After careful consideration I have decided to transfer all hardware review activities to a new domain.  I purchased Hardwareasylum.com in 2012 and have been working hard to build a new and improved Ninjalane on that domain.  If you are reading this you have reached one of the archived articles, news, projects and/or reviews that were left behind during the site migration. 

Please update your bookmarks and be sure to visit the new and improved Ninjalane at Hardwareasylum.com

  • reviews
  • storage
  • Super Talent UltraDrive ME 32GB SSD Review
  • Super Talent UltraDrive ME 32GB SSD Review

    Author:
    Published:

    Performance - HDTune

    Solid State Drives have a substantial performance increase over the original "platter" style hard drives when it comes to access time.  SSD drives are based on NAND Flash memory and come with an integrated high speed data cache, the drives also eliminate almost any time needed for accessing the data so it can spend less time looking for data and more time transferring it.

    All Ultra Series drives utilize E.C.C. (error correction) as well as wear leveling and bad block management. These are top quality in design and have some of the highest speed ratings currently available.
    System as it was tested
    QX9650 Extreme Edition @3.0ghz 1333fsb
    DFI LanParty P45T2RS
    2x2GB Crucial Ballistix 800mhz 5-5-5-15
    VisionTek Radeon HD4850 512MB
    Windows 7 build 7.100

    For the purposes of this review we used Windows 7 as it is an excellent platform for testing new tech. The installs are all identical as far as updates and drivers; we used all free software available on the web so readers can compare their results to what we have in this review. No defragmenting or any other "tweaks" were used. Indexing, system restore and pagefile, super prefetch etc. were all left at default settings as was the write back cache.
    HDTune 3.50 is a very well known test and we couldn't wait to see what the numbers would show.  The drives achieved approximately 4x the speed recorded for the raptors. While this is due in large part to the Raptors being SATA 1.5 we were still expecting a closer test, instead we were given a shut out.

    We will jump straight to the RAID 0 HDTune results. Windows 7 doesn't require any drivers for RAID so it is a simple matter of setting up the bios and configuring the onboard RAID controller then load Windows as if it were a regular single drive configuration.
    Well the RAID 0 tests are impressive and about 3x the performance of the Raptors in this application.  We were simple astounded at the scaling in this test but a review is about more than just one test so let's move our attention to some of other benchmarks.