MTRON SSD 32GB: Wile E. Coyote or Road Runner?

First Thoughts

Solid State Drives are making great strides towards offering performance that matches and in some cases exceeds the best high-end consumer drives on the market in our limited benchmark results. We are in the early stages of testing several SSD products under an operating system (Vista) optimized for them. We also have a new test suite designed to emphasize actual applications that the typical business or home user might utilize on a daily basis, along with updated game benchmarks.

While iPEAK and test applications like PCMark05 based on iPEAK have served us well and are certainly one of the best tools to show the pure performance capabilities of a storage device, it does not work properly under Vista. It is also getting long in the tooth as the ability to generate meaningful trace files with newer desktop chipsets, applications, and drive sizes is severely limited at this time. In fact, the results generated in our initial iPEAK benchmarks with the MTRON drive did not follow performance patterns in our upcoming application and operating results. This leads us to believe that current chipset and drive technology will soon surpass the capability of our test programs to properly generate meaningful results.

Beyond that, as we found out with the MTRON drive your choice of core logic chipset can make a difference in the overall performance of the drive. Exactly why the latest Intel desktop chipsets have an apparent 80 MB/sec ceiling for sustained transfer rates with the SSD products is still a mystery to us and the drive manufacturers. We are still testing other Intel chipsets and will report these tests results and any updates from Intel or the drive manufacturers in our next article. In the meantime, using this drive with the Intel ICH9R provides the speed of Wile E. Coyote while we liken the NVIDIA 680i to the Road Runner: just a little faster and apparently a little smarter when it comes to SSD products.

Our limited testing shows both the strengths and weaknesses of this particular drive when comparing it to one of the best performing consumer desktop drives. The read and write speeds are incredible for an SSD and its vastly superior access and random read rates generate very competitive scores in our application tests. Add to this the fact that the drive is completely silent, offers greatly improved thermals relative to pretty much any mechanical drive, and the ability to withstand extreme vibration and shock, and you have an absolute winner on your hands. Well, almost.

Why almost? The two major weaknesses of this drive are its limited capacity and the very expensive price tag. Opening up your pocketbook for the current introductory price of $1499 will buy you one of the fastest drives for the desktop and certainly the fastest drive available in a 2.5" format for the portable market based upon our current test results. However, $1500 is the cost of a complete midrange notebook with 160GB of storage, and it's tough to look beyond that fact.

These weaknesses will diminish over time, especially with NAND memory decreasing in price by 40% per year based on current averages. We doubt SSD products will make significant headway into the desktop market over the next three years due to the continued explosion of storage space requirements for digital entertainment. However, we do see it making serious inroads into the portable market over the same time period, along with exceptionally fast double digit growth in the commercial and industrial markets. Based upon what MTRON has delivered in this drive, we also foresee certain enthusiasts embracing this technology, provided the capacities and prices are more in alignment with each other.

We want to thank DV Nation for providing our first truly performance oriented SSD drive. Our upcoming full review of this interesting yet expensive drive will concentrate on notebook operations along with a wider variety of application scores from our new test suite and the all important boot/stand-by/hibernation results. Until then, if you have deep pockets and are a road warrior who is constantly afraid of losing data due to handling mishaps - or a desktop enthusiast who can live with limited capacities - then we highly suggest taking a look into the new high performance SSD products from MTRON.