All of them have SATA III interface support and are aimed at ultrabooks

Jan 17, 2013 18:31 GMT  ·  By

There will soon be three new solid-state drives up for sale, courtesy of Apacer, and one might say they are ready for action already. Still, they won't be available until next month (February 2013). The un-priced three new SSDs are the 2.5-inch SFD 25S-M, MO-297-compliant SFD 18S5-M and mSATA S1-M.

Since they are very compact, even for NAND Flash-based storage devices, they will do well as part of ultrabooks and other ultrathin laptops.

For its part, the SATA III interface will provide the 6.0 Gbps bandwidth. Without it, there would have been no way for the SSDs to reach 555 MB/s when reading and 550 MB/s when writing, even with SF-2281 SandForce controller chips.

Speaking of which, the random 4K performance is of 60,000 IOPS, the same efficiency as RAID HDD configurations with hundreds of platter spinners.

All in all, the newcomers are the expected response to the increasing interest on the part of PCs, enterprises and cloud computing.

On that note, the new SSDs will benefit lots of devices and systems, not just ultrabooks. Networking devices, embedded computers, servers, all have a reason to consider their use.

Of course, when the power consumption is reduced by 50% compared to SSDs based on the previous-generation SF-2281 B01 control chip, eyebrows are bound to shoot up.

Other specs of the aforementioned SSDs include 55-bit Error Correcting Code (ECC), SMART ((Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology), Windows 7 TRIM, ATA Secure Erase and AES 128-bit Encryption.

“In the cloud computing era, the compact mobile devices are becoming increasingly common. Therefore, when designing SATA 3.0 series products, Apacer has taken into consideration the needs for compactness and reliability of various devices,” said Jeff Lin, embedded application business unit director of Apacer.

“Regarding MO-297-compliant SFD 18S5-M and mSATA S1-M with a size equal to one-third the size of credit card, the stability during the operation of the system has been considered.”