14 DAY TRIAL // For all their benefits, solid state drives are very well known for being able to significantly speed up boot up times and data access. It is this that makes them quite useful when used as boot drives. On the other hand, such storage units have become quite capacious compared to previous years, which is why they have started to show up more and more as alternatives to HDDs, on both desktops and laptops. To promote this pro-SSD movement, so to speak, Mach Xtreme has come forth and made the official introduction of the MX-NANO Series.
The MX-NANO Series are intended to serve as storage solutions in notebooks with the 44-pin or 50-pin ZIF PATA interface. They are constructed out of MLC (multi-level cell) NAND flash memory chips and come in capacities of 30GB, 60GB, 120GB and 240GB. What they are most notable for, however, is their “industry-leading” cache memory of no less than 256MB.
While consuming 0.5W in standby and 1.3W during normal operation, the PATA SSDs can read at speeds of up to 120MB/s (on the 120GB and 240GB models) and write at 90MB/s.
They also reach a maximum of 5100 IOPS. All in all, they are about three times as capable as hard disks and even have a significant endurance, shown by the MTBF (mean time before failure) of one million hours.
“Combined with industry's leading 256MB cache memory and ultra-fast access times, these new SSDs deliver double or even triple the performance of the default hard drives in most current notebooks, resulting in substantially faster boot-up, application load and shutdown speeds. It is one of the fastest and easiest ways to upgrade dozens of different notebooks and UMPCs to higher performance and more local storage (up to 240GB),” the official announcement states.
The 1.8-inch storage devices have not been given prices as of yet, but they will be backed by a one-year warranty when they eventually become available.