Product Description

WE HAVE FOR SALE THE ONE AND ONLY ORIGINAL MTRON MOBI 1.8" 32GB PATA (IDE) ZIF SOLID STATE DISK SSD. THIS SOLID STATE DISK HAS A "ZIF" CONNECTION. ZIF = ZERO INSERTION FORCE. GREAT FOR UMPC, SUB-NOTEBOOKS, TABLETS, AND MOBILE DEVICES THAT REQUIRE A 1.8" SSD ZIF CONNECTION. THIS SOLID STATE DISK IS 100% COMPATIBLE WITH THE MACBOOK AIR!!! THE CURRENT SSD OPTION FOR THE MACBOOK AIR IS VERY SLOW COMPARED TO THE SPEED OF THIS MTRON 1.8" SSD. 100MB PER SECOND SUSTAINED READ!! 100MB PER SECOND SUSTAINED WRITE!! 0.1 MILLISECONDS RANDOM ACCESS TIME!! 3 YEAR WARRANTY! BRAND NEW FACTORY SEALED BOX! THIS SOLID STATE DISK IS ALSO 100% COMPATIBLE WITH ALL TABLET PC'S ULTRA MOBILE PC's (UMPC) INCLUDING THE FOLLOWING: OQO MODEL 02, SONY VAIO UX SERIES (ALL MODELS), FUJITSU LIFEBOOK TABLETS, DELL TABLET PC'S, DELL LATITUDE SERIES SUB-NOTEBOOKS, LENOVO THINKPAD TABLET PC'S, SAMSUNG Q1 UMPC, MOTION TABLET PC's, AND MORE!

Product Details

• Brand: Mtron
• Model: MSD-PATA3018-032-ZIF2
• Hard Disk: 32GB

Features

• Original Mtron Brand Ssd
• 1.8-Inch Form Factor, 32Gb Capacity
• Pata Ide Zif Interface
• 3 Years Manufacturers Warranty
• 100 Mb/S Read & 100 Mb/S Write Speeds, 0.1 Milliseconds Access Time. This Ssd Is Fast!!

Customer Reviews

Good for sequential reads, bad for random writes
I bought one of these to replace the HD in my Fujitsu P7120 laptop. Overall it is working reliably but with somewhat less performance benefits than I had hoped.

I used a third-party PATA to ZIF adapter to connect the drive into my laptop. Windows recognized it immediately, with no issues.

The time to load Windows (from when the BIOS first reads the disk until the login screen appears) has improved by about 20%.

Application startup also seems noticeably faster. Because of Windows caching, it's hard to be precise, but it seems like at least 20% faster for Adobe Illustrator and more for Word.

According to MTRON's specification for this drive, for small operations it should deliver up to 25000 sequential reads/sec, or 48000 sequential writes/sec, or 16000 random reads/sec, but only 60 (sixty) random writes/sec. The sequential read and write numbers are extremely good. Alas, the very poor random write numbers are typical for a flash SSD.

So the performance impact will depend greatly on the kind of disk I/O you are doing. The high read rates should benefit system boot and application launching. But the low random write rates will tend to slow down things like copying lots of small files. Unfortunately Windows also has a nasty tendency to do lots of small random disk writes for its own housekeeping purposes (logs, timestamps, etc), including during startup.

I had an initial BIOS glitch (I've put details in a comment below) but that was fixed by upgrading to newer MTRON firmware, which should now be present in all new drives.

The bottom line: The drive works reliably, and as far as I can tell it meets the promised performance. So I'll give it four stars. But at the same time, the overall performance benefit on my laptop has been rather less than I had hoped. Maybe the fault is with Windows rather than MTRON, but overall my laptop feels only slightly faster. Your mileage may vary, but you should probably expect incremental rather than radical change.

Update May 2009: I am now happily using this drive with the Windows 7 Release Candidate. Overall performance seems significantly better than under Vista. Some of that improvement may be due to the enhanced SSD support in Windows 7.

Great replacement HP Mini Netbook Flash Drive
I ordered this drive from RocketDisk and received it very quickly. I wanted to replace the 16GB flash drive that came in my HP Mini 1030NR netbook. The (lack of) speed of the standard flash was slowing down everything I was doing with my netbook. After following a video tutorial I found at jkkmobile on how easy it is to get access to the flash drive location, I had the new drive installed in no more than 10 minutes. It takes a bit of time to reinstall the OS and applications but if you persevere it is worth the effort. I am running the Windows 7 RC and have to say it is way better than Windows XP that came on the netbook.

The netbook runs much better with the new Mtron drive. Everything is much smoother and faster. Highly recommended if you are frustrated with the awful performance of the standard flash drive that came with your netbook.

Outstanding performance!
If you value your time this little drive is absolutely worth the money! My HP Mini went from being virtually unusable to a blistering fast little net buddy. Well worth it.

If you're worried about the capacity just save your personal data to an external drive (which you should be doing anyway). Plenty of space for all the popular OS'es.