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REPORT ANALYSIS AND FINAL THOUGHTS
I have to admit that my first look at the SuperTalent USB 3.0 Express RC4 flash drive at ceBIT left me a bit confused. After all, we had reviewed the SuperTalent Express RC8 twice previously, once with Windows To Go installed. Performance wasn’t a factor whatsoever. That was when Roman Nahal, SuperTalent Marketing Manager, reminded us that the JMicron controller and bridge were both SATA 3 capable and this drive could reach speeds that surpassed the RC8. Further, using JMicron hardware also enabled SuperTalent to keep prices down.
Microsoft Windows To Go is its own animal. It should be available to the consumer but it is not. Microsoft needs to reconsider this. While a trial version of Windows To Go is provided and also available elsewhere, it is no more than a lure to get the consumer to upgrade to Windows 8 Enterprise. Having the ability to take your PC environment with you and use it anywhere is amazing. The possibilities that show themselves are limitless. Microsoft needs to include this in Windows 8 consumer edition.
Getting back to the SuperTalent USB3.0 Express RC4 flash drive, we found it to be a high performing and well built device. There has been a great deal of time and effort to get this certified by Microsoft and this has paid off. Stay tuned as we will update this report once the RC4 is available. Until then, we believe the Express RC4 is deserving of the Innovation Award!
Watch For The SuperTalent RC4 Windows To Go Flash Drive at Amazon!
ssd controller makers should start making native usb 3.0 controllers, possibly with single die for all products (just like sandforce does it for consumer and enterprise chips), that way prices would be lower, no need for bridge chips and smaller size (due to missing bridge chip).
no that will cost more cause then you got to do the process together and at the same time. The yield for that will be really really low consider you are packing a lot of things together.
That’s a pretty interesting idea. Given that the physical protocol implementation is insignificantly small compared to the rest of a modern SSD controller, this shouldn’t increase manufacturing cost by much.
Then again – the market for USB SSDs is insignificantly small right now, so there’s really not much point adding to manufacturing costs just for that – even if the cost difference would be just a few cents per unit.
How about testing the speeds through a normal USB 2.0 interface ? I am interested to see if the random 4K read/write speeds are maintained through the older USB 2.0 and not only through USB 3.0. Since this does not support TRIM ( SMART is also not supported ? ) then what drive does support TRIM and SMART through USB interface ? Does the Kingston Datatraveler or the RC8 support it ? How about the upcoming Mushkin Ventura 2281 device ? What about doing a size comparison next to a dummy credit card so we can estimate size. Otherwise, great review sir !
Give us a few days and watch for the update. Tx ahead.
Dunno about this drive, but both the DataTraveler Workspace and the RC8 support SMART, just like any other SandForce based drive. I wouldn’t worry about TRIM, as it is essentially useless in real-life scenarios (and can even REDUCE your performance due to one fucked up quirk of the SATA protocol).
If you want to visualise size, I suggest you look at the USB connector. These are as standard-sized as it gets ;-).