Super Talent MasterDrive OX 64GB Alaska

The MasterDrive OX 64GB isn't a strange morph of two popular SEGA consoles. Instead, it's one of three very similar MLC NAND flash-based SSDs in the Labs test. Super Talent claims that the MasterDrive OX 64GB can read at 150MB/sec and write at 100MB/sec. As it uses MLC NAND flash and a JMicron memory controller, you'd be right in suspecting that you might not see these speeds in the real world.







In HD Tach 3 RW, the MasterDrive OX 64GB performed well in the read test, managing an average speed of 144MB/sec - just 6MB/sec slower than the claimed speed. The write speed, however, is much lower at just 57.8MB/sec, 22.2MB/sec slower than the claimed speed. This resulted in the drive struggling through the GIMP image editing benchmark with a score of 1,376. It fared much better in the multitasking test, though, scoring 1,125, which is the same as the HyperDrive4 RAM drive's score, and it was the fourth fastest of all the flash drives. Crysis level loading was a similar story; the MasterDrive OX 64GB loaded the level in 23 seconds. It completed the search test in 13 seconds, which is fast, but nothing spectacular.







It appears that Super Talent is more conservative with its speed ratings than many other companies, but we stand by our suspicion that the OCZ 60GB Core V2, Patriot 64GB Warp and MasterDrive OX 64GB are all the same drive under the hood. Still, as with the other two drives, the MasterDrive OX 64GB has a comparatively low price per gigabyte and its fast read speeds help it to achieve high scores in many tests. The JMicron controller is still an issue, though, as it can bring write-intensive applications to a crawl. However, the MasterDrive OX 64GB is generally faster than a 2.5in hard drive, so it could be a worthwhile upgrade for a laptop.

Author: James Gorbold & Antony Leather

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