14 DAY TRIAL // The new solid state drive lineup from Silicon Power is being advertised as a single collection of 7mm-thick models, but it is, in truth, composed of two distinct series: S70 and S60.
Both lines have a thickness of 7mm, making them suitable for ultrathin PCs, which includes Intel-based ultrabooks and AMD-powered laptops. In this, they are similar to Monster Digital's Daytona.
Colored Champagne gold, the Slim S70 come in 60 GB, 120 GB, 240 GB and 480 GB and work at a maximum of 557 MB/s read and 507 MB/s write. The Random 4k write performance is of up to 86,000 IOPS.
Silicon Power made sure to give all the SSDs support for RAID, NCQ, DuraWrite technology (increases speed and lifetime for most data), wear leveling and ECC.
As a bonus, the toggle/synchronous flash-based drives are vibration- and shock-proof. TRIM is, of course, supported as well.
The units in the Slim S60 SSD line from Silicon Power have many similarities with the S7, but they come in black casings, use normal NAND chips and boast different transfer rates.
Data is read at up to 550 MB/s, while files can be written at a maximum of 500 MB/s. Quite high on both counts, even if not quite in the same league as the S7. The storage capacities are the same as the ones above: 60 GB, 120 GB, 240 GB and 480 GB.
Silicon power might ship the Slim S60 and S70 directly to consumers, but brand notebook configuration pages are more likely to include it than retailers.
The press release mentions that LSI's SandForce SF-2281 controller powers the S70, but it says nothing about S60, so we'll assume the same chip is there as well. The performance differences, small as they are, strongly suggest it.
The prices, unfortunately, are not known at this time. We will have to wait for retailers to add them to their availability lists.
