Plextor unleashes long life and stable SSDs on UK market

PC STORAGE COMPONENT OUTFIT Plextor has excitedly announced that it is about to storm the UK with a range of fast, long life stable solid state disks (SSDs), its first of such units.

These "world class, second generation" - Plextor's words - M2S series SSDs have SATA III 6Gb/sec interfaces and come in a range of three capacities - 64GB, 128GB and 256GB.

Long life, in Plextor's view, is 10 years, which is pretty long, and the firm added that the SSDs' performance will not degrade over time. Although this suggests that suddenly after 10 years the unit will simply cease to be, like the fabled Parson's one horse shay, this is unlikely.

The three SSDs have read speeds of up to 480MB/sec and write speeds of up to 330MB/sec, on the biggest unit, and according to Plextor have performed well in benchmark tests. So well in fact that it claimed that the M2S series are the fastest on the market.

The 2.5-inch internal SSDs also offer instant restore technology, which is designed to improve stability, a 128GB DDR3 cache for improved data transfer speeds, Acronis True Image software for easy data migration, Windows data wiping tools, and a three-year warranty.

Plextor wasn't being modest when it came to put together the announcement on the MS2. It said that the SSDs will storm the UK and catapult the series into market leadership. The inclusion of the server grade Marvell 88SS9174 control chip, which is the industry's most advanced, gives the units an edge, it added.

Aiding their longevity is Plextor's Instant Restore Technology, which it explained will prevent degradation by, um, preventing it. It said the Windows 7 TRIM command writes data into blocks, which it claimed will reduce memory losses.

Upgrades should be easy, too, as the bundled in Acronis True Image software should make a move from HDD to SSD a simple, quick process by cloning a system to a new drive.

The units, and pricing information, will be released in the UK in March. µ