The Memoright Flash SSD MR25.2-032S is available in several capacities of 8, 16, 32, 64 and 128 GB. We received four 32-GB drives, which allowed us to do RAID 0 benchmarks, so we could see the potential of flash SSD when set up in RAID arrays. All of these come with a five-year warranty, which is comparable to other enterprise hard drives on the market. The warranty is also a sign of faith in flash SSD’s reliability.

We found that the performance of the Memoright 32-GB flash SSD is awesome. The 0.1 ms access time is similar to what other Flash SSDs deliver, but the 115 MB/s read transfer rate is a new record for Flash SSDs. The cool part is that write performance is almost as high. Mtron’s 32-GB flash SSD reached 95 MB/s read performance on our storage test system, but it was limited to 75 MB/s write performance. With the exception of the Webserver benchmark, all other I/O performance results are dominated by Memoright: 700-4,300 I/O operations per second are significant, which is approximately between 4x and 20x faster than a Western Digital WD1500 Raptor.

Although we found that the sequential throughput does not reach the interface bandwidth, the next SSD generation will certainly have to use SATA/300 instead of SATA/150 to avoid the interface becoming a bottleneck. When we compared four Memoright 32-GB flash SSDs to four Seagate Savvio 10K.2 2.5” SAS drives and four 3.5” WD1500 Raptor drives, we found the conventional drives don’t stand a chance against the four Memoright device. A 0.2-ms access time is amazing for a RAID 0 array (vs. 7.4 ms for the Seagate Savvio 10K.2 and 8.5 ms for WD’s Raptors). The Memoright flash SSDs also sustain a minimum write transfer rate of 323 MB/s in RAID 0, while the Savvios drop to 199 MB/s and the Raptors go down to 177 MB/s. The read throughput of 450 MB/s for the Mtron quartet is equally impressive.

The 128-GB version is priced at $3,500, which is way too much for the vast majority of us. A 64-GB version still costs slightly more than $2,000, but the 32-GB device is priced at $1,049, which is not out of reach for power users and enthusiasts. Other 32-GB flash SSDs may be much cheaper (DV Nation offers the Mtron device for $699), but they also aren’t as fast. If you are a true hardcore user with a flexible budget then you should not hesitate. For everyone else I can only repeat the recommendation I made half a year ago: Capacities, performance and price points will only drop considerably over time.