A Review of the Latest (and Fastest) SSD Storage Devices

by Les Tokar

It seems we here at NotebookReview.com may have struck a chord with respect to SSD Reviews. Not only can a simple Google search bring up NotebookReview.com's SSD reviews linked to from several other sites, but also, consumer and enterprise interests can be found milling about to see what all the fuss is. Two recent articles posted on this site, SSD Performance Comparison and An Introduction Guide to SSD Storage, will assist those new to the SSD with identifying its benefits and also in understanding terms used in performance testing.

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In this review we will be examining two SSDs, the Mtron Pro 7000 and the MemoRight MR25.1-032S, both are SATA 32GB SSDs. Both companies fully intend on making their mark quickly. In my many discussions with these companies I have found there is more than just a touch of competition between them, which will be great for the industry. Both are awaiting results of the tests in this review and I must pass on a thank you to Both Zeta of Mtron and Elina of MemoRight for getting me the sample SSDs out so quickly.

First let's jump to the results! I have listed SSD disks from left to right in order of performance, the two new drives being the first and second, respectively. Each SSD was used inside a Dell XPS M1330 laptop to garner the results (Specs: 2.0GHz Core 2 Duo processor, 4Gb RAM and running on Vista Ultimate 64):

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The Mtron Pro

The Mtron Pro 7000 is a brand new release which follows up on that of the Mtron Mobi 3000 released less than two months ago. Even though the Mobi 3000 was the fastest SSD in the industry, Mtron decided not to stand pat and instead put their best foot forward to try for better, and they have! Mtron can boast that they are the first to break the 100MB/s barrier not only in the read category with a 116MB/s speed , but also in the burst speed at 114MB/s. This SSD never ceases to amaze me. When installed on my laptop I got a new record boot time of 26 seconds from the press of the power button to Internet connectivity confirmation and SSD activity complete. Not only is its access speed still the top tested at .1ms but also, this little baby helped boost my system PCMark05 score to an overall 6,224 (from 6,124 with the Mtron Mobi) with an unbelievable PCMark HDD Score of 15,056. I didn’t realize PCMark05 HDD scores it even went that high. Good work Mtron!

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MemoRight SSD

Memoright’s first shot at the SSD market is going to hit with a bang as they are introducing not only a top contender, but also trying to hit the market fast and make their product available to the consumer. In examining the results of my testing (PCMark05, HDTune, HDTach, ATTO and WinExperience), I had to run the ATTO tests a few times just to believe what I was seeing. MemoRight is the first to break the 100MB/s barrier in the write category with a speed of 106MB/s which is unbelievable. Their remaining scores were equally successful in easily placing them above the Mtron Mobi, Samsung and Sandisk. I have included the chart of all SSD testing below for your assistance.

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Conclusion

As much as I would like to say there is a distinct winner between these two, I cannot. Both, in their own right, can claim enormous victories in breaking the 100 Mb/s barriers in both the read/burst (Mtron) and the write speed (MemoRight). Mtron does pull ahead slightly in other categories such as disk access and CPU Utilization but, for the most part, these disks stay neck and neck in terms of performance. The Mtron Pro can be found at www.neostore.com for $777, the Mtron Mobi is now $649 -- a far cry from the $1,500 price tag I was looking at less than a month ago. The MemoRight can be found at Ashlin Computer Corporation, a company that is actively trying to make both the Mtron and MemoWright available at prices the consumer can afford. You may have to call them directly to find out about pricing and availability.

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Great stuff thanks!!!

 

I'm wondering, how did you get over the 80mb/s limit as know as from the Intel chipset?

 

Solid State Drives are one of those new technologies that actively captures public imagination. It isn't common to have a technology come out of relative nowhere and instantly post results exponentially improving computer performance from current standards. Also, the speed at which these drives are improving and decreasing in price is awe inspiring!

SSDs will be available to the common consumer at a reasonable price much sooner than expected, and that makes everyone happy.

