Super Talent MasterDrive MX SSD

EDITORS NOTE: Please read Solid State Drive (SSD) Benchmark Performance Testing to understand how the benchmarks used in this article should be interpreted.

Super Talent is very well known for their enthusiast-grade system memory kits, such as PC3-14400 DDR3 1800MHz ProjectX kit we reviewed several months back. So when a product such as Solid State Drives (SSD's) arrived to market, it makes perfect sense to build off of their existing reputation to introduce new high-performance storage devices. The Super Talent MasterDrive MX is an example of this, which features SATA-II controller architecture and high capacities. Early SSD products offered very small capacity, leaving them out of reach for primary drive usage. Super Talent solves this problem, and introduces the 60 GB FTM60GK25H.

Since first making an initial commercial debut to the public at the 2007 Consumer Electronics Show, Solid State Drives 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.

Solid State Drives are a perceived as the new animal in the computer hardware kingdom. They've been around for several years already, yet a very slow consumer acceptance has made the Solid State Drive (SSD) an elusive product to spot in the wild. There really hasn't been a heavy appetite for these premium-priced products; especially since they haven't exactly pushed the Hard Disk Drive (HDD) into extinction. However, the big-game hunters are beginning to see SSDs really crowd the habitat, and their performance has often times eclipsed that of the HDD.

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.

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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