Introduction

It is no secret that solid state drives are very profitable and every company is looking to take a slice of the green pie. The latest addition to the growing number of companies offering SSDs is Zalman. Zalman, a company best known for their high performance CPU heat sink coolers and high quality PC cases, might seem to be late for the party, but their entry comes at a time when the winners have been established and little chance of faultier was possible.

Zalman's highest performing SSD, the N Series, is controlled by a SandForce SF-1200 controller, the highest performance SATA 3G controller on the market and our pick for any SSD with less than 256GB capacity. The SF-1200 is a beast of a controller and it is aging very gracefully. New firmware from SandForce and their partners has given the highest rated even better performance; something we will look at today since the new N Series uses the latest firmware offering.

There are several companies offering SandForce consumer drives and with competition comes very low prices or extravagant accessory packages. Zalman has chosen to compete with the low cost offerings on the market and eliminated the accessory package. Today we will look at the performance of the new Zalman N Series SandForce controlled SSD and see how it compares in performance and price to the competition.