SUPER TALENT MIGHT not be the most well known brand when it comes to SSDs, but the company has been coming out with some interesting products and was one of the first to show off a PCI Express based SSD. However, its latest products are going after those who would like to get an SSD but have a really tight budget.
The new Value SSD range from Super Talent starts at a tiny 8GB and this as well as its 16GB sibling doesn’t exactly offer anything exciting in terms of performance, as both offer a read speed of 90MB/s and a really paltry write speed of 30MB/s. The 8GB model has a MSRP of just $65, but we can’t help but think this is false economy when you can have a 32GB SSD for just over $80 retail.
However, Super Talent also has a 32GB model that offers improved performance with read speeds of 150MB/s and write speeds of 60MB/s. Finally there’s a 64GB model that improves upon the write speed of the 32GB model, as it manages 100MB/s. Super Talent hasn’t divulged the pricing on the 16GB and 32GB models, but the 64GB model is said to be priced at $175. Again, the MSRP isn’t a fantastic value considering that you can pick up Kingston’s second generation SSDNow V series 64GB SSD for about $150 and it offers better performance at 200MB/s read and 110MB/s write speeds.
Of course MSRP’s are rarely the same as retail pricing and we’d expect all of the new Super Talent models to retail at well below the MSRP. Interestingly Super Talent hasn’t encased its new SSDs in metal as so many other manufacturers have, instead the company has gone for a “lightweight polymer shell that protects the drives against physical damage”. This should be a slightly more environmentally friendly solution and we’d expect to see other SSD makers follow suit, as there just isn’t a need for a metal enclosure for SSDs.
If nothing else, the new products from Super Talent shows one thing, a trend towards more affordable SSD drives, albeit with reduced performance. We’ve already seen budget products from several other bigger names in the SSD business. It looks like we’re at a point where the SSD market is getting ready to kick off a budget segment for those looking for an affordable SSD due to the non-volatile nature of flash memory for use in mobile device, rather than just for the performance characteristics that more expensive SSDs have to offer.S|A
Lars-Göran Nilsson
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