As the U.2 standard becomes more common place in solid state drives (SSD), especially among enterprise systems, it’s no surprise that companies like Super Talent are looking to expand their compatible offerings to take advantage. The new Nova SSDs from the company are just that and launching in sizes ranging from the rather tiny 120GB, all the way up to a much heftier 2TB.
Although we don’t have details on what controller sits under the hood, nor the manufacturer of the MLC NAND Flash memory used in their construction, we do know that regardless of the size you opt for, you will get the same sort of speeds. Sequential read and write are an impressive 3GBps and 2.2GBps respectively.
All the SSDs are the same size too, fitting within the 2.5 inch, 9mm form factor whether you opt for 2TB of storage space, or a couple of hundred gigabytes. There is, however, no word on what random read/write times are like.
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That universal sizing and shaping may well be because of these drives being aimed at the enterprise market, where uniformity is going to be much more appreciated than saving a couple of millimeters here and there. That said, the Nova SSDs should still work fine in consumer systems – it just might be a little bit difficult to fit them in some laptops and notebooks, as Anandtech points out.
Regardless, the U.2 standard is picking up speed and Super Talent is responding in that ever present chicken and egg scenario of PC hardware. Unfortunately, we cannot comment on a price tag for these drives, nor when we might expect to see them, but if you’re a business customer you may be able to learn more by going through official purchasing channels.
As for consumers looking to get in on the action, it’s going to be a case of wait and see for now.
