Super Talent Masterdrive DX

Posted 11/15/08 at 11:00:00 AM by David Murphy

Super Talent’s 64GB SSD must be using the exact same hardware as RiData’s Ultra-S Plus 64GB. If not, then the similarities between these drives are an amazing coincidence. We recorded identical random access read times for both, an underwhelming .39 milliseconds. Both drives’ PCMark Vantage scores were within one-third of one percent of each other, and they varied by just two seconds in our uncompressed AVI file-creation test.

If these two MLC-based drives are indeed brothers in arms, then they’re the two drunken soldiers stumbling around at the rear of the SSD brigade. Like the RiData, the Super Talent’s performance is unacceptable, even given its low price. While the Super Talent drive overtakes our Western Digital Velociraptor in the real-world PCMark Vantage test, we’d be terrified to use this drive as the primary storage for our operating system. Its random access read scores are swift, but this drive’s random access write performance is atrocious: It was more than 7,000 percent slower than a Velociraptor in our tests!

This drive would rock if we only needed to read information from it, but the SSD’s write speeds are simply too slow. There’s an inexplicably large gap between the Super Talent’s slowest and fastest sustained read speeds: 14.7MB/s, as recorded by h2benchw. This doesn’t make much of a difference in real-world performance, but it’s certainly greater than the 2MB/s to 3MB/s difference, at most, that we’re used to seeing from SSDs.

Like the Ultra-S Plus, the Super Talent DX’s sustained read speeds outpace the theoretical interface speed measurement. But this is clearly indicative of a benchmark snafu, as the Super Talent was unable to fill the pipe of its SATA 3Gb/s connection in our real-world tests.