14 DAY TRIAL // Silicon Power has just announced the introduction of the company's first solid state drive to use the SATA 6Gbps interface, the Velox Series V30, which is targeting gamers and enthusiasts in need of high-performance storage.
Silicon Power's new solid state drive series will comprise four models that span in capacity between 60GB and 480GB, and all of these will use the 2.5-inch form factor that is standard for most notebooks.
At the heart of the drives stands the second-generation SandForce SF-2281 controller which features native SATA 6Gbps support as well as eight memory channels that are to be connected to NAND Flash chips.
Silicon Power doesn't say anything about the type of NAND these drives use, but it does provide us with a series of details regarding the sequential performance of its Velox Series V30 SSDs.
According to this information, all the units that include between 60GB and 240GB of storage space have their maximum sequential read performance set at 550MB/s, while sequential write speeds vary from 500MB/s to 520MB/s.
In the case of the 480GB drive things are a tad more complicated as both sequential read and write speeds are set bellow those of the smaller drives, at 540MB/s and 460MB/s, respectively.
This seems to indicate that Silicon Power went with slower NAND Flash when designing this model, most probably to keep the price of the unit in check.
Maximum 4K random write performance is estimated at 40,000 IOPS for the 480GB SSD, while the remaining drives provide 80K or 85K IOPS.
Unfortunately, Silicon Power refrained itself from providing any information regarding the release date and price of the Velox Series V30 SSDs.
When released, the Silicon Power drives will go head to head against models such as the OCZ Agility 3, the Mushkin Chronos, or the recently announced Patriot Pyro. All of these SSDs are based on second-generation 6Gbps SandForce controllers.