Thanks for the review flamenko, I always get excited when I see "SSD" in the title of a NotebookReview.com article.

 

Ahh, I want an SSD, except i wish it was cheaper and more storage

 

A 64 GB SSD would be perfect for me, as my current HDD is 60 GB and I'm still doing fine on it.

$1000+ though is a bit much right now. I love to hear about price drops though!

 

I'm on the same page. 60GB is doing great for me. The only thing holding me back from a purchase is the price. ~$15 a Gig is just out of my league. I'm always on the look out for price drops!

And yea, it's very surprising how the price rate is decreasing; went down about 50% already...

 

Stormeffect I feel precisely the same way. Finally, the humble Hard Drive, the unsung hero of computing EVERYWHERE is getting some good new tech and press, and , most importantly, SPEED! Dave

 

Still more then 20$/Giga comapred to 1$/Giga in a 7200RPM drive .

Even if SDD were x20 better ( which they are not ) I'd still buy a 7K200 over any 32GB SDD at current pricing .

 

Again, another great review, Les. Thanks

 

I dunno which one I can't wait to happen soon, the SSDs price to go down, or Vista to get fixed with SP1. Either one would speed up my system, although Superfetch in Vista should be better in my opinion. But these SSDs, they're tempting..

 

Price is still rediculous, outrageously expensive. I saw on the news a while back, there may be an investigation into the memory makers and their possible price fixing.

 

Don't we all

128 GB would be my sweet spot.

 

Thanks for the great review, the more we hear about new SSD drives coming out the faster the prices will drop.

Does mtron provide any spec sheets on their SSD? I would like to know what the power draw is like, and will it actually improve battery life.

 

guys, i may look pretty ignorant but... which one is better in term of speed, a 7200 rpm HD or one of those SSD?

 

The speed on these things is only going to increase over time. As will storage..

Arnt HDD's nearing the limit for read/write rates by now? They can only spin at soo many RPM.

 

SSDs? No?

 

Of course standard Hard drives are still cheaper. If they weren't, SSDs would be in every laptop made, instead of just <.1% of them. But for certain applications, the benefits of an SSD drive are worth the extra money.

I haven't bitten the bullet yet, but I store all of my audio and video on a networked server, so 32GB would be fine for me. $700+ is still a bit steep for me, but I could see paying $500.

Also, while I appreciate the review, could you possibly update it with the following:
- 7200 and 5400 RPM notebook drives. I've got a 5400 RPM in my notebook, and I would be very interested to get an idea of the difference.
- Suspend/resume speeds. For most notebooks, this probably is more important than boot speeds.

 

I guess the SSD is faster than a 7200 rpm hd...well i hope, if not it s not worth the price imo

 

flamenko, have you also tested how much this improves battery life with the SSD compared to a HDD?

 

I have in my initial Review (you will have to dig back) but it was like comparing apples and oranges. I, at that time compared the m1210 to the m1330 in battery life, one with the SSD.

I don't really think you will find a large difference. I typically get 4.5 hours from my laptop on wifi and surfing as I am doing now.

 

In fact they are even better. Capacity should not be an issue for laptop users. Mobility is about carrying around what is necessary and not everything. That is the whole philosophy.

 

Thanks for the review Flamenko.

Someone asked about the Intel chipset limitation - would you please share what chipset you are on and what you know about this problem? I've heard of reads capping at 80...

Also, I'd be very interested to see the Memoright in RAID 0. I've seen benchmarks for Mtron showing it scaling beautifully. I don't think we can assume all SSDs will scale so well, so I'm looking forward to seeing how the memoright does RAID.

Thanks again for your review.

 

Here is the RAID0 results for the Memoright and my chipset is the same as standard M1330s, the Santa Rosa C2D and at 2Gb (T7300) I will concede my knowledge is that of a laymen regarding the limitation as I do not overclock my system. Perhaps someone more knowledgeable in this area could jump in here.

