Mtron SSD MOBI 3000 Series

The Mtron Mobi SSD

The Mobi drive from Mtron is presented in capacities ranging from 16Gb to 128GB. They all have a Sata interface and come in two form factors. 2.5” for laptops and 3.5” for desktop type systems. So where can they be applied in the real world and who is buying them?

IT Managers. One of my corporate clients only use 20GB HDD's for their laptop software image. Most if not all employee data is retained in-house and not transported around on laptops because of the risk of loss of data due to laptop theft. Most of us consultants now are using software as a service and therefore do not require mass storage devices in our laptops.

Your home PC/Laptop buyer who's HDD has failed should consider a solid state drive as a substitute for the HDD once their system has a Sata interface. The PC enthusiast has already adopted SSD knowing only too well they do not want to snooze and loose. PC gamers are spending copious amounts on the latest and greatest GPU's in order to play their games at max res. Yet they too are beginning to understand that in terms of bang for buck, solid state drives are the most shrewd and beneficial upgrade you can purchase for your system today.

Personally I think the Mtron Mobi 2.5” is a best buy option if you are buying for a desktop. I say this because in the likely event you should upgrade your desktop computer in the future, you can always use the 2.5” Mobi in a tired €400 laptop and it will perform like a €1000 one. Brackets are also available to convert 2.5” drives to 3.5” form factor.
Benchmarking SSD's are throwing up different results around the web. Therefore I am not going to present you with yet more results, rather allow you to experience this technology, benchmark it yourself if required but most importantly enjoy it for what it really is. The Mtron drives should carry a speed warning. They are fast!

Buying and owning an Mtron Mobi SSD.

This can be a difficult one to capture in words and perhaps video would be a further testament to their performance values. However I will try and explain if I have not done so already, what you might expect by owning an Mtron Mobi. Firstly they are well packaged. And first impressions last. Secondly they are appealing to the eye and for custom PC builders they are a joy to install. Thirdly they perform better than any HDD can. Fourthly, they offer a three year warranty and are backed up by distributors and partners worldwide. Peace of mind. Fifth, they are cheaper than DDR ram per GB yet offer far more uses than RAM itself. Sixth. They make installing programs a breeze and boot-up times are cut by half. Every command you send to your OS is responded to immediately by the Mtron. Performance.

Figure 1

Screen shot of the Mtron 32GB Mobi properties after a fresh install of Vista Ultimate Edition 64

Figure 2

Suggested drive setup for desktop users. Mtron Mobi 32GB used for OS install. (C Drive) Local D and E using HDD drives in raid 0 config.

Figure 3

Figure 3 is showing a fresh install of Vista on the Mobi with some essential apps installed such as Open Office, Antivirus software and with the latest Vista updates applied. It behaved just as a traditional HDD did during install. Plugged it into the on-board sata port, bios picked it up and Vista did not complain. No BSOD. And what is even sweeter is keeping my original drives for data or applications not used on a regular basis. Also, with my old HDD's going into a low power state when not in use I am still playing my part in conserving energy.

Ubuntu default install on Mtron 32GB Pro Drive

Figure 4

The install of Ubuntu was seemless and check out how much disk space it uses in relation to Vista on dev/sdb1. Ubuntu residing on dev/sda1 with plenty of applications to keep you busy using only 7% of disk space. Very nice!

The Mtron Mobi is rated at 100MB/s read speed. Beneath, figure 5 shows the Mtron mobi at 117.2MB/s using a powerful host bus adapter such as an Areca 1220.

Figure 5

Conclusion

When I began my career in IT, the internet was a place where by when you searched for a solution to a problem or an answer to a question you generally found it on the first hit. However since then the internet has become less a tool for IT professionals and more of a playground for social networking. Even with the power of search engines its hard to find the answer you really need. If you are an IT consultant are you going to advise your customers from comments you've read in a forum? I think not. They are playgrounds and nothing more.

For the past 12 months I have been establishing myself as an IT business owner. I was getting tired of the same old boring performance coming from PC and Laptop systems. I wanted something new,, something fresh, something to encourage me to keep on going in an IT world that has become monotonous and sometimes boring. My first goal was to find at least one piece of hardware to offer my clients. During this time I built my own custom PC using all the latest in hardware the market place had to offer. Spending thousands of euro's on quad core processors, high end graphic cards , even water cooling my PC.

