14 DAY TRIAL // GeIL, a company that is well known to PC enthusiasts thanks to its high-performance DDR3 memory series, has recently unveiled that later this year the company plans to enter the ever more popular SSD market.
The company plans to introduce two such product ranges later in 2012, dubbed S2 and Zenith.
GeIL’s S2 series drives will use a SATA 3Gbps controller with read/write speeds estimated at 280/270MBps and will be available with either 60GB or 120GB of storage space.
The S2 drives will target the entry-level market, while customers requiring more performance will have the option of going for the Zenith S3 series SSDs, which will use SandForce SATA 6Gbps controllers.
“For our Zenith S3 performance products, we only use the very latest SandForce controllers and these must be supplied with the Golden firmware and original ICs,” said Hank Cheng marketing director at GeIL, in an interview with the Kit Guru website.
Compared to the S2 line, these SSDs will be available in many more capacities ranging from 60GB to 480GB, and will use a carbon-fiber style packaging and case.
Cheng hasn’t provided Kit Guru with any performance estimates regarding these Zenith S3 SSDs, but since we are dealing with a second generation SandForce controller, sequential read and write speeds should easily surpass the 500MB/s mark.
As far as the IOPS (input/output operations per second) performance of the Zenith drives is concerned, this should be rated at about 60,000 random 4K writes.
Like all the other SandForce SF-2200 based drives available out there, GeIL Zenith S3 series SSDs will also include the DuraClass and DuraWrite technologies, as well as full support for the TRIM command.
GeIL hasn’t mentioned so far how much its solid state drives will cost, but the company did reveal that these should arrive in time for CeBIT 2012.