14 DAY TRIAL // As though it were a response to PhotoFast's rather daring moves on the SSD front, Viking Modular Solutions announced the existence of its own Element series, composed of several drives designed for the enterprise market.
Unlike consumer-oriented solid state drives, which communicate via the SATA interface, Viking Modular Solutions chose the SAS 6.0 Gbps connection when it made its new SSDs.
Granted, the drives that PhotoFast released, the G-Monster3 XV1 and the Power Drive-LSI, aren't exactly similar to many of their peers in that respect either.
What Viking created is a line of flash-based storage devices which is aimed at the enterprise market, the list of models including drives built with multiple types of chips.
More specifically, the Element series of 2.5-inch solid state drives has members constructed out of MLC (multi-level cell), eMLC and SLC (single-level cell).
All of them have “best-in-class sequential and random performance” (exact numbers not given), as well as power fail data protection and intelligent write management techniques.
Other specifications include military-level environment testing, SSD-specific SMART command support and protection against flash page and block failures.
"At Viking Modular, our goal is to continue to bring valuable products to market that exceed OEM expectations and that solve real-life problems for data center IT managers," said Adrian Proctor, Vice President of Marketing at Viking Modular.
"Comprehensive and exhaustive design verification and production tests have proven that the Element SSD delivers the highest levels of quality, environmental ruggedness and endurance available on the market today, while enabling performance-per-dollar leadership," he added.
The series of Element SSDs is made up of SLC models with 50 GB, 100 GB, 200 GB, as well as 100 GB, 200 GB and 400 GB versions of MLC/eMLC.
Unfortunately, the official product page does not mention any sort of details regarding how much each of the newcomers costs.