News: Super Talent's SATA25 128GB solid-state hard drive

[Wizno]

APART FROM COOLING FANS, hard drives are the only mechanical devices inside a modern
PC—the last bastion of an era lost in a sea of silicon teeming with billions of
transistors running at gigahertz clock speeds. The mechanical internals of modern
hard drives are hardly low-tech, of course, but they do carry a number of inherent
penalties we'd rather avoid.

For example, hard drives feature platters that take a fair bit of energy to keep
spinning at thousands of rotations per minute. Power consumption is of course a
greater concern for mobile applications, but it's become a key metric for desktops,
as well. Those spinning platters also introduce a measure of rotational latency that
severely impedes seek performance. The drive head can't just go and grab data from a
given target; it has to wait for that target to come 'round on the platter. And then
there's the not-so-trivial matter of fragility. Hard drives have become considerably
more robust over the years, but moving parts are still prone to damage from jostling
and other physical abuse.

Solid-state drives (SSDs) aim to solve the problems associated with hard drive
mechanics by replacing them with memory chips. On paper, it looks like a great idea.
The first batch of SSDs did offer low power consumption and quick seek times without
moving parts, however, actual throughput was dismal and capacities were quite
limited.

Now a new wave of SSDs is upon us, led into our labs by Super Talent's SATA25. This
2.5" drive packs a stunning 128GB of total capacity and claims sustained read and
write speeds of 60MB/s and 40MB/s, respectively—huge improvements over previous
solid-state drives. But how does it hold up in the wild? We've run the drive through
our comprehensive suite of performance, power consumption, and noise level tests to
find out.

http://techreport.com/articles.x/13163