It seems that everyone and their Mum are getting into SSDs lately, and the latest entrant into the space is Mach Xtreme Technology. This is a new start-up company who has just begun to bring its stuff to Australia, and it seems that flash memory is very much one of their strengths.
Kicking off with its premium SSD, the MX-DS 100 arrived in a box that, while it certainly was eye-catching, was almost illegible. Just look at the SSD itself: sure 'Mach' and 'Technology' are clear, but 'Xtreme' looks like the end result of a back-alley paint-drinking competition (first to drink ten litres of blue without passing out wins!). Still, to each their own, and it's only a sticker.
Internally the drive is very similar to OCZ's Vertex drive from Issue 113. It's got the same amount of MLC memory chips, giving the same 93.16GB of space when formatted with NTFS, runs on the same SATA 2 interface and uses the SandForce controller. Specifically the MX drive uses the SF-1222, a slightly updated version of the SF-1200, but performance is very close.
In average reads the MX drive reported 229.8MB/s sustained, a burst of 248MB/s and an access speed of 0.1ms - faster than OCZ's drive by 6.8MB/s and 1.5MB/s respectively. When we filled the MX drive with junk data to a chip-bursting 100 per cent, it reported slightly lower average read speeds of 202.7MB/s and bursts of 248.6MB/s - a small drop, and again a sign that SSDs are best kept at under 90 per cent capacity.
The price is even slightly cheaper than OCZ's offering, and though it comes with only two years of warranty it's still very good value. Though we're a little disappointed that it still uses the bandwidth-starved SATA 2 standard, it's amongst the fastest SSDs that money can buy.
