14 DAY TRIAL // If there's any area of the semiconductor industry that is moving ahead of the rest, it's that of NAND Flash storage devices. While CPUs and GPUs are still at 22 nm or 28 nm, NAND Flash chips used in SSDs come in 19 nm and 16 nm form. Even 14 nm chips are being produced.
Lite-On has just revealed a series of solid state drives based on 16 nm MLC NAND Flash chips from SK Hynix, where MLC means multi-level cell.
These being internal drives (meaning they go inside desktop cases), they boast the 2.5-inch form factor (thickness of 7 mm).
Lite-On wanted them to be both fast and secure, so it implemented hardware encryption alongside the regular feature set. But we may as well look at the specifications in order.
The specs of the Lite-On Zeta SSD series
Storage-wise, you can select between 128 GB, 256 GB and 512 GB. Or you will be able to select once sales begin. They may already be found in the Greater China region, but other countries will have to wait for a while.
The capacities may not be the greatest, but 512 GB is decent. Also, the smaller SSDs will carry lower prices, which is always a plus.
The performance is a bit tricky though. Between the NAND Flash chips and the Silicon Motion SM2246EN controller, it all goes well on the 512 GB drive. The LPDDR3 controller cache of 128 MB is no joke either.
However, while the 512 GB SSD reached 430 MB/s write speed, and 520 MB/s is the read speed for all three drives, writing performance drops for the other two.
The 256 GB variant scrapes 260 MB/s, while the 128 GB unit is limited to 150 MB/s (not much better than a much more capacious HDD really).
The random 4K read speed is of up to 67,500 IOPS for the 128 GB SSD, 82,500 IOPS for the 256 GB and 83,500 IOPS for the 512 GB. Write is, again, much lower, with 37,500 IOPS, 72,500 IOPS and 80,000 IOPS maximums, respectively.
All in all, the performance parameters are pretty modest as far as solid state drives in general are concerned. On the bright side, TRIM and NCQ features exist, and so does hardware-based 256-bit AES encryption.
Availability and pricing
The Lite-On Zeta solid state drives of 128 GB, 256 GB and 512 GB should be up for sale soon in the Greater China region, for prices still unknown as we said. Other countries might have to wait for a few weeks or months, if they will see them at all.
