Final Thoughts

The MemoRight GT is currently the fastest hard drive I have tested, and when paired for use in RAID 0 the performance gets even better. As with other Solid State Drives, the cost of ownership is going to limit sales, but pro users and those that travel a great deal will ensure that the demand is still available to take up the supply. RAID 0 performance with two drives is terrific, but pro users will need more space and even more speed when working with many large files.

I don't like beating the cost of SSD over the head over and over again, but at this time it is the limiting factor for consumers. While that statement is true, you have to look a little deeper to see why. At this time there are just not enough production facilities making the type of memory used on solid state drives to feed the demand of a low cost drive. If a company announced a truly low cost product, the supply of memory would be eaten away in pre-order sales alone. So, the real reason for the high cost of the drives at this point has to do more with manufacturing than companies looking to make windfall profits.

While the rest of us wait for production to ramp up on the memory, professional users that actually need the speed are able to obtain it. In my own personal and professional computing uses, the most I/O intensive work has come from recording a band in a make shift studio with Logic Audio (before Apple purchased Logic). Fast forward to modern day home studio users and their need for very fast I/O with very low latency due to incorporating digital samples with live acoustics running at the same time; for many of these users SSD is almost a necessity.

Business travelers also benefit from the low voltages required to run solid-state drives. This is further amplified by the non-existent heat produced by the drives, making the notebook run cooler and resulting in the reduction of active cooling needed. Our samples provided by DVNation.com were once again 32GB drives, so we were unable to test battery life properly with Bapco's MobileMark. However, our next sample will allow us to finally get a good idea of how long battery life is extended when using SSD.

I did get a chance to load Windows on the MemoRight GT on my Lenovo T61, and found that the system ran much better. When unplugged from outside power, the processor runs at a slower speed and this usually leads to a small amount of time in system reaction. This was completely eliminated with the MemoRight GT and my notebook performance was increased by a large margin. Since I have switched over to using my notebook for almost all of my computing tasks, the additional performance made the system feel like a much faster model simply by upgrading the drive.