INTRODUCTION

   With solid state drives becoming more and more mainstream by the day due to their continuous price drops it's no surprise that most notebook manufacturers and system integrators now even offer budget systems with at least one installed in them. The recent announcement of 4TB enterprise class SAS SSDs by SanDisk may not seem like it to most people but it’s actually great news since it finally marks the start of very high capacity models. Of course no one expects prices of Enterprise SAS SSDs to compete with those of normal HDDs (that applies to even plain SATA 4TB SSDs) but unless something new emerges in the storage industry in time they should come really close. What's somewhat disturbing however is that there are many people out there who still have no idea of what SSDs are or even that they exist so although i think manufacturers should focus on the reasons behind that i really hope it changes really soon. Today on our test bench we have an Enterprise oriented model that hasn't really gotten the attention it should since its launch roughly half a year ago the SSDNow E50 100G Solid State Drive by Kingston.

   Kingston Technology Company, Inc. is the world’s largest independent manufacturer of memory products. Kingston designs, manufactures and distributes memory products for desktops, laptops, servers, printers, and Flash memory products for PDAs, mobile phones, digital cameras, and MP3 players. Through its global network of subsidiaries and affiliates, Kingston has manufacturing facilities in California, Taiwan, China and sales representatives in the United States, Canada, Europe, Russia, Turkey, Ukraine, Australia, New Zealand, India, Taiwan, China, and Latin America.

   Now the reason i said that the E50 hasn't gotten the attention it deserves is because of its specifications sheet which is nothing short of impressive at least for a Enterprise class SSD model priced almost exactly (and in some cases even less) as normal SSDs. So the SSDNow E50 features the second generation top of the line SF-2581 controller by LSI SandForce along with 19nm MLC NAND flash modules by Toshiba. We have seen many SSDs wearing the SF-2281 controller by LSI Sandforce but the SF-2581 (and the SF-2582) aims much higher since it packs some very useful features especially crucial for enterprise users the most important of which are the 10 million hour MTBF (for the controller not the entire drive) and the ability to make use of secondary tantalum capacitors to provide protection for your data in case of a power loss. Other features include AES-128bit data encryption, DuraWrite (intelligent block management, wear leveling, read disturb management and garbage collection), RAISE (intelligent data retention optimization and best-in-class ECC protection for longest data retention and drive life), power/performance balancing and thermal threshold management. When it comes to read/write performance Kingston claims the SSDNow E50 100G can do 550 & 530MB/s and since everything else sounds great this is what we need to check.