South Korea’s MTron is best known for their industrial applications and server storage solutions, but the company announced today that it plans to enter the consumer market for solid-state drives (SSDs) with its MTron SSD MOBI 23 GB SSD. Designed as a drop-in replacement for standard 2.5-inch hard disk drives, the SSD MOBI sports an SSD interface and what might be a first for consumer-level SSD drives: a 100 MB/sec reading speed, 80 MB/sec writing speed, and an average access time of 0.1ms.
“Most of SSD demand was in industrial market for high-end servers and storage,” said Mtron CEO Steve Jeon, in a statement. “However with the price of flash memory has been dropping about 40 percent every year, there will be a new demand in consumer SSD market as early as next year. Therefore Mtron has launched Mtron SSD MOBI in order to establish Mtron as the worldwide leader in the new consumer SSD market.”
Mtron plans to offer the 32 GB version for $650; a 16 GB version will also be available, although the company has not released any pricing information. Other availability details are also scant—Mtron has not said when the drives will be available to consumers or how end-users can buy them—but the company says this is just its first salvo in a new range of consumer offerings: the company plans to launch 1.8-inch SSD drives and other SSD products in 2008.
