Super Talent Upstream SSD Aimed Squarely At The Consumer – Market Set For Shower Of New Products

Super Talent, making their presence known at this year’s CeBit, has announced the imminent release of their UpStream PCIe SSD.

The LSI Sandforce based card on display will deliver read and write speeds of 1GB/s and 900MB/s respectively and will be offered in capacities of 220GB, 460GB and 960GB.

Super Talent hopes to have the card released in April and we hope to have it reviewed much sooner yet.

This isn’t Super Talent’s first foray into the world of PCIe SSDs, but it is the company’s first product of this type to be aimed squarely at consumers. Indeed, Super Talent alludes to this fact by stating that the drive will be significantly cheaper than their current PCIe based offerings. This is definitely good news, as they will need every potential advantage in the uphill battle against more established offerings such as OCZ’s RevoDrive series, not to mention similar PCIe SSDS from both Mushkin and OWC that we saw at CES in January. Seeing as all of these products are based on similar hardware, the competition is sure to be fierce.

Speaking of hardware, the new UpStream will be built on four LSI Sandforce SF-1200 processors in a RAID 0 configuration, which should be brimming with enough bandwidth to keep the underlying LSI controller well fed. This certainly is one quick quartet, and it seems that Super Talent has massaged enough performance out of it to make their new product sing, though I’m sure we’ll find out what this speed demon is really made of soon enough.

An interesting thing about this announcement is that this will be the third PCIe SSD targeted at consumers, making for a veritable crowd in what is a burgeoning new industry. It’s true, in the next couple of months, the world will no longer be revolving around OCZ’s Revo series, which will have to earn its place if it wishes to remain in high orbit. This is, of course, excellent news for consumers, who will have three major players locking horns in order to land their hard earned loot.

Hopefully, before long, we’ll have even more entries in what is sure to be a swelling market segment in the months and years to come. The only potential roadblock has to be the Windows exclusive nature of these products. This is due to the manufacturers’ use of a proprietary PCIe SSD interface which, in turn, requires custom developed drivers that may not be easy to port to other OS’s. This sticking point may soon be put to rest, however, as the NVM Express group recently released drivers that fully support their open PCIe SSD interface, which goes by the same name (NVMe).

Such a circumstance should open the flood gates when it comes to manufacturers entering this market, as much of the development will have already been taken care of. With any luck, April will mark the beginning of a downpour which will change the landscape of the SSD industry, washing away old notions of what is considered high performance.

Now, isn’t that a ‘refreshing’ thought?