Traxdata Ultra-S
The drive we have to desk is from Traxdata a brand that you might not be familiar with but is in fact part of the Ritek Corporation, who are better known for making optical media. Traxdata's SSD Ultra-S Plus range is available in both SLC and MLC favours. The SLC drive claims maximum read speed of 119MB/sec and a maximum write of 99MB/sec and are available in 32GB and 64GB capacities. The MLC drives meanwhile claims slightly slower maximum read speed of 110MB/sec and maximum write of 78MB/sec and are available in 32GB and 64GB capacities.
The differences in stated speeds are quite significant but the differences in price between the two technologies is even greater. The recommended retails price for a 64GB MLC Ultra-S Plus is 175, but the SLC drive will set you back an eye-watering 689.99. For reference, a typical 400GB SATA 5,400rpm 2.5 hard disk will set you back only 75.
Testing
To test the performance of the near 700 drive, we hooked it as a secondary slave drive on as fast a desktop PC system as we could find, in order to avoid bottlenecks. We used a system based on the latest technology a 3.2GHz Intel Core i7, with 4GB of RAM and a standard 5.25in 5,400rpm hard disk ensured that this was the case.
For comparative results we obtained a conventional 2.5in hard disk drive as you would likely find in many laptops, in the form of a Toshiba MK4058GSX a hefty 400GB capacity drive.
Firstly we ran HD Tach, a free software utility that designed to test the performance of I/O devices such as a hard disks. The figures it delivers are an average read speed, an average write speed, a random access time and a maximum burst speed.
In addition we also ran some more 'real world' tests by copying a folder of 22.6GB of data. The data consisted of large, medium and small files and as such presents a really tough test for a hard drive.
Results
First up then, in HD Tach is the Traxdata, which achieved amazing average read speeds of 149.6MB/sec, which actually beats out its maximum claimed read speeds of 119MB/sec. However, the average write speeds were down at 83.8MB/s below its claimed 99MB/s.
Still, this compared very well with the Toshiba 400GB drive, which could only achieve figures of 48.1MB/sec read and 24.4MB/sec write.
Random access was also far superior on the SSD at a mere 0.2ms compared to a relatively tardy 17.5ms on the SSD.
One thing one the HD Tach results reveal on the Traxdata drive is the rather inconsistent performance of some of its I/O read data, which rather than showing a steady line moves up and down in a rapidfire manner. This indicates that the drive controller inside is not as efficient as it could be which create this stop-start effect.
