BY NOW WE can establish one thing, SSDs aren’t going to get any slower. PhotoFast might not be the most well-known SSD maker out there, but this Taiwanese company is very popular in the Japanese market. Its latest additions won’t be available until next month and we’d expect there’ll be a pretty high price premium, but such is the case if you want to live on the cutting edgedge.
First up we have the G-Monster PowerDrive-LSI PCI Express SSD which is, as the name suggests, a PCI Express card, more specifically, it has a x8 PCI Express interface. It uses an LSI SAS2108 controller and it has 512MB of DDR2 cache memory. It will be available in 240, 480 and 960GB with read speeds of up to 1400MB/s and write speeds of up to 1500MB/s. This puts it squarely at the top of the PCI Express SSD performance market.
The second product is the G-Monster 3X V1 which is PhotoFast’s first SATA 6Gbps SSD and this one should be available at somewhat more reasonable pricing. It will be available in 64, 128 and 256GB capacities and all three models have 128MB of DDR3 cache memory. The 64GB model offers 370MB/s read speeds and 120MB write speeds, the 128GB betters this with 410MB/s read speeds and 190MB/s write speeds, and finally the 256GB tops out at 430MB/s read speed and 300MB/s write speed.
We were told by PhotoFast that the G-Monster 3X V1 uses the same Marvell controller as Micron/Crucial/Lexar, but that PhotoFast is using a different firmware which enables better performance. The word is mum on pricing, but the new SSDs will launch in Japan in October with other markets to follow.S|A
Lars-Göran Nilsson
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