Mtron releases performance SSD for the consumer market

Seoul (Korea) – Mtron has begun shipping what the company claims is the currently fastest flash-based solid-state disk drive for consumer applications : The SSD Mobi promises data read rates of up to 100 MB/s.

If the solid state disk drives (SSDs) currently available from manufacturers such as Samsung and Sandisk are just too mainstream for you, there is a new performance SSD from Mtron, which promises speeds that are about 35% above competing products.

According to Mtron, the Mobi drive is the first SSD to hit read speeds of up to 100 MB/s and write speeds of 80 MB/s. First reviews posted by review sites such as Anandtech and Tom’s Hardware US indicate that these specs are close to what can be expected by the user. Both sites saw sequential read speeds at about 95 MB/s and sustained write speeds of 75 MB/s, which is substantially faster than typical SSD read speeds of just under just under 70 MB/s and read speeds of about 40 MB/s.

Mtron claims that, compared to hard disk drives, that the speed gain is enough to cut Windows boot times in half. Power consumption of the SATA 1.5 Gb/s drive is 0.6 watts when idle and about 3.1 watts under full load, Mtron said.

The downside of the Mobi is that it is currently only available in a 2.5” 32 MB configuration. A 1.8” version is expected to become available sometime in 2008.

The drive carries a suggested retail price of $650, which undercuts comparable drives, but is more than twice the price of mainstream 2.5” 32 GB SATA SSDs, which are currently selling from about $305, according to Pricegrabber.com.