There is a new series of solid state drives on the market, or there will be as soon as Silicon Power gets around to the stage where it ramps up availability.

The new collection of storage devices is called SSD Extreme E25 but, contrary to what people may expect, it is not so “extreme” in terms of performance.

Simply put, the drives in the line lack support for the SATA III interface, or SATA 6.0 Gbps, which means they do not get even close to the 500 GB/s data transfer mark, let alone beyond it.

Nevertheless, they do make the best of the SATA II connection (3.0 Gbps), achieving sequential transfer speed of 278 MB/s under right circumstances.

There are three new drives in total, with capacities of 64 GB, 128 GB and 256 GB, respectively.

All of them feature DDR3 cache memory, so that the read performance and lifetime be extended by as much and for as long as possible.

Additionally, Silicon Power was able to grant them a vibration resistance of 20G peak-to-peak, a shock resistance of 1,500 G and a durability of 10,000 insertions.

Furthermore, the newcomers support the Windows 7 TRIM command, which constantly erases deleted sectors, freeing up the unit and preserving the number of write cycles over time.

In other words, the E25 members, like most self-respecting SSDs these days, don’t suffer from the syndrome of gradually decreasing performance over time.

Finally, the company implemented built-in ECC (error correcting code), which ensures data reliability even at the highest data rate.

As for product lifespan and endurance, a wear-leveling technology has that aspect covered, enough that Silicon Power doesn’t mind offering a 3-year warranty.

Unfortunately, there is no information on prices, so prospective buyers will have to wait until retailers start listing them to know how much their finances will have to suffer in exchange for one of them.

• Friday, February 17th, 2012 • Techno • RSS 2.0