14 DAY TRIAL // Active Media Products, or AMP for short, has specialized in building niche products that cater to the needs of a very specific group of users and their latest solid state disk is no exception to the rule as it was designed especially to be used in the Dell Inspiron Mini 9 and Vostro A90 portable computers.
Dubbed the SaberTooth AA, AMP's SSD uses the half-height mini PCI Express form factor and features up to 64GB of storage space, quite an improvement when compared to the 16GB drive that comes standard with the Mini 9.
But the additional storage space is just one of the selling point of AMP's drive as the SaberTooth AA also delivers a substantial speed increase over Dell's stock SSD.
To put things in perspective, AMP has provided us with a few performance figures, and the company claims that read and write sequential transfer rates were increased from 35.7MB/s and 5MB/s to 71.4MB/s and 45.9MB/s, respectively.
In addition, the 4K IOPS count was also improved as the SaberTooth AA is capable of reaching 1022 IOPS (input/output operations per second) compared to the 496 IOPS of the standard drive.
“This SSD answers the demand from many netbook users for bigger and faster storage options. We were able to reach the 64GB density by using the newest high capacity flash chips,” stated Active Media Products VP of Sales, Jerry Thomson.
The SaberTooth AA is powered by a Phison 3016 controller, that uses IDE/PATA signaling, paired together with MLC flash and includes ECC and wear leveling features, but TRIM is not mentioned anywhere in its specifications.
As far as pricing is concerned, the 16GB version can be purchased for $69.95, while the 32GB and 64GB drives are priced at $109.95 and $199.95, respectively.
This makes them quite an expensive upgrade path considering the age and performance of the systems is meant to be used in.