and coubling up to 128GB in the LE series and 256GB in the ME series.
