Mtron Unveils Faster Solid-State Drives

South Korea's Mtron Co. Ltd. is adding to its line-up of already speedy solid-state disk drives with new models that offer faster reading and writing of data.

The new drives offer a maximum sustained read speed of 120MBps (bytes per second) and a maximum write speed of 90MBps compared to 100MBps and 80MBps respectively on current models, said Ahn Ji-young, a spokesman for the company.

Mtron is unveiling the new models at the IFA trade show in Berlin this week.

The speed jumps are important because they should directly translate to an increase in performance in the system in which they are used. When a computer needs to store or retrieve data there is often a slight delay while the information is transferred to or from the disk. By increasing the speeds the delay is shortened.

SSDs are already fast compared to standard hard-disk drives. The drives use flash memory chips in place of a rotating magnetic disk to store data and that brings a significant performance increase. In previous demonstrations PCs running SSDs have been able to boot Windows in about 20 seconds compared to more than 30 seconds for hard-disk drive-based computers.

Mtron is planning to begin production of the drives in late September or early October. They will be available in 16G byte, 32G byte and 64G byte capacities and in 2.5-inch and 3.5-inch form factors with Serial ATA (SATA) interfaces. The drives are plug-in replacements for existing hard-disk drives.

The company offers three families of product: a basic model for consumer applications, a professional model for server applications and an industrial model for harsh environment and military applications.

Mtron is planning to introduce a higher capacity 128G byte model in the fourth quarter of this year and at about the same time will introduce a 1.8-inch drive, said Ahn. The smaller drive will debut at 32G bytes and a 64G-byte version should be available in early 2008, he said.