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.
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mostlyprudent - Wednesday, August 15, 2007 - link
I hope Gary's 3 year prediction is as wrong as AT's (and just about everyone else's) prediction about DDR3 speeds and latencies! I am quite impressed by what has happened in SSD technology over the last year or so.AnnihilatorX - Wednesday, August 15, 2007 - link
Well I do rip loseless audio from CDs. On some types of music I can hear differences betwween mp3 and ape32GB is just enough for a Windows installation plus few applications
It's best to store multimedia files to a HDD
yyrkoon - Thursday, August 16, 2007 - link
80MB/s sustained is more than enough for video editing, and I am not sure you guys understand this or not, but until now, this is the first test I have personally seen that the SSD comes this close to overall standard HDD in performance. The Raptor may peak higher, but if I am reading these benchmarks correctly, this drive is FAST. Take the sub milisecond access times, and you have something worth talking about.As for Windows boot times, I think if you compared this even to a Raptor, you would notice a diference in bootup times. Windows may not need much more than ~12MB/s transfers, but the very low access times will show a noticable difference. Maybe only a second or two, but in Windows boot times, this is outstanding given the current performance of all current HDDs.
Uh, WinXP only needs ~1.5GB-4GB for a base install, this gives plenty of room for other applications. I do not know how other people install their OSes, but this is perfect for me, since I keep all my data(important or not) on a different drive from the OS anyhow. This SSD would probably serve great as a Photoshop scratch disk as well . . .
GlassHouse69 - Wednesday, August 15, 2007 - link
Windows itself doesnt need a fast drive. I load up windows 1x every 2-3 weeks. It is on 24/7. The swap file is affected, but with 2 gb of ram, dual core, xp pro, O&O defrag and no random crap programs loaded into memory unnecessarily, I never see my hd tic when I am using windows.Now, network transfers it can show, but that is for 1 hour here and there, maybe 3-4x a month. Really, what the fast hd is used for is encoding or decoding, compressing and uncompressing, and, most importantly, games. There you would never dream of using anything less than 100 gigs of space. So, this thing is completely useless. yay! I mean, unless you make a partition for your favorite games and another for some ripping usage, 32 gb is next to useless.
it is a great write up though. nicely done
AnnihilatorX - Friday, August 17, 2007 - link
Not entirely trueAlthough Windows at run-time does not need a fast drive,
Windows at boot-time and applications at load-time do improve a lot
Windows startup is 2x faster on SSD
That alone is the biggest selling point of SSD
Calin - Wednesday, August 15, 2007 - link
You might want to try a quick and dirty benchmark in Linux, maybe the situation is simply related to drivers. And maybe some quick and dirty benchmarks in XP versus Vista, just to see if the Intel chipset is slower in all configurationsEpyon - Wednesday, August 15, 2007 - link
Thanks for the review. Its great to have some concrete numbers to base opinions on SSDs.