14 DAY TRIAL // PhotoFast has just announced the introduction of a new series of solid state drives, called the Gmonster3 XV2, which are based on a new controller design capable of sustaining transfer rates of 500MB/s, nearly reaching the limit of the SATA III 6Gbps interface.
Together with the press release announcing the new drive, PhotoFast has also sent out a few screenshots which seems to prove the transfer rates promised by the company.
As stated earlier, the Gmonster3 XV2 series SSDs use a controller from a new Japanese company that PhotoFast have been working with since early 2009 in order to develop these solid state disks.
This enabled the Gmonster3 XV2 to reach sequential read speeds of up to 500MB/s as well as a maximum sequential write speed of 450MB/s.
The numbers bring PhotoFast's drive in the SF-2000 territory, as SandForce's new controller is estimated to reach sequential read/write speeds of 500MB/s, when it becomes available in consumer devices.
Unfortunately, the Japanese company hasn't provided us with any details regarding the IOPS performance of its newest SSDs, so I expect this to be below that of the SandFoce-based units.
The new drive is built using MLC NAND Flash cells and PhotoFast says this it features an advanced garbage collection algorithm that protects the SSD from performance degradation. TRIM is not mentioned anywhere in the specifications list.
The GMonster3 XV2 series is expected to start shipping to Japan in April 2011 together with a new firmware which will bring improved NCQ (native command queuing) support.
PhotoFast's range of GMonster3 XV2 SSDs will be comprised of four models ranging in size from 64GB to 512GB.
The 64GB and 128GB units are priced at $110 US and $200 US, while the 256GB and the 512GB solid state disks can be purchased for $400 US and $800 US, respectively.
