14 DAY TRIAL // With solid state drives rapidly growing in popularity, Flash storage solution developers are, naturally, quite bent on grabbing as large a slice of this market as they can, and Zalman deems eager to say its piece, supposedly preparing two full series of SSDs.
Solid state drives can be said to have started to be seen as a potential threat to hard disk drives when the TRIM command appeared, which made them get over the issue of degrading performance over time.
Since then, they have been steadily growing in popularity and seen an increasingly widespread adoption, on both the enterprise and consumer markets, even despite their higher prices.
To further enforce its foothold in this segment, Zalman will, according to a report, soon be launching two complete series of such storage units.
One of them will be known as the S Series and will employ controller chips created by JMicron, while the more powerful N Sereis will use SandForce controllers.
Thus, the S Drives will be, at least at first, three in number, will have capacities of up to 128 GB and will sport read and write speeds of up to 280 MB/s and 210 MB/s.
The 32 GB and 64 GB models will be limited to about 60 MB/s and 120 MB/s, respectively.
All three will have prices of $100 (32 GB), $150 (64 GB) and $250 (128 GB) and will be optimized for the ACHI mode.
Naturally, the aforementioned Windows 7 TRIM command is fully supported.
The second line, since it will use the more popular and powerful SandForce controllers, will manage a fairly higher performance, of up to 280 MB/s when reading and 270 MB/s when writing.
They will be available in only 64 GB and 128 GB capacities, with prices of $170 and $290, respectively. No actual shipment date was included in the report.