Super Talent Masterdrive DX

David Murphy — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 11:00:00 -0600

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.

Other SSD reviews in our roundup:

RiData Ultra-S Plus 64GB

Super Talent Masterdrive DX

Memoright MR25.2-032/64S GT Series

Samsung 64GB

OCZ Sata II

Mtron SSD Pro 7500

Imation Solid State Drive Pro 7000

Intel X-25M

Super Talent MX Series SSDs Get a Speed Boost and Rebate

Paul Lilly — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 23:50:35 -0500

Not everyone is sold on SSDs, but that isn't stopping almost everyone from trying to sell you one. Competition has started to heat up, and it looks as though OCZ and Super Talent are lining up for a race to see which company can offer the fastest SSDs at the lowest price point. Super Talent kicked things off with its MasterDrive MX line, offering 120MB/sec write and 40MB/sec read speeds in 30GB, 60GB, and 120GB sizes for as low as $299, but OCZ joined the race just a few months later with a low cost line of its own. OCZ's Core series drives upped the ante with a hat trick that includes slightly more storage space, better read and write speeds at up to 143MB/sec and 93MB/sec respectively, and lower price points. Game, set, match?

Not quite. Super Talent doesn't appear ready to concede the mainstream market, and to prove it, the company has revised its MX series SSDs to offer faster speeds. Both the 15GB and 30GB models now sport read speeds of 120MB/sec and write speeds of 60MB/sec, while the 60GB and 120GB boast the same read speed but increases the write speeds to 80MB/sec. "Our expert engineering team is constantly discovering new ways to improve our proudcts, and this is one improvement that will be well received by power laptop users," said Super Talent director or marketing, Joe James.

The tweaked SATA-II SSDs still trail behind OCZ's Core series, but to make them more competitive, Super Talent has begun offering a $40 rebate (PDF) when purchased through Newegg. Is it enough to make you consider a SSD?

Image Credit: Super Talent

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Other SSD reviews in our roundup:

Super Talent MX Series SSDs Get a Speed Boost and Rebate