Today, I have replaced all that hardware with one little piece of magic. An Mtron solid state drive. I feel good about offering this real world solution to my customers. Its a product that has restored my faith in IT. It has inspired me to keep on going. I have selected Mtron as my product and SSDisk as my supplier, simply because Mtron are a pure SSD manufacturer and like SSDisk are as passionate about IT as I am. It can only be good for the world of Information Technology. And who knows, perhaps in 10 years time a new generation of IT whizz kids and guru's out there will report back and say that they have found some other hardware components to swear at and not solid state drives.:-)

Origins of this review writer

My first computer was a Commodore 64. It did not have an internal hard drive. Instead it used an 8-bit MOS Technology 6510 processor. The purpose of the processor was to bank switch the machines ROM in and out of the processor address space and to operate the datasette tape recorder or an optional extra floppy disk which could be classified as its harddrive.By today's standards this method of data I/O was slow and noisy. But at the time of its release the C64 was a resounding success.

Moving on from my childhood years and into the big world, my first IT job came in 1998 with IBM. I was supporting the North American market on IBM's line of desktop and laptop pc's. Following that I worked for a small IT company that built PC clones which involved plenty of hands-on hardware builds. From there I spent some five years moving around different enterprise companies gathering knowledge, skill and experience. In the year 2003 I settled in a university for some 2 and a half years whereby part of my role was to Project Manage ghost imaging and support of hundreds of multi-vendor laptops year.
Today, I am writing a review on a subject that I have sworn at more times than I care to remember! A hard disk drive. I can honestly say that during the past 10 years of trouble shooting and diagnosing hardware faults the HDD has been the one component over all other hardware components in modern day computers to be the device that failed the most often. So I am saying to myself, great just what I need, another HDD! But wait, this one is different. Its called Solid State Drive, SSD being its acronym. Let me just take the two names and decipher them a little.

HDD and SSD defined

The term Hard Disk is known as a rigid magnetic disk fixed within a disk drive and used for storing computer data. It is generally regarded as the replacement for the Floppy disk since the evolution of personal computer systems really exploded in the early eighties. The HDD's spindle system relies on air pressure inside the enclosure to support the heads at their proper flying height while the disk rotates. An HDD requires a certain range of air pressures in order to operate properly. If the air pressure is too low, then there is not enough lift for the flying head, so the head gets too close to the disk, and there is a risk of head crashes and data loss.

Most HDDs prevent power interruptions from shutting the drive down with its heads landing in the data zone by either moving the heads to a landing zone or unloading (i.e., load/unload) the heads. A landing zone is an area of the platter usually near its inner diameter (ID), where no data is stored. This area is called the Contact Start/Stop (CSS) zone. Disks are designed such that either a spring or, more recently, rotational inertia in the platters is used to park the heads in the case of unexpected power loss. In this case, the spindle motor temporarily acts as a generator, providing power to the actuator. Normal use eventually can lead to a breakdown in this inherently fragile device. Ok, so were used to them by now and we are comfortable working with them knowing that even if they fail there is a good chance we can recover the data. They come in all different capacities and speeds and sizes and compatible with most if not all interfaces found in desktop laptop and server computers. Do we really need a HDD replacement?

HDD's Replacement

In 1978 StorageTek developed the first SSD. (quoted from wikipedia) The term Solid State is designating or pertaining to electronic devices, as transistors or crystals, that can control current without the use of moving parts, heated filaments, or vacuum gaps. The original usage of the term solid-state (from solid-state physics) refers to the use of semiconductor devices rather than electron tubes.

In layman's terms, its basically a high capacity USB disk that you plug into your computers Sata interface which allows for greater data bandwidth and breathtakingly quick 0.1ms access times. In my view the release of the USB pen drive is one of the all time best “cannot work without” storage devices of our generation. I cannot see why solid state drives are going to be any different especially when power over E-Sata is imminent. They are fast, I can live with that. Cool, well if it needs to be. Quite, there is nothing I will miss about current HDD's noise levels.
Whilst all the other components in your computer have gotten bigger, louder and in general require more power, solid state drives have leaped frogged all those devices and presented most if not all other computer component manufacturers their biggest challenge to date. To create devices that consume less energy, emit no heat and generally boost a systems performance far greater than any other purchase the Enthusiast, the IT manager or the home PC/Laptop buyer in the market place today needs and wants.

Many great thanks to our Partner Réalta Business Solutions (Réalta's Mtron E-shop).