14 DAY TRIAL // Zalman is doing what many other companies did when they got into the SSD game, namely call on the services of a certain, very powerful and very well known series of controllers.
Zalman used to be a company that mainly dealt in cooling products but, like so many others, it expanded its business outlets.
In this instance, it is making the news because of solid state drives.
The company was known to be working on a new series of such storage devices, courtesy of previous reports on the matter.
Only now have they actually begun to pop up in stores, though.
They are not just any stores either, but those from Japan.
This means that only a small part of the world's populace will get the chance to try them out, at least until Zalman gets around to the stage where it supplies other countries with shipments.
The F1-Series, as it is called, is made up of three models, their capacities being of 60 GB, 120 GB and 240 GB, respectively. All of them have the 2.5-inch form factor.
MLC (multi-level cell) NAND Flash memory chips were chosen, along with the SandForce SF-2281 controller.
Also, predictably enough, the SATA III interface was implemented, otherwise known as SATA 6.0 Gbps.
These features combined led to performance of 560 MB/s when reading and 530 MB/s when writing (rates scale down with the capacity, as is the case with every other SSD line out there).
Other specifications buyers may be interested in are 4K random write performance of 30,000 IOPS (for the 60 GB and 120 GB models) and 45,000 IOPS (for the 240 GB one).
Zalman's F1-Series SandForce 60 GB, 120 GB and 240 GB SSDs sell for 11,980 JPY ($153/ 118 Euro), 19,800 JPY ($254/ 195 Euro), and 39,980 JPY ($513/ 393 Euro), respectively.