And indeed this issue was borne out in our real-world copy tests. The 22.6GB of data could be read from the Traxdata drive in 12 minutes 35 seconds, but this actually tool less time on the Toshiba 10 minutes 31 seconds.
In writing however, the SSD came out on top, taking only 4 minutes and 1 seconds compared to 7 minutes and 52 seconds.
So all in all, it's a bit of a mixed bag for the Traxdata. It's certainly theoretically faster, but in our real world tests, it actually proved to be slower than a regular fixed disc for writing, which is a problem considering the Toshiba costs around 75 and the Traxdata SSD, around 600.
We'd put that primarily down to that tricky memory controller and that for single large file transfer the sustained transfer speeds could be maintained for longer, enabling the disk to perform better overall.
How the drive performs then depends very much on the tasks your using it for. In the right situation, you might well see the full performance benefits that the HD Tach tests reveal but at other times, you simply won't.
What it indicates is that even if money is no object there's no point just sticking in an SSD drive and expecting to get the benefits you need to test in your own labs with your workloads to see how it might deliver.
Clearly though SSD drive technology continues to develop and we'd be very interested to see where the technology is a year from now.
Verdict
Traxdata's Ultra-S is typical of SLC based SSDs by offering low capacity at a very high price. On the up side the theoretical performance is very high but extracting it in the real world proved difficult. For business use, testing in your own environment and with your own workloads would be recommended before making a heavy investment.
Technology: Single Layer Cell Solid-State Disk Capacity: 64GB Form factor: 2.5in Connection: SATA
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