Super Talent MasterDrive OX SATA 2.0 SSD

Performance:

For our testing we ran this drive on an overclocked Intel Core i7 system running Ubuntu 9.04 (x86_64) with the Linux 2.6.28 kernel and using the EXT4 file-system. The 16GB Super Talent MasterDrive OX SATA 2.0 SSD had worked fine "out of the box" with Ubuntu Linux. The Super Talent FTM16GL25H was recognized as a 16GB STT_FTM16GL25H SSD.

We have already tested the Super Talent MasterDrive 16GB SSD when reviewing the OCZ Vertex SATA 2.0 60GB SSD and also compared its performance to two traditional 2.5" hard drives -- the 160GB FUJITSU MHZ2160B and 120GB FUJITSU MHY2120B. Our results from these tests can be found starting on this page.

As can be seen from the results, the Super Talent 16GB MasterDrive was no match for the OCZ Vertex SSD. In some of the common tests, the Super Talent drive even ran slower than the Fujitsu HDDs. The only two tests where the Super Talent SSD did better than the OCZ SSD was with Dbench when running just one client and when running the Threaded I/O Tester with 64MB random writes with 32 threads it had a lower latency, but in all other tests it lagged behind and was most often slower than the HDDs.

Conclusion:

If you are looking for a performance-oriented solid state drive but are trying to conserve costs (which will limit you at this time to MLC-based SSDs), the Super Talent MasterDrive OX is one you may want to avoid. The Super Talent FTM16GL25H is a solid state drive, but its performance was not the best and was frequently beat out by Fujitsu 5400RPM notebook hard drives and the OCZ Vertex SSD. This drive is also rated for 1,000,000 hours MTBF compared to a 1.5 million hour rating with the OCZ Vertex. Though if you are just looking for a cheap SSD to experiment with, to run in a system so that it consumes less energy than one with a hard drive, or are just looking for a low-capacity drive with non-rotating media, you will not be able to find many that are cheaper than the 16GB version of the Super Talent MasterDrive OX SATA 2.0 SSD. The Super Talent FTM16GL25H is selling at this time for around $75 USD.