14 DAY TRIAL // Solid state drives have been growing in both availability and the rate of adoption and the advantages that hard drives still have over them are getting fewer with each new release. Furthermore, a certain SSD controller has been implemented into multiple flash storage drives over the past few months. The technology in question is known as the SandForce controller and it has been used as part of products from companies such as A-Data, OCZ and, more recently, Viking Modular Solutions. PhotoFast has just introduced its own new solid state drive and, although SandForce is not mentioned, its use is likely.
PhotoFast has been biding its time over the past couple of months and now it has stepped up once again in order to launch its G-Monster2 SFV1. As the company's newest SSD, this 2.5-inch unit is built on multi-level cell (MLC) NAND memory and utilizes the transfer capabilities of the SATA 3.0 Gbps interface. It can reach a read speed of about 260MB/s and it can write data at approximately 160MB/s. In addition, when measured for 4K random writes, the drive reached a speed of 75MB/s.
The 2.5-inch G-Monster2 SFV1 from PhotoFast comes in multiple storage capabilities, such as the more modest 50GB, a capacity of 100GB, 200GB and even 400GB. In addition, the drive has an estimated mean time before failure (MTBS) of over one million hours.
The company did not say that the drive was built with the SandForce SSD controller, but this feature is quite possible, considering how no on-board cache memory was mentioned and the SF used in the product's name.
The product is compatible with Windows7 (32bit/64bit), Windows Vista (32bit/64bit), Windows XP SP3 and Mac OS X. It measures approximately 100mm × 70mm × 9.5mm and should start selling sometime next month. The product comes with a one-year warranty.