 

After sitting on the fence, I recently bought an MTRON SSD (the 6000 series). My main motivator was performance and reliability. From Flamenko’s reviews I knew that I would get top notch performance with the MTRON and by virtue of being an SSD I believed that the MTRON would be very reliable (at least compared to a regular hard drive).

However, there are indications that the promises made by the SSD manufacturers regarding the reliability (or rather re-writeability) may be grossly overstated.

I found the following post in the discussion thread from Tomshardware’s review of the MTRON’s

“As someone who was bit on the ass by MTRON SSD drives only a few months ago I'd like to point out that this claim is patently false. Out of 10 total 32gb MTRON SSD drives we had a 30% failure rate when used as backing stores on a hi performance clustered mail server within the first 10 weeks. ..
..
A look back through my emails had the first two drives we received failing after 7 weeks with aprox 70gb of daily write operations and the third failed after 6 days at a similar load. Their own white paper and the engineers advised that I should have expected an MTBF of a million hours and a write life 120years with 50gb daily writes”


Pretty disturbing don’t you think? Assuming that the failure of drive three was not wear-level related, the failure of the first two drives would indicate that MTRON overstated the re-writeability of their drives by a factor of more than 90!!!!

It would be interesting to hear if MTRON had an official comment for the above.

The entire discussion thread can be found at
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/244460-14-mtron-sweeping-performance-catch

 

Jketzetera,

I have read the article posted at the other site and am first wondering if you could provide some background on your drive? Are you happy with it? Impressions?

I am glad you queried the author, who is deemed to be a stranger with respect to experience on the site, and asked for his response from Mtron with respect to his experience. Not that his site standing would bring anything into doubt as we don't know him but, I am hoping he responds to you with the answer.

It appears he purchased the MSD series, the older version for his use rather than the newer Pro series which they deem to be built for business use.

I have the Pro 32Gb in my system and am very happy with it; my system is nowhere near his 50-70Gb wr per day however, so although I don't doubt anything he has said, I would like to here his response to your post.

 

Mine is the "old" 6000 series (the same model as the one referred to by the poster in the Tomshardware forum), which is probably identical to the current MOBI series (with the exception that the MOBI series features plastic casing).

So far I am very happy with it. It is completely silent, very fast, very responsive and handles multiple I/O:s like a champ. My only complaint is the limited storage capacity but I am trying to offset that by using a pccard compact flash adapter and I am planning to get a 32GB compact flash card.

However, the post in the TH forum gave me a scare. While, neither I do 70GB of re-writes per day I certainly do not want to end up in a scenario where my MTRON drive suddenly fails in 16 months because it could not live up to the manufacturers spec on wear levelling and re-writeability.

I have not yet received a response from the TH poster.

 

Looks like we will just have to wait and see on this point.

Anyone buying an SSD at this early stage must be sure of two things:

• Get a good warranty and don't do anything to void it
• Backup data regularly and plan as if expecting HW failure

Knowing nothing about this individual or the operating conditions it shouldn't stop anyone from making an upgrade who is willing to accept these recommendations. Anyone who can't accept these would be much better to hold off; the truth will come out soon enough. I imagine batch quality of ram is a large factor here, but if these small companies have simply misrepresented reg. their wear-leveling tech then they will have destroyed their reputations just as they were becoming known to the world. Let's hope they were not so foolish.

Does make me think twice though about planning for Raid 0...

 

You are awesome what you do and so helpful.

 

Thank you very much. I just responded to your ? on the other thread. Feel free to PM me if you have any questions.

 

Thanks Flamenko for yet another neat article.....I really want to buy an SSD but don't think I can afford one until prices drop to $400-500 range...!!

 

I did not notice what the 32gb SSD drive was going for, but I noticed the 64gb SSD I'm adding to my M1530 is $900 now instead of $1030 recently.

 

Yes the Samsung is dropping in price. You can get the 32Gb Sandisk for under 500 I believe but you wanna be careful with its performance limitations as it has a very low write.

