14 DAY TRIAL // The quite respected manufacturer of graphics cards components, graphics adapters, tablets and small PCs, Zotac, decided to enter the SSD Market with its first SSD model, the Zotac Speed 120. Comparing with its previous excellent line of products, the new Zotac's SSD is highly underwhelming.
Coming with a storage space of 120GB in 2.5"/7mm form-factor and using Serial ATA-6GB/s interface and featuring 32MB DRAM cache, Zotac really starts small, and considering that the maximum sequential read speed of 521MB/s as well as maximum sequential write speed is up to 170MB/s, it's clear that the drive is also fairly slow compared with its counterparts.
Unfortunately, Zotac also does not reveal what kind of flash memory it uses as well as what controller powers its solid drive, but it's to be expected to use MLC (multi-level cell) NAND flash memory as well as a mainstream controller.
Why bother if you don't do it right?
As I said before, the company does start small indeed, but this is underwhelming by any standards. As we previously covered the Essencore newcomer in the memory industry, it's very important to have at least one product that can hope to compete with what top players like Samsung, Intel, Seagate and many others are trying to offer. As the Zotac Speed 120 is running on shady hardware with laughable specs, it all ends up looking like a massive lack of professionalism.
SSDs do not need advanced manufacturing facilities or enormous research costs, but what Zotac needs is to learn how to design a strong firmware and to ensure a stable supply of NAND flash memory.
However, no press release or public announcement has been made on their website. According to KitGuru, this quiet launch was probably meant to consolidate a strong market in China first, where such bad products probably don't undergo strong criticism from consumers.