Specifications, Pricing and Availability

The SuperSSpeed S301 Hyper SLC SSD isn't on the market just yet, but as you'll see today, SuperSSpeed isn't far away from a retail unit. Two models are slated for production and they vary by capacity, 60GB and the model were looking at today, 120GB.

Anytime we start talking about SLC the first thing that comes to mind is price. Just days ago we spoke with the CEO of SuperSSpeed and were informed these units should cost at e-tail around two times the price of a comparable SF-2281/MLC drive. With MLC drives hitting the $1 per GB mark that could mean as low as $2 per GB, but even if we're talking about $3 per GB, we'd be happy.

The second thought SLC rushes to our head is performance - lots and lots of performance. To date, very few SF-2281 drives with SLC flash tests made it to the public domain. Since we caught the Chinese preview two months ago, we already know the S301 delivers massive performance. Per the spec sheet the claimed performance numbers don't look much better than your standard off the shelf 2281/MLC drive, but as we've shown before with synchronous vs. asynchronous flash, the spec sheets never tell the whole story. We'll show you that again today, but I'll save the spicy details for the benchmark results.

At this point, you have to be wondering who is this SuperSSpeed and where did they come from. I took a 24 hour flight to Computex to find out, but the truth is, I didn't even need to leave my living room. SuperSSpeed has an office in California where they negotiate to manufacturer SSDs for companies that sell them under their own flag. In Hong Kong, SuperSSpeed is known for their NAND flash sales to other manufacturers who build SSDs. Although the name is new to many, SuperSSpeed and their parent company have been deep in the SSD game for a long time.

Let's take a look at their flagship product.