What You Get

The packaging might at first cause a double take, but then again there's really not a lot to package here. Inside the simple pop out packaging you find a deceptively small 2.5" form factor device, resembling a low profile SATA notebook HDD. There are actually two versions of this drive. The SSD16GB25 is targeted towards commercial applications and comes with a largely plastic device body. The drive we received, the SSD16GB25M is the industrial version of the drive, and comes with an all metal casing.

What's the difference? Operating temperature range. The commercial version has a very respectable operating temperature range of 0 Celsius to 70 Celsius. The industrial version we have has an even more insane operating temperature range of -40 Celsius to 85 Celsius. Needless to say both drives can survive some pretty harsh operating environment temperature extremes.

Operational shock tolerances are also pretty impressive as the drives are designed to operate with up to a sustained 16 G's of vibration and 1500 G's of shock. To give you some perspective, a typical hard drive is rated at about ½ a G of vibration tolerance and 50 G's of static shock resistance when operating, and about 1G of vibration and 300 G's of static shock resistance when powered down.

Power requirements also are significantly favorable to the Supertalent drive, with idle power draw being a meager .16watts, and only .48w under load. Compared to the typical range of ~1watt/3watt of the typical low power notebook drive, or ~5watt/10watt power draw of the desktop class Hitachi 7K250 drive we compared to in our tests, there is definitely potential for significant power savings here with portable devices.

When looking at operational characteristics, the Supertalent drive doesn't fair too badly either. Though it's rated maximum read/write speed of 28MB/sec and sustained transfer rate of 25MB/sec aren't exactly earth shattering compared to a traditional hard drive, it's rated read seek time of less than 1ms is definitely something to cheer about.

In the past Flash memory technologies have suffered from limited reliability and lifespan concerns, but this is been mitigated with modern NAND flash designs. Supertalent's proprietary wear leveling algorithms along with built in EDD/EDC functions and an estimated write/erase cycle per memory cell of 100,000 cycles gives the drive an MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure) rating of approximately 1,000,000 hours. With normal usage patterns this roughly equates to a 10 year service life, far exceeding the operating duty cycles of most traditional hard drives.

So, now we know it's extremely reliable and can operate in environmental extremes beyond what any traditional mechanical hard drive could tolerate. But how does it perform? At first glance looking at it's rather pedestrian burst and sustained transfer rates you'd think compared to magnetic storage there'd be no contest. But it's not quite that simple. Under real world conditions hard drives rarely reach their maximum operational speeds, owing to the random access nature of data, and the limitations of the mechanical read/write heads and the physical distances they travel.

With this in mind, it's time to actually do something with the drive, and see how it measures up.