14 DAY TRIAL // Super Talent revealed more than one set of solid state drives during the recently ended Consumer Electronics Show, one of them being TeraDrive models powered by the newest SandForce controllers.
Solid state drives may not have caught up to HDDs in terms of storage space and affordability, but they definitely made some good tries at compensating for those disadvantages.
After their issue with decreasing performance over time was resolved by the TRIM command (which constantly cleans up deleted sectors), the feature left with the responsibility of justifying the price tag was the transfer speed.
Flash memory is naturally faster at reading and writing that HDDs platters, but the one that truly dictates this performance is the controller chip.
There are several suppliers of such chips, SandForce being the most popular, and its latest line of such processors was adopted by Super Talent's even newer TeraDrive models, or so it is said.
The company has already delivered the UltraDrive MT SATA 6.0 Gbps collection.
This new series is actually divided into two parts, the one holding enterprise drives, called TeraDrive FT3, and the consumer-aimed one, TeraDrive CT3.
All of them boast the compact 2.5-inch form factor that most SSDs are used to and, via the SATA 6.0 Gbps interface, reach 500 MB/s (read/write).
The TeraDrive CT3 is composed of units built out of MLC (multi-level cell) NAND Flash memory chips and a SandForce SF-2200 controller. Their capacities range between 60 GB and 480 GB.
The TeraDrive FT3 includes both MLC and SLC-based drives, all of which boast a SF-2500 controller and have a storage space of 50 GB to 400 GB.
Other specifications include a MTBF of one million hours, Super Cap (on the FT3 only) and a warranty of 2 years (3 years for the SLC models). Unfortunately, pricing details are still unavailable.