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
Super Talent UltraDrive ME 32GB SSD Review
Author: Jim Manis
Published: Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Conclusion
Anyone interested in SSD drives has surely read a review or two by now and I'm sure they have made you wonder if there is a real gain to be had from making the switch. For years now HDD technology has lagged sadly behind the rest of the components in a modern PC and those days quickly coming to an end. With an aftermarket raid card and other software tweaks there is still more performance to be had from these drives. Also the technology itself has room to advance much further than "platter" style technology ever could.
The RAID 0 testing revealed some interesting things, the first thing that caught our attention was the discrepancy of synthetic versus the real world type tests. For raw data transfer the RAID array allows the SSDs to really rip. Keep in mind that you will never see a 100% scaling by adding a second drive but we did see some very good results from it. For example HDTune 3.5 gained 150MB/sec read which is easily a 75% gain over the single drive. On the flip side there were some applications actually ran slower with two drives. The performance was still there and the differences were minimal at best.
And now for the ever popular lists of good things and bad things
The RAID 0 testing revealed some interesting things, the first thing that caught our attention was the discrepancy of synthetic versus the real world type tests. For raw data transfer the RAID array allows the SSDs to really rip. Keep in mind that you will never see a 100% scaling by adding a second drive but we did see some very good results from it. For example HDTune 3.5 gained 150MB/sec read which is easily a 75% gain over the single drive. On the flip side there were some applications actually ran slower with two drives. The performance was still there and the differences were minimal at best.
And now for the ever popular lists of good things and bad things
Good Things
Silent operation
Much smaller than 3.5" HDDs
No heat dump
Very fast read as well as write performance
High quality construction
Great looking
Much smaller than 3.5" HDDs
No heat dump
Very fast read as well as write performance
High quality construction
Great looking
Bad Things
RAID 0 scaling uneven
Small capacity limits applications
Pricey compared to much larger traditional HDDs
Requires adapters to mount in the majority of cases
Small capacity limits applications
Pricey compared to much larger traditional HDDs
Requires adapters to mount in the majority of cases
Ninjalane Rating
Super Talent UltraDrive ME 32GB SSD Review
Furious 5 of 5
http://www.hardwareasylum.com
We would like to thank Super Talent for helping make this review possible.
