14 DAY TRIAL // Coming to build upon its long experience in the field of memory products, Mach Xtreme has developed what it calls the MX-Katana solid state drive, one that does not exactly qualify as a common SSD.
The word common can be applied to a great many things on the IT industry, from events to products, depending on the criteria one has in mind.
Still, there are products that stand out from all the rest and, thus, definitely do not qualify as common unless the standard is very specific or, alternatively, broad enough.
It is Mach Xtreme that has stepped out of the norm in this case, or at least its newest product has, being a fairly uncommon solid state drive.
To be more precise, the Mach Xtreme MX-Katana SSD differs from most others of its kind through its form factor.
Where common SSDs are made for the SATA interface, or external (for USB or whatnot), this one goes into a mini PCI Express slot.
PCI Express SSDs are definitely not unheard of, but they usually have a full-length interface, to leverage as much of the bandwidth as possible.
Nevertheless, Mach Xtreme decided on the mini PCI Express form in this case, leading to maximum read and write speeds of 275 MB/s and 225 MB/s.
That said, MLC (multi-level cell) NAND Flash memory is used in the construction, while the MTBF of 1 million hours stands for reliability. Finally, the random read/write rate is of 20,000 IOPS.
Among other things, the mac Xtreme MX-Katana can be utilized as an upgrade for the Apple MacBook Air laptop. The available storage capacity options are of 60 GB, 120 GB, 240 GB and 480 GB.
As with so many other things revealed recently, the SSD should be on show at Computex, Taipei. Whether competitors will have similar things to show off remains to be seen.