Introduction

For the past couple of months I have been testing Solid State Drives almost non-stop with a sample in my lab constantly. In that time I have learned three things; solid state is the future, solid state is fast and for solid state to really take off the price needs to come down.

This last month has been filled with press releases from companies promising high performance solid state technology at prices that are up to 30% less than any of the drives we have previously tested. The cost reduction has to do with memory manufacturers starting to ramp up production of the memory chips used, and according to DRAMeXchange, prices are down 26% for many MLC memory sizes popular for use in SSDs.

Super Talent is the first to send us their latest MLC Solid State Drive that takes advantage of the new lower contract prices on memory. The MasterDrive MX Line is available in sizes ranging from 8 to 120GB. Our sample 60GB model is available at Newegg right now for less than 400 U.S. Dollars. Let's have a look and see how these new low cost Solid State Drives perform against our trusty Western Digital Raptor 150GB and Samsung's SATA II SLC drive.