14 DAY TRIAL // It appears that not just one but two companies delivered their respective new sets of solid state drives, each aimed at a somewhat different sort of consumer base and with just as different performance levels.
This year might just mark the beginning of the real rise of solid state drives, especially now that NAND manufacturing processes are advancing.
Granted, makers of SSDs have to deal with the fact that smaller NAND Flash chips have fewer write cycles, leading to the need for certain design changes.
Still, this doesn't mean that the rate at which SSDs get released has slowed down in any way, and Verbatim and Kingmax have come forth to confirm this.
Kingmax's line can be seen as the more traditional of the two, being designed for the SATA interface, SATA 6.0 Gbps to be exact.
With capacities of 64 GB, 128 GB, 256 GB and 512 GB, respectively, they can read data at a maximum of 415 MB/s.
The writing speeds, on the other hand, differ, with 95 MB/s for the 64 GB one, 175 MB/s for the 128 GB model and 260 MB/s for the other two. Prices are unknown for now.
Meanwhile, Verbatim's products, while also in the 2.5-inch form factor, are aimed at notebooks and have capacities of 64 GB, 128 GB and 256 GB, respectively.
The prices for the above are 129 Euro, 238 Euro and 470 Euro, since they have been made available in Europe. That said, their read and write speeds are of 250 MB/s and 220 MB/s.
Like pretty much every solid state drive, the Verbatim models are meant to replace HDDs used in laptops, thus leading to a smaller power consumption and faster boot and load times.
What remains is to see how quick PC makers are at including either of the above in their product offers.
