MTRON SSD 32GB: Wile E. Coyote or Road Runner?
by Gary Key on August 15, 2007 3:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
HDD/SSD Comparison and Features
The MTRON MSD-SATA6025-032 features a capacity of 32GB; other sizes ranging from 4GB to 32GB are available in the 2.5" form factor and up to 128GB is available in the 3.5" form factor. The drive is marketed into the commercial, server, and industrial sectors with an emphasis placed on performance storage needs with a high degree of tolerance to environmental conditions.
The MSD-SATA6025-032 features a read seek time of less than .1ms, a maximum read speed of up to 100MB/sec, a maximum write speed of 80MB/sec, and sustained transfer rates of around 95MB/sec. The drive features a write/erase endurance of approximately 140 years at 50GB of write/erase cycles per day thanks to an exclusive controller chip design that features proprietary wear leveling and bad block management algorithms.
The MTRON drive is truly silent as indicated by the acoustics test, features a very low power envelope with load requirements being over three times less than the Western Digital Raptor drive, and excellent thermals considering our room temperature base was 25C.
| Hard Drive Specifications | ||
| MTRON SSD 32GB MSD-SATA6025-032 |
Western Digital Raptor 150GB WD1500ADFD |
|
| Manufacturer's Stated Capacity | 32 GB | 150 GB |
| Operating System Stated Capacity | 30.9 GB | 139.73 GB |
| Interface | SATA 1.5Gb/s | SATA 1.5Gb/s |
| Rotational Speed | n/a | 10,000 RPM |
| Cache Size | n/a | 16 MB |
| Average Latency | n/a | 2.99 ms (nominal) |
| Read Seek Time | .1 ms | 4.6 ms |
| Number of Heads | n/a | 4 |
| Number of Platters | n/a | 2 |
| Power Draw Idle / Load | .55W / 3.1W | 9.19W / 10.02W |
| Acoustics Idle / Load | 0 dB(A) / 0 dB(A) | 35 dB(A) / 48 dB(A) |
| Thermals Idle / Load | 25C / 26C | 47C / 58C |
| Write/Erase Endurance | >140 years at 50GB Write/Erase Cycles per Day | - |
| Data Retention | 10 years | |
| Command Queuing | n/a | Native Command Queuing |
| Warranty | 5 Years | 5 Years - Retail or OEM |
The MTRON MSD-SATA6025-032 features a capacity of 32GB; other sizes ranging from 4GB to 32GB are available in the 2.5" form factor and up to 128GB is available in the 3.5" form factor. The drive is marketed into the commercial, server, and industrial sectors with an emphasis placed on performance storage needs with a high degree of tolerance to environmental conditions.
The MSD-SATA6025-032 features a read seek time of less than .1ms, a maximum read speed of up to 100MB/sec, a maximum write speed of 80MB/sec, and sustained transfer rates of around 95MB/sec. The drive features a write/erase endurance of approximately 140 years at 50GB of write/erase cycles per day thanks to an exclusive controller chip design that features proprietary wear leveling and bad block management algorithms.
The MTRON drive is truly silent as indicated by the acoustics test, features a very low power envelope with load requirements being over three times less than the Western Digital Raptor drive, and excellent thermals considering our room temperature base was 25C.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
37 Comments
View All Comments
Frumious1 - Thursday, August 16, 2007 - link
I don't think an SSD in a notebook is really going to affect battery life that much. There was a laptop review that made this point just the other day: http://www.anandtech.com/mobile/showdoc.aspx?i=306...">see the last 3 paragraphs. If you have a low power laptop, it could probably cut 1-2W power and add maybe 15 minutes of battery life. 2.5" drives also aren't particularly hot, so it won't make a huge difference there. Now, performance would be faster for sure, since laptop drives are also slow, but $1500 or whatever for one of these puppies? I'll pass!ciparis - Wednesday, August 15, 2007 - link
I may have missed it in the article -- was there a discussion of Windows boot times? That plus hibernate / sleep would be interesting. More comprehensive application launch time comparisons would be nice as well.PandaBear - Wednesday, August 15, 2007 - link
With this kind of performance I think the target is not laptop but rather database servers that need very very fast seq and random access. They can afford a couple of these drives, easily.But then again, will a RAM based device like Gigabyte's work better? and how long would they last (i.e. how good is MTRON's wear leveling?)
brundlefly - Saturday, August 18, 2007 - link
Actually I have this disk and it outperforms every mechanical I have ever used in every scenario (server, database, notebook, desktop) (and I have 15k Fujitsu MAS UltraSCSI's, Raptors, and Hitachi 7k200). See my post below about MySQL performance, which is why I got the drive.There is no reason or desire to have a mechanical device in any computer, it doesn't even make any sense, its just the best solution weve had until the price, performance, size, and durability of SSD matured.
BTW MTRON states you can write or erase 50GB/day for 140 years before any cells turn read-only. Thats longer then the MTBF for a raptor.
StraightPipe - Wednesday, August 15, 2007 - link
I'd love to see how one of these drives performs in multi-access enviroments. Can you run a server test or two (RAID would also be nice) to see how they do?I can't see too many home users picking these up for their desktops, but it's always nice to have another option. the 3.5" even goes to 128MB, it's about the same as my 160GB Raptor. Price is still way high, but like all good memory, it only gets cheaper :)
Right now the pricing is set so it is most viable for the enterprise market.
StraightPipe - Wednesday, August 15, 2007 - link
From the Tom's article listed above:"Writing to lots of different cells slows the SSD down so much that even conventional 2.5" hard drives offer better I/O and file-write performance. "
So this is probably not what you want for many server applications.
For a webserver this fast read, no write scenario may be ideal.
jaybuffet - Wednesday, August 15, 2007 - link
http://www.adtec.co.jp/direct/index.php/product/18...">http://www.adtec.co.jp/direct/index.php/product/18...Is that $1600 USD?
Their mainpage shows the 32GB version for about $850 USD
brundlefly - Wednesday, August 15, 2007 - link
I cant read Japanese but 198,000 yen = $1700 USD ?jaybuffet - Wednesday, August 15, 2007 - link
Those are 3.5" drive versions i guess. According to the bottom of http://mtron.net/eng/sub_eb1.asp">http://mtron.net/eng/sub_eb1.asp their is also a 128GB 3.5" availableEODetroit - Wednesday, August 15, 2007 - link
... It might be interesting to compare the speeds here with those from Gigabyte's old I-Ram.