Author: Scott Piercy

Editor: Nigel Woodford

Model: Supertalent SSD16GB25M

Manufacturer: Supertalent

Price: $575 Est.

Flash based storage technology has most definitely become mainstream, but is still relegated to a specialty role in modern electronics. Widely used today in everything from cellular phones to ATM machines, Flash based storage has traditionally had significant advantages as well as disadvantages and thus seen its deployment relegated to specialty roles and situations. In consumer electronics, it's adoption has been primarily driven by size and power envelope constraints. Traditional magnetic storage technology is simply too bulky and power hungry for many portable devices. Still as capacity requirements climb with portable devices, we've seen many deployments utilizing magnetic storage, owing to the sheer economics of magnetic storage. It's just orders of magnitude less expensive per megabyte.

Though this is still the case today, the performance gap between traditional magnetic storage technologies and NAND type flash devices is narrowing significantly. Not only has performance improved, but reliability and longevity have actually surpassed traditional magnetic storage devices. And though there's still a huge cost per megabyte differential between the two technologies, it's a differential that has shrunk rather significantly in just the last couple of years.

It is with this in mind, that we decided to take a look at Supertalent's line of commercial and industrial NAND Flash drives, specifically the Supertalent SSD16GB25M. Sporting 16GB of storage space and a familiar 2.5" SATA HDD form factor, the SSD16GB25M is designed as a direct drop in replacement for an existing notebook,Tablet PC, or embedded system. Granted, it's current price of about $575 makes considering this as a "drop in" replacement a decision not for the feint of heart.

We decided to test this product in a typical desktop operating system scenario pitted against a typical example of desktop magnetic storage. Though not entirely fair, at least at first glance, we felt this would give you an idea of what to expect now from Flash based storage, and perhaps give you a glimpse into the not too distant future.

Let's proceed with a brief look at the drives published specifications, and then we'll move on to the drive itself.