Solidata K8 1920E 2TB SSD Review – Highest Capacity 2.5″ Form Factor SSD To Date

Ever since SSDs were introduced to the retail market back in 07, one of the main complaints has always been capacity.  After all, the first SSD releases were only 32 and 64GB.

The hopes of one day seeing the performance of an SSD coupled with the capacity of a hard drive has grown and, too many, we think our analysis of the new Solidata K8-1920E 2TB SSD might be welcome news.

To say that 2TB SSDs are somewhat of a niche product is a bit of an understatement.  With such capacity,  a performance bump can be expected in comparison to the 500MB/s SSDs of today and the price tag…another given.  No matter how we look at it though, this has got to be the smallest form factor 2TB SSD ever manufactured and that is very encouraging.

SPECIFICATIONS

The Solidata K8-1920E SSD is a SATA 2 SSD and was created specifically for those in need of a high capacity solid state drive.  It lists performance at 230MB/s read and 200MB/s write with up to 6000 IOPS at low 4k random disk access.

On the disk itself, warranty is reflected as two years whereas, we can see it listed at three years on the exterior packaging.  This SSD is a special order item and available today.  Solidata hasn’t committed to an exact price but states that it will be in the range of $5000.

COMPONENTS

The Solidata K8-1920 E SSD is as ‘LSI SandForce Driven’ as it can get and sports four SF-1222 flash storage processors (FSP) on its PCB. Along with this is are 16 Micron MLC NAND flash memory chips (MT29F512G08CUCABH3) on each side of the PCB for a total of 32.

 These memory modules are 64 GB each in capacity for an SSD high total of 2048GB.  As with all LSI SandForce SSDs, a small amount of the memory remains proprietary for over provisioning and firmware needs, 128GB in this case.  Final formatting leaves the user with availability of up to 1788GB of storage.

The Solidata K8-1920E SSD also contains a JMicron JMB393 1-5 port SATA II RAID-5 Controller which acts as a 4 port SATA hub.  If you can imagine, there are actually, 4 x 480GB ‘LSI SandForce’ SSDs being fed through the hub and recognized as a single 1920GB SSD by the system.

About the Author

Les Tokar is a technology nut and Founder of The SSD Review. His early work includes the first consumer SSD review along with MS Vista, Win 7 and SSD Optimization Guides. Les is fortunate to, not only evaluate and provide opinion on consumer and enterprise solid state storage but also, travel the world in search of new technologies and great friendships. Google+