Solid State Drives

Solid State Disks (SSDs) are the latest alternative to conventional hard disk drive storage bringing faster performance and greater reliability coupled with power efficiency and low weight. Memory Express is pleased to bring you the below range of SSDs which bring the speed and power benefits of SSDs to businesses and consumers at an affordable price.

We supply a range of form factors for SSDs at present including low cost units from Intergral and Intel for laptops and desktops connecting using the SATA interface (these just drop in place of your existing hard disk drive), and PCI Express units tailored to both desktop and server machines delivering amazing throughput.

Integral SATA SSD

At present, the SSD from Integral has a wide range of options by capacity, including 32GB, 64GB, 128GB and 256GB. They support any device compatible with 2.5-inch hard drives, including industrial PCs, desktops, laptops, servers and STBs. Enhance your battery life, get faster boot times and enjoy an unprecedented high-speed computing experience.

• Fully compatible with devices and OS that support the SATA standard
• Non-volatile Flash Memory for outstanding data retention
• Wear-leveling algorithm : Bad block management algorithm
• Error Correction Code : ECC 10bytes in 512 data bytes
• Supports up to Ultra DMA Mode 6
• Shock resistant
• Noiseless and stable

Integral SSD

Intel SATA SSD

The Fast Hard Drive Alternative

Intel® Solid-State Drives (Intel® SSDs) are tested and validated on the latest Intel®-based laptop and desktop platforms, and offer breakthrough storage performance to let you launch PC applications faster, and more easily. Boost your PC to the next level in performance, and worry-free reliability with an Intel® SSD.

Rugged & Reliable

Built to withstand bumps and shocks without losing precious data, Intel® SSDs are your dependable, high-performance alternative to traditional hard drives. With no noise, no moving parts, and no drama, you can trust your personal content to the beautiful silence of a rugged, reliable, and energy-efficient Intel® SSD.

A Better Choice

• Faster boot-up, application launch, and re-loading
• Up to 66-percent faster PC responsiveness compared to hard drives¹
• No moving parts for higher reliability and longer life span
• Rugged enough to withstand bumps and shocks without losing precious data
• Lower power consumption extends battery life so you stay mobile longer

Server PCIe SSD

We can supply a wide range of very high end server Solid State Disks for virtualisation and database applications. We strongly recommend talking to one of our experienced sales staff about your requirements in this area on 020 8453 9700.

OCZ PCIe SSD

Designed with power users and multimedia designers in mind, the RevoDrive 3 X2 SSD Series provides the ultimate storage solution for intensive workstation applications with maximum performance and a sophisticated feature-set based on OCZ's proprietary Virtualized Controller Architecture 2.0 (VCA) technology and OCZ's SuperScale storage accelerator.

The RevoDrive 3 X2 provides unique benefits to users by incorporating features from the VCA 2.0 flash virtualization software that allow certain direct memory access (DMA) and data management functions. Included in this feature-set are OCZ’s exclusive command queuing and queue balancing algorithms, which can be handled by the onboard processing core for higher performance and reduced burden on the host resources. VCA 2.0 is also the only virtualization layer in the industry with TRIM and SCSI unmap support to enhance sustained performance and provide greater endurance by significantly reducing the overhead associated with garbage collection. Furthermore, VCA also offers consolidated SMART support and provides system administrators with advanced features for monitoring, analyzing, and reporting device attributes.

With an all-new architecture, the RevoDrive 3 X2 shatters its predecessor’s performance record and is faster than comparable solutions ten times the price. Eliminating the SATA bottleneck,the PCIe-based Revo3 X 2 delivers ground-breaking 1.5GB/s of bandwidth and 230,000 4KB random write IOPS making this an ideal SSD for high performance applications,multimedia,and workstations. Additionally, the Revo3 X2 offers up to an ample 960GB capacity for users in media development and management looking for more storage room.

Available in 240GB, 480GB and 960GB capacities, the OCZ RevoDrive 3 X2 provides exceptional performance and reliability features for data warehousing, applications, multimedia files, and operating systems with the superior durability, and energy efficiency of SSDs.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. What is wear levelling?
2. How fast are SSDs?
3. Aren't SSDs unreliable?
4. What capacities are available
5. What is the difference betweeen SLC and MLC?

SSD FAQs

What is wear levelling?

Wear levelling is a technique used by many high-quality flash devices to even out usage of different areas of the disk to prevent premature failure through the overuse of certain blocks used for often changed system files. Our range of SSDs support the latest wear levelling techniques including log-structuring, advanced cacheing and block marking through the use of a high-speed flash abstraction layer; this allows the device to emulate a conventional disk in a seamless fashion whilst protecting your data with wear levelling.

How fast are SSDs?

Our range of Integral MLC Solid State Disks can read sequential data at 170MB/s and write at 100MB/s. If we compare this to Seagate's latest 5400.6 500GB 2.5" disk (a direct equivalent) is measured by Toms Hardware at 83.2 MB/s, we can see that SSDs can really deliver a speed boost. Even their top-end 146GB 15kRPM 2.5" drive is only shown as delivering 160MB/s.

Aren't SSDs unreliable?

Although individual flash cells have a lower lifespan than tracks on a disk, use of advanced techniques such as wear levelling and SSDs' invulnerability to many shocks that would destroy a hard disk mean that reliability is similar or better than most disks:

What capacities are available

Currently capacities of 32GB, 64GB, 128GB and 256GB are readily available and we would expect higher capacities to come to market as the price of flash drops.

What is the difference betweeen SLC and MLC?

We all think of computers as operating in binary - ones and noughts, ons and offs. With the advent of low cost MLC (multilayer) technology, this is not necessarily true any more!

In order to increase the storage density of flash devices, MLC was developed. By giving each cell 4 possible values instead of two, two bits of data can be stored instead of one, doubling capacity and halfing cost. MLC does however have the downside of being slightly slower and slightly less resilient than tradional (SLC/single-layered) technology.

Most of our current flash range are MLC devices but we do keep stock of a range of SLC drives for mission critical applications.