SSDs are snowballing in importance, so it’s interesting to see what a new manufacturer brings to the party. Distributor DV Nation (www.dvnation.com) was kind enough to send us a 32GB drive from Chinese firm Memoright, as well as a handful of new units from Mtron (special thanks once again go to Western Digital for the Raptor hard drives for comparison purposes).

Benchmark results speak louder than words, so here’s the takeaway: Any of these SSDs will match or beat a (much cheaper and more spacious) Raptor, although only the Memoright beats the hard drive in sequential write performance. RAID 0 may not double some aspects of SSD performance as it nearly does for hard drives, but then, RAID controller support is key. An SSD’s internal controller must also be able to work well with the hard drive controllers in its target market, too. There’s likely room for improvement in both controller driver support and SSD firmware.

The Memoright unit uses a custom controller with its Samsung NAND chips, and the result is really fast write speed. The PCMark Vantage subtests will give you a good indication of this SSD’s strengths (i.e., OS and app loading, plus A/V file editing and processing). Memoright claims more than double the write cycle life of an Mtron, namely 100GB written daily for more than 200 years vs. 50GB per day for 140 years. Yeah, we’ll let you know when we finish that particular test.

Something we may not have mentioned before is that the read/write graphs for single SSDs look like flat horizons as compared with a hard drive's gentle curve into slower performance toward its upper capacity limit. Hard drives fill their disks inward from the outer tracks, where their sequential speeds are highest. Among other things, this means that hard drives are able to retrieve the first files written to a fresh partition, such as OS files, faster than they can read data files added later. SSDs read and write at the same great speed no matter which of the drive’s silicon chips physically store a chunk of data.

All of the SSDs we’ve handled thus far have used SLC (single-level cell) NAND memory, which offers outstanding speeds at high prices. New MLC (multilevel cell) NAND units from the likes of STEC and Toshiba seek to make SSDs more affordable and capacious, albeit with slower performance. The trick with MLC is beefing up the controller’s error correction capability without unnecessarily harming throughput, STEC says.

Speaking of STEC, stay tuned for a review of the company’s SLC-based ZeusIOPS 146GB. Our evaluation unit was optimized for server controllers, not desktop, and our test results showed it. New firmware may be on the way, so we’ll give the STEC another spin then.

SSDs are silent. They’re typically thinner than desktop hard drives and run cooler than performance units. SSDs offer double or treble the impact resistance of a hard drive, broader temperature tolerance, and lower power consumption. Desktop benefits include slightly faster boot times and multiplayer game hosting I/O. The dark side, of course, is a cost per gigabyte like a bargain with a Sith.

by Marty Sems