14 DAY TRIAL // We've been writing about Buffalo and its external storage products for a while, but it is only now that the company makes its first sojourn into the solid state drive market.
Buffalo has announced the SSD-NS/PM3P series of SSDs in Japan, with three capacity options: 128 GB, 256 GB and 512 GB.
One would think that, as a newcomer in this field, the company would start out with somewhat lower prices than the competition.
Alas, this is not the case: the smallest model bears a price of 24,400 Yen, which is the same as $300 and 225 Euro.
Meanwhile, the 256 GB drive has a price of 47,700 Yen ($588 / 440 Euro) and the 512 GB stock keeping unit bears a tag of 90,300 Yen ($1,113 / 834 Euro).
All in all, not very accessible prices, even when factoring in how electronics devices are always a bit more expensive in Japan than the rest of the world.
It doesn't help that the 512 GB SSD is only available as a special, limited order item.
Buffalo selected Philips and Lite-On Digital Solutions (PLDS) as the contract manufacturers for the SSDs.
The cheapest drive has a cache memory of 256 MB, while the others have twice as much (512 MB).
Finally, thanks to the Marvell controller and NAND Flash from Toshiba, data transfers go as high as 479 MB/s on the 128 GB SSD, 513 MB on the 256 GB one and 500 MB/s on the 512 GB SKU (the performance was measured with CrystalDiskMark 3.0.1).
All in all, Buffalo's SSD-NS/PM3P don't really stand out, at least not in a good way. There are stronger SSDs, based on the much faster SandForce SSD controllers, that cost less than these new saplings. The IT player might want to invent a new batch, or cut the costs on this one, if it wants to avoid this turning into a waste of time and resources.