DV Nation MTRON Pro 3.5-Inch 64GB SATA SSD

Susie Ochs — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 13:35:09 -0500

Need a Lamborghini inside your G5 or Mac Pro?

Say you drive your three beautiful children to school every day, and you’re trying to think of a way to get this task done more quickly. You could go for a faster car—say, a Lamborghini. That could get your kids to school in no time—except that you can no longer fit said children into the car, seeing as how it’s a Lamborghini.

We were struck by a similar quandary when testing the MTRON Pro 64GB SATA solid-state drive (SSD). DV Nation sent us two of the nearly $2,000 beauties to review, and we added them to a Mac Pro as the second and third drives, combining them into a 118.57GB striped RAID. And as you can imagine, it screamed. Using Xbench (free, www.xbench.com), we got Sequential Uncached Read speeds of 189.86MB/sec and Sequential Uncached Write speeds of 137.75MB/sec. The Mac Pro’s stock 500GB, 7,200-rpm hard drive (HDD) clocked speeds of 72.18MB/sec in the read test, and 72.11MB/sec in the write test.

So installing these drives will let you achieve really fast transfer times—it took us 15 minutes to transfer a 1.58GB folder (containing a variety of files of different sizes) from the Mac Pro’s standard hard drive to a USB 2.0 flash drive, but only 25.91 seconds to transfer the same folder from the HDD to the SSD RAID. But the $1,959 question is: Who, besides Bruce Wayne, should buy these drives? The logical benefit to an SSD is to transfer files quickly, but files that normally transfer slowly tend to also be huge (high-def video or uncompressed audio, for example). Who needs speed but not capacity? It’s the ol’driving-carpool-in-a-Lamborghini problem. Although since the Mac Pro fits four drives total, we can have our SSD RAID on the side and still keep the 500GB HDD for the main drive.

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DV Nation MTRON Pro 3.5-Inch 64GB SATA SSD