Memoright FTM-25 Series 240GB SSD Review

This review is going to examine the Memoright FTM-25 Series 240GB SSD and I have to say right off that this one just a bit special to me. My first review was in August of 2007 where I was fortunate to publish one of the earliest opinions of consumer SSD technology.

A short time after that hit the web a young company from Taiwan by the name of Memoright contacted me. They were curious as to whether I might take a look at their new slc line of SSDs and provide an honest opinion which I happily agreed to.

Within a few days, they had sent two SSDs out for testing and I quickly put them to the test but the thing that astonished me most was the retail price of solid state drives back then.

This company had shipped product,valued at $3500, to a total stranger as a result of a few e-mails and a simple internet article that they supported. Although we haven’t heard much of Memoright on the retail side of things, we are happy to report that they are alive and well being led by a very ambitious Alex Kuo who confidently notes that Memoright is predicted to show a 100% revenue increase in 2011 alone.

OVERVIEW

The Memoright FTM-25 Series of SSDs are a new release geared towards business and enterprise applications. This SSD just may, however, become a must have for those finicky consumers who demand the best in their systems. This drive is SATA II and available in capacities ranging from 60GB to 400GB thanks to their effective use of 29nm NAND flash memory chips. Performance peaks at 280MB/s read and 270MB/s write with 50000/30000 IOPS and the drive carries a 3 year warranty.

Our thanks go out to to Charles Chou and Memoright for allowing The SSD Review this exclusive opportunity to sample their product.

PHYSICAL CHARACTERISTICS

The exterior packaging is that of a compact cardboard box with the distinctive Memoright green and blue color scheme and description of its features on the back. We can see right off that this may become a retail release as relevant applications include that of desktop PCs and laptops.

The casing of the drive itself is a very well construct brushed metal finish with screws ensuring the circuit board is protected and…well… originally there was a security sticker over one of the screws which we would explain voids the warranty once removed.

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The face of the circuit board itself displays the Sandforce SF-1222 processor and we are going to bet the firmware proves to be updated as we are seeing in our testing of other recent Sandforce equipped SSDs. Our recent review of the Renice M-PCIe SSD with the same processor blew the socks off of every product that we had tested with a suite score of over 44000 points. This was followed by the Super Talent FT2 review which, coincidentally, contains the SF-1500 processor so we now have an excellent test bed for comparison of the drives.

The quiet rumour on the street is that SandForce has released a new firmware that brings the SF-1200 series right in line with the ability of the SF-1500 controller. It is one that is impossible to get confirmed verbally but test results are starting to show that both are performing equally well. This also just happens to fall in line with the introduction and expected release of SandForces new SF-2000 line of processors in Q1 2011.

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This is also an excellent opportunity to see that the SSD contains 16 pieces of Micron 29NM NAND, each piece accomodating 16Gb of storage for a total of 256GB. The drive only provides 240GB to the user as the rest is proprietary to the firmwares use for over provisioning and other behind the scenes activities.

Pg1 – Overview and Physical Description

Pg2 – Testing Protocol And Initial Tests

Pg 3 – BenchMarks

Pg4 – Vantage Testing and Conclusions