14 DAY TRIAL // A new solid-state drive has been launched, one that shows how, at last, it's not just SandForce controllers that can manage very high transfer speeds. The drive is called DARK L3 and is made by Team Group.
Once upon a time, the only SSD controllers that could reliably deliver performance of over 500 MB/s were SandForce ICs, now belonging to LSI.
More recently, SandForce has been getting tougher competition, even if most new high-speed chips could go fast when reading but floundered when writing.
The new SSD from Team Group may or may not fit that category based on your view.
After all, while it can reach 550 MB/s when reading, it can only write at 450 MB/s at most, although the highest-capacity option of 240 GB could go all the way to 500 MB/s.
The controller is a Phison PS3108-S8 chip and handles MLC (multi-level cell) NAND Flash memory.
On that note, the random performance is of 35,000 for 4K random reads and 50,000 IOPS for random writes (25,000 on 60 GB model).
That said, the Team Group DARK L3 2.5-inch SSD has a MTBF of 1.5 million hours, a weight of 80 grams / 0.17 lbs, decent shock resistance, RAID support, and all the expected technologies of this type of HDD alternative: TRIM, SMART, NCQ, Background Garbage Collection, Bad Block Management, Dynamic & Static Wear-leveling.
All that in a package with a height of just 7 mm. That's the normal drive size for desktops and laptops, but should be good for ultrabooks too.
As for supported operating systems, the list is made of Windows XP, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1 and Chrome OS.
Team Group should already be selling the 60 GB, 120 GB and 240 GB SSDs for €49 / $49, €74 / $74 and €149 / $149, respectively.