14 DAY TRIAL // With all the media focused on the latest and most hyped products, such as NVIDIA's Fermi cards, AMD's Eyefinity 6 offer and the various CPUs from AMD and Intel, Buffalo somehow managed to squeeze in and still grab attention with its newest line of solid state drives. The new storage solutions are known as SHD-NSU2 and use the 2.5-inch form factor, which means that they may end up as optional storage solutions in laptops.
The SHD-NSU2 SSDs are built with multi-level cell NAND Flash memory chips and come in four versions, with storage capacities of 32GB, 64GB, 128GB and even 256GB. The exact SSD controller used is not mentioned, but the supposedly most likely candidate is the Barefoot, developed by Indilinx.
This may seem surprising to some, considering that the majority of the SSDs released recently have been mostly powered by the SandForce controller. Here, the units reach read speeds of 175MB/s (the writing speed is not mentioned). This is, visibly, not the highest data-transfer rate ever achieved by an SSD, but the units make up for it through their capacities and reasonably accessible price points.
The new Flash-based storage modules are compatible with the SATA II interface, but have, as an extra feature, integrated USB 2.0 support. Not only that, but they are also compatible with the Windows 7 TRIM command, which preserves the performance of the SSDs over time by erasing deleted sectors, thus keeping the drives clean and fast. Furthermore, Buffalo has included the Acronis TrueImage HD software in the product bundle. Finally, like all SSDs, the Buffalo SHD-NSU2 Series drives have no moving parts, which means that they will never produce noise during operation.
The new SSDs are currently scheduled to reach Japanese stores sometime in the middle of April. Depending on the capacity, they will be priced between roughly $157 an $845.