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Super Talent Technology

Super Talent Technology Corporation based in San Jose, California, designs and manufactures a full range of DDR, DDR2, and DDR3 memory modules and flash based SSD and USB storage devices for computers and consumer electronics. An ISO 9001 certified company, Super Talent utilizes its state-of-the-art factories and leading-edge components to produce award winning products with outstanding reliability. Super Talent is an active member of the JEDEC and ONFI. With over 250 patents, the company was ranked in the top 50 of the Wall Street Journal's Patent ScorecardTM for the IT industry three consecutive times.

see also:- Super Talent - editor mentions on STORAGEsearch.com and Super Talent's SSD page

SSD ad - click for more info
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Super Talent - recent milestones from SSD market history

In December 2008 - Super Talent Technology said it will sample a new range of 2.5" SATA flash SSDs in January 2009. The SLC unit has 128GB capacity and R/W speeds upto 230/170 MB/sec. The MLC unit has 256GB capacity and R/W speeds upto 200/160 MB/sec.

In April 2009 - Super Talent Technology pre-announced its RAIDDrives SSD product line. This connects via PCIe and supports up to 2TB of RAID5 protected MLC flash storage. R/W performance is upto 1.2GB/s and 1.3GB/s respectively. More details are promised in June 2009.

In May 2009 - Super Talent announced new firmware for its UltraDrive ME series 2.5" SSDs. This includes what the company calls a "Performance Refresh Tool" to fix performance degradation problems in its earlier generation of SSDs. Although some commentators on the web have attributed such problems to fragmentation - that's completely incorrect!

Since the access time for random reads in a well designed SSD is nearly identical for all locations - the real problem in Super Talent's SSDs (and some models from Intel) was due to badly designed products which were rushed to market too soon without adequate testing.

For a deeper look at these issues see Can you trust flash SSD specs & benchmarks? - published nearly a year ago - which first alerted buyers to these problems. See also:- SSD controllers and IP.

In March 2010 - Super Talent Technology announced imminent availability of a new encrypted USB 3 flash SSD - with upto 256GB capacity. The USB 3.0 SuperCrypt is a true SSD (with wear-leveling). Internally the module (95 x 34 x 15.4 mm) is a SATA SSD with a USB bridge chip.

In June 2010 - Super Talent Technology announced availability of a new range of 2.5" SATA MLC SSDs which use SandForce controllers. Capacities and street prices are as follows:- 60GB $199 , 120GB $349, 240GB $669, 480GB (contact vendor). And the company entered the 2.5" SAS SSD market by announcing imminent shipments of its ShuttleCraft brand - which includes SLC and MLC models with capacities upto 240GB.

In September 2010 - Super Talent launched a range of 1.8" and 2.5" PATA SSDs for industrial temperature operation - and with secure erase.

In January 2011 - Super Talent speeded up its DuraDrive range of 2.5" industrial SSDs with a new SATA model which has sequential R/W speeds of 125MB/s, 110MB/s respectively. As you might guess from the performance figures - Super Talent's "DuraDrives" don't use SandForce's DuraClass technology. But SandForce processors are used in Super Talent's TeraDrive SSDs.

In August 2011 - Super Talent launched the USB 3.0 Express ST2 - with 67MB/s read, 24MB/s write speeds. MSRP for the 8GB ST2 is $20 USD. Measuring 70 x 18 x 8 mm, the ST2 is as small as many USB 2.0 flash drives and won't block adjacent ports.
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the Problem with Write IOPS

the "play it again Sam" syndrome
Editor:- Flash SSD "random write IOPS" are now similar to "read IOPS" in many of the fastest SSDs.

So why are they such a poor predictor of application performance?

And why are users still buying RAM SSDs which cost 9x more than SLC? - even when the IOPS specs look similar.
the problem with flash SSD  write IOPS This article tells you why the specs got faster - but the applications didn't. And why competing SSDs with apparently identical benchmark results can perform completely differently. ...read the article
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What's the best / cheapest - PC SSD?
Editor:- I often get emails from readers which ask the above question.

An article on StorageSearch.com - called What's the best / cheapest PC SSD? - is my attempt to create a simple FAQs page - which answers the question...
click to read this article ...of why I can't answer your question - and follows on to pose some probing questions which you can ask yourself. ...read the article
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SSD Pricing - where does all the money go?
SSDs are among the most expensive computer hardware products you will ever buy.

Understanding the factors which determine SSD costs is often a confusing and irritating process...
Clarifying SSD Pricing - where does all the money go? - click to read the article ...not made any easier when market prices for identical capacity SSDs can vary more than 100x to 1! Why is that? ...read the article

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