SSD technology has seen some massive leaps since it was introduced in the mass consumer market a few years back. Throughout that time we have seen faster speeds, newer interfaces, and smaller designs. One drawback that has remained constant throughout is size, and it still is the major issue today for those looking to make the jump from mechanical to flash storage. Solidata Technology enters the fray with their K8 1920E enterprise/military-grade level 2TB MLC solid-state drive for roughly $5000. In terms of adding four 512GB SSDs together, it is quite steep considering it is just one single drive. That being said it is made for the industrial market in mind, but we will test and see if it is worth consumer recognition. SPECIFICATIONS AND PACKAGING The drive itself is not bigger than a normal 2.5" SSD as one may think due to its larger size. The low-profile footprint along with the shock, vibration, and security protection show that it is meant for a high-level industrial/enterprise environment. The key fact to note is speeds - notably the 250MBps read and write speeds. As the interface shows, unfortunately the drive is SATA 2.0, not 3.0, hence has fully-saturated 3Gbps speeds instead of the 6Gbps nowadays. The three-year warranty is also on the low side when considering the market the SSD is aimed towards. The Solidata K8 1920E comes in a simple white and blue coloured box. The front shows the drive, while the back has company information along with a QR-code that takes you to the product site to provide information and specifications lacking on the packaging: Contents include the SSD wrapped in an anti-static bag, along with a 2.5" to 3.5" adapter and its accompanying screws: EXTERIOR COMPONENTS AND A CLOSER LOOK The K8 1920E 2TB has a sleek shiny silver enclosure. The front is clear aside from the branding, while the back has a few features and specifications stickered-on. Oddly the warranty is listed as two-year instead of the three-year in the specs. The IOPS and sequential read/write speeds are also lower than reported. INTERIOR COMPONENTS Opening the SSD simply required unscrewing and nothing special was needed. Interestingly the inside of the frame has a flame-retardant fabric strip to withstand industrial damages: Focusing on the green PCB we immediately see the four SandForce SF-1222TA3-SBH Flash Storage Processors. These chips in particular are SATA 2.6 compliant, with speeds up to 260MB/s read/write. Each processor supports up to 512GB MLC NAND memory, hence the four are required for the complete 2TB pool. Speaking of MLC NAND, the modules used are from Micron (MT29F512G08CUCABH3), with 32 total chips of which there are 16 on the front and back respectively. Each package is 64GB in size for a grand total of 2048GB. TEST BENCH AND PROTOCOL Our system configuration for testing the Solidata K8 1920E 2TB wIS be Intel-based: The benchmark suites used for testing will most likely already be on your system, as essentially all of this software is available online. As such, it allows direct correlation between reader and reviewer due to the ease of accessibility, and hence results can simply be compared between different test systems and configurations. Real-world benchmarks included a batch of files and folders with capacities of 250MB, 500MB, and 1000MB respectively to test file transfer performance. Windows 7 boot times were also monitored and timed starting from the OS load screen to Steam's login window (the last program to load). For consistency, each test was run three times for the DRAM cache to kick in, utilizing AHCI as the storage mode. The average of all three was taken as the final result. Note that once installed, the total size shows up as roughly 1788GB. CRYSTAL DISKINFO X64 Crystal DiskInfo allows monitoring the health of all the physical hard disks, may they be internal, or external. Using their own built-in SMART tools plus any temperature-monitoring tools that may be present in the computer or hard drive, CDI gives accurate health readings of your drives and gives warnings in case of imminent drive malfunction. Unfortunately there is very little information displayed about the drive, which is no fault of the program. One fact to take away is that the TRIM command is not highlighted, meaning there is no garbage collection - not a good sign for longevity and performance. ATTO DISK BENCHMARK VER. 2.47 The ATTO Disk Benchmark measures storage performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. ATTO is rated to test RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives. As we will see with upcoming benchmarks, Solidata's advertised speeds are spot on of the quoted 250MB/s read and 250MB/s write, which almost hit the SATA 2.0/2.6 limit of 260MB/s read/write. CRYSTAL DISKMARK X64 Crystal DiskMark is a disk benchmark utility that measures performance for sequential and random reads/writes of various sizes for any storage device. It is useful for comparing the speed of both portable and local storage devices. With the two different tests run in CDM, both 0-fill and random access benchmarks revealed separate results. Again you will not find staggering numbers, but that is not what Solidata is aiming for. AS-SSD VER. 1.7 AS-SSD Benchmark is a lightweight application that is designed to provide a simple means of evaluating the performance of SSDs. The tool contains six synthetic and three copy tests. The synthetic tests to determine the sequential and random read and write performance of the SSD. These tests are carried out without use of the operating system caches.The program comes with a copy benchmark as well as one for compression and it can also be used with hard disk drives. Once again we see virtually the same results as those produced by CDM. Looks like Solidata was right when they listed 6k IOPS read/3.5k IOPS write for the K8 1920E. Note that the specifications saying 8k/8k IOPS for 4k random access times are incorrect, and we are thus going with those stickered onto the SSD. ANVIL STORAGE UTILITIES VER. 1.0.51 RC6 Anvil Storage Utilities is a powerful tool that is designed in to provide a simple means of assessing the read and write performance of a solid state drive. To wrap-up speed testing, ASU shows consistent results for both 0-fill and incompressible data. HD TUNE PRO VER. 5.00 HD Tune Pro supports performing secure erasure, running comprehensive error scans (including a review of a disk’s SMART health status), displaying read, write, and spin-up times and recording benchmark performance metrics. As an added bonus we have the HD Tune Pro run a plethora of benchmarks and extra tests. We see higher reads and writes here, and since ATTO tends to do the same, the results are confirmed for both benchmarking tools. Note again we see no TRIM active, which is further confirmed by TRIM Check Ver. 0.4: PCMARK VANTAGE X64 PCMark Vantage measures PCMarks as an indicator of performance across a variety of common tasks such as viewing and editing photos, video, music and other media, gaming, communications, productivity and security. A score of ~35000 for PCM is decent for SATA 3Gbps speeds, but is certainly nowhere near the upper echelon of scores we have seen from newer SATA 6Gbps SSDs. To be fair, those drives have not been 2TB in space either. REAL-WORLD BENCHMARKS Moving on to the real-world tests, we see that the SF-1222TA3-SBH chips are more than capable of boosting overall productivity. The file copy results are pretty quick for duplicating and moving around data: Load times on a clean system are not bad either: Keep in mind that Steam is in auto-login mode, so we can expect speeds to be a tad slower. FINAL THOUGHTS AND CONCLUSION The Solidata K8 1920E 2TB SSD is the perfect example of how far SSDs have come these past few years in addressing the space versus cost ratio. Sure the drive is only SATA 2.0, and thus only able to hit the 250MB/s read/write maximum; but the fact that all of that space is on one single PCB with four FPUs allowing for a standard 2.5" frame speaks highly of its innovative design. Being the first 2TB SSD of its kind, there is not much to compare the K8 1920E with. It performed extremely well, just as we would expect of any SATA 2.0 drive in 2013, but its main downside again is the lack of SATA 3.0 speeds. At an extremely steep $5000, it is tough to swallow an SSD offering anything less than market standards of today. With that being said, the K8 1920E is market more as an industrial/enterprise drive first and foremost, and hence fits that calling perfectly. For the price, consumers have better options, such as purchasing ten high-end 512GB SATA 3.0 SSDs and configuring them in RAID 5 for the same $5000 price. If you are looking for a single high-capacity SSD without having to go through any other hassles or headaches however, the Solidata K8 1920E 2TB SSD has you covered.
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Wowwww, nice job!
Anyone who is expecting it now?
good