Silicon Power 64GB SATA SSD

Silicon Power has big dreams, but this a cruel world we live in and being the new name in competitive North American computer industry usually doesn't help dreams come true. Making matters more difficult - even beyond the obvious start-up hurdles - is the latest product focus of Silicon Power: Solid State Drive (SSD) technology. But all of this isn't to say that I don't think they can do it, because there have been many a new name made by fresh companies introducing product with a dramatic improvement over the old. But will Silicon Power enjoy this luxury? Benchmark Reviews tests the Silicon Power 64GB SATA SSD model SP064GBSSD25SV10 against nearly a dozen other Solid State Drives to see how well their SSD performs.

Since first making a commercial public debut at the 2007 Consumer Electronics Show, Solid State Drives (SSD's) have been a topic of hot discussion among performance enthusiasts. With virtually no access time delay, these nonvolatile flash memory-based drives were quick to promise a more reliable storage device with greater performance while operating at a fraction of the power level. Moving further into 2008 they have become a reality for many performance-minded power users. I suppose it's been a slow ramp-up for consumers to accept Solid State Drive technology, similar to the struggle DDR3 SDRAM has seen. Later on at the end of April 2008, Silicon Power launched their SATA-I and ATA line of SSD products.

But it wasn't supposed to be this way, and I personally blame Microsoft for a large portion of this delay. Almost two years ago, and still months prior to the retail release, Windows Vista was supposed to require Hybrid Hard Drives if you wanted the new Operating System on a notebook. However, once Microsoft caved in to manufacturer pressure the development quickly slowed to a halt.

Perhaps Benchmark Reviews likes to ride the edge of technology just a little too close, since we've tested more DDR3 and SSD's than almost everyone else on the web. The bleeding edge is where most enthusiasts like to live, but seldom enjoy the price tag. Because I am in a position where cutting edge technology are within my reach (if only for a few weeks of testing), my experience is valuable to the small niche of consumers that might actually want these premier products.

Benchmark Reviews has been hard at work trying to ride the wave of innovation into the next big technology. It only took a few years of development, but Solid State Drives can now offer superior speed over Hard Disk Drives; but they are still extremely expensive.

According to a Q1 2008 report by the semiconductor market research firm iSuppli, the SSD market will grow at an annualized average of 124 percent during the four-year period from 2008 until 2012. iSuppli now projects SSD sales to increase by an additional 35 percent in 2009 over what it projected last year, 51 percent more in 2010, and 89 percent more in 2011, and continue to show dramatic increases in subsequent years.

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