The three storage devices use the SATA II 3.0 Gbps interface

Feb 23, 2012 15:09 GMT  ·  By

Amidst a trove of SATA III 6.0 Gbps SSD announcements, Transcend has taken the microphone to release some that aren't that desperate to work at over 500 MB/s.

What this means is that the company has announced the SSD500 line of NAND Flash storage devices.

With support for SATA II (SATA 3.0 Gbps), they have maximum speeds of 260 MB/s when reading and 230 MB/s when writing.

Don't think these will come cheap, though. Even if their capacities and speeds aren't too high, they do use SLC (single-level cell) NAND Flash chips, which are expensive compared to regular MLC.

On the bright side, the chips provide up to 100,000 erase/write cycles, and with TRIM going in the background there shouldn't be much of an issue with performance degrading over time.

The 2.5-inch 16 GB, 32 GB and 64 GB SSD500 models sell for 164.01 Euro, 314.07 Euro and 596.89 Euro, respectively ($218 / $418 / $794).