14 DAY TRIAL // The Chinese, snake-sounding company, SuperSSpeed, is reportedly preparing to introduce a SLC-based SSD using SandForce’s popular SF-2281 controller. This is something all computer enthusiasts have been waiting for, and the product range seems to be exactly targeted for that market range.
SLC NAND flash memory is much more resilient to wear and tear than cheap MLC flash. This is a very important issue, especially since most 25nm MLC flash cells manufactured nowadays have quite a short life span.
The most popular use for an SSD is as operating system drive. SSDs are still expensive, even if HDD prices have been artificially inflated lately.
So most users that want to benefit from the fast responsiveness of a SSD will buy a lower capacity model and use it just for the OS and some programs next to a normal, large hard disk drive.
The small capacity of the SSD, combined with this kind of usage model can lead to quite a fast burn through of the SSD’s life span, as we’ve discussed in our Kingston HyperX 3K Review.
Some SSD manufacturers, such as Transcend, even deter users from using a MLC model as a system drive.
The other advantage SuperSSpeed’s new product range brings is the significantly faster write speeds, along with the faster access time.
The revealed benchmarks show a 91% score improvement in the popular AS SSD benchmark, when comparing the speed of a normal Kingston HyperX 120 GB SSD drive using MLC memory to the 120 GB SSD from SuperSSpeed that uses SLC NAND flash.
The write speed is greatly increased from a normal 162 MB/s to a super-fast 475 MB/s. This is a 293% improvement.
SuperSSpeed targets the SLC drives exactly at system drive type of usage. The available capacities are 60GB and 120 GB, but we’re very disappointed the company has not released a Marvell-based SLC SSD.
Using Marvell’s controller with SLC memory would have probably yielded the fastest consumer SSD on the market.
Pricing has not been made available yet, but let’s hope for a Marvell version.