 

i wonder if write limitations are a problem...
if u get an ssd just to ensure longevity u shud op for the better slc ssd type (which is also faster but more expensive).
any ideas?

 

What write limitations are you speaking of exactly?

If your speaking of lifespan, this hasnt ever been an issue with an SSD, just a concern through a misunderstanding of how it is calculated.

If you look at the Mtron 1000 series, for example, it has a MTBF of 1,000,000 hours which surpasses the data retention of 10 years.

I will concede warranties of 3 years could be adjusted.

It has a benchmark of read write is 100MB/s read and 40MB/s write and very soon will be the cheapest SSD on the market as it is about to undercut the 3000 series by 40-50% of the price which could bring this SSD in the 3-400 dollar range.

Where is the compromise?

 

yeah, same here

 

Hi. I just put the sandisk SSD 32gb I ordered from dell into my
sony Vaio TXN17. Now the DVD drive doesn't work.
As soon as I remove the SSD, the DVD works again. Can anyone
help or any suggestions?

thanks.
by the way, why can't I post a new thread?

 

If you have the PATA version of Sandisk SSD, then your problem is likely due to incorrect master/slave settings for the SSD and DVD. The problem with the Sandisk SSD is that it is hardcoded as master and to my knowledge, there is no way to change it to master (with slave present), slave or even cable select.

Your only bet would be to change the status of the DVD but that is also unlikely to be possible on a notebook DVD.

 

x2

Performance/Price $

 

The question as to whether an SSD is worth the cost changes daily. Even I would never pay the prices being asked today or a short time ago. Watch for my posting of prices within 2 weeks though hint hint.

As for performance being 20 x better, The only thing keeping HDs from becoming a dinosaur is the price of the SSD. As a consumer, we can look from outside the window and say its less than 20x but its actually well past 20 times better.

The fact that an SSD, in business and enterprise, is changing everything as it is being seen today is an enormous step. Just yesterday we could not put a HD in so many situations because of the force applied to it for operation (ie a fighter jet at 4g force). Today its entirely possible in an SSD. SSDs function flawlessly at subzero temperature where HDs cannot.

Having spoken to Adtron a few weeks back, I was astonished to learn the greatest aspect of testing is the physical component. There is no questioning of performance as it is taken at face value now.

With respect to performance at the consumer level, my SSD runs in the area of 100MB/s read and write. My fan in my laptop hardly ever runs as the heat created through the SSD is next to Nil. The start time as well as the performance of normal operations is almost instantaneous because the disk acces time is .1ms rather than 15ms (which is evident on every search in a HD). If I drop my laptop, I don't have to worry about the information being lost as occurred recently in my sons laptop.

Just my opinion I guess. If I hadn't gotten a lucky price followed by a great reputation after an initial review, I would still be using a HD as well...

so yes...price is still the killer...for a few days anyway.

 

also!! i don't want to be advertising or anything, but the alienwares' m15x totally makes ssd useful.

SSD as primary harddrive, 320gb smartbay in a 15 inch... you get speed and data storage. no?... waiting for prices to drop :-D next 2 weeks huh flam?

 

I have no problem with advertising if it benefits all here jl1989. I was rather impressed with that move by Alienware. Its serves a very distinct purpose at a time when SSD prices are very high.

And....hopefully in a few days after the Chinese Holiday has ended, we will get good news on pricing. It hits a number of the companies I am in touch with and everything is at a stand still until they are back to work

 

I had planned to get tha M15X with the SSD, but decided to go with the M1330 and a decent desktop. Bezt of both worlds and more power and better battery life in each case.

The SSD sounds awesome, I ordered the 64GB drive with the M1330, I heard it was the same new-gen Samsung as in the M15X, is that right?

 

I am not aware of the specs or benchmarks from any new-gen Samsung. I have just gotten in contact with Samsung quite recently though and maybe I can get some info into this.

I have sent an email to my Samsung contact and will provide response soonest.