MemoRight FTM Plus 240GB SSD Review (Sata III)

1. Introduction2. MemoRight FTM Plus+ 240GB SSD3. MemoRight FTM Plus 240GB SSD (Ultra High Res Gallery)4. Testing Methodology5. CrystalDiskMark6. Atto Disk Benchmark7. AS SSD8. IOMeter9. Real World Testing10. Closing Thoughts11. View All Pages

A few weeks ago we were sent a SATA II MemoRight 115GB SSD for review and as we expected it got nailed in the performance tests when compared against the latest SATA III SandForce SF-2281 powered drives.

MemoRight intervened and asked us to review their latest performance oriented SATA III 240GB solid state drive.

MemoRight are a basically unknown entity in the UK, but they have established a presence in the military and enterprise sectors. The drive they sent us for review is a SandForce SF-2281 powered unit with a custom firmware and PCB design.

Specifications:

• SATA III
• MLC NAND Type
• OP Temperature: -20℃~+70℃ / 0℃~+70℃
• High performance (Up to 520/500 MB/s)
• TRIM support (O/S support dependent)
• Lower power consumption (<2W in operation)
• Min. Access Time: <0.1 ms
• OVP protected
• High Shock Resistant: Up to 1500G
• Slim 2.5″ Form Factor
• Light Weight: 75g

The MemoRight FTM Plus 240GB SSD arrives in a rather forgettable package with the name of the product on the front and no images of the drive itself.

The bundle includes a 3.5 drive mounting bay, literature on the product and some mounting screws for system installation.

The FTM Plus is shipped in an attractive aluminium chassis with a product sticker on the front. Drive specifications are listed at the rear. The drive measures 100.18 x 69.93 x 9.3 mm. It has an anti shock rating of 50G.

The FTM Plus is controlled by the Sandforce SF-2281 controller. The PCB is a custom design and they are using Synchronous IMFT MLC NAND flash. This is a 240GB drive with 16 NAND chips and two 8GB 25nm IMFT die per chip. MemoRight are using an OVP chip and ESD chip to help improve security.

Memoright rate the MTBF of the drive at 2,100,000 hours.

On this page we present some super high resolution images of the product taken with the 24.5MP Nikon D3X camera and 24-70mm ED lens. These will take much longer to open due to the dimensions, especially on slower connections. If you use these pictures on another site or publication, please credit Kitguru.net as the owner/source.

For testing, the drives are all wiped and reset to factory settings by HDDerase V4. We try to use free or easily available programs and some real world testing so you can compare our findings against your own system.

This is a good way to measure potential upgrade benefits.

Main Test System:

CPU: Intel Core i7 2600k
Cooler: Thermaltake Frio OCK
Motherboard: Asus P8P67 Deluxe
Memory: ADATA DDR3 2000mhz 9-11-9-24
PSU: ADATA 1200W
Graphics: Sapphire HD6950 Flex Edition
Chassis: Thermaltake Level 10 GT
Operating System: Windows 7 64 bit Ultimate
Monitor: Dell U2410

OCZ RevoDrive 3 x2 480GB Test System:
CPU: Intel Core i7 990x @ 4.8ghz
Cooler: Corsair H100 Performance Liquid Cooler
Motherboard: Asus Rampage III Black Edition
Memory: 12GB Kingston DDR3 @ 1600mhz 9-9-9-24
PSU: ADATA 1200W
Graphics: Nvidia GTX580
Chassis: Lian Li X2000F
Operating System: Windows 7 64 bit Enterprise
Monitor: Dell U2410

Other Drives for comparisons:
Patriot Pyro 120GB SSD
OCZ RevoDrive 3 x2 480GB
Patriot Wildfire 120GB SSD OCZ Agility 3 240GB
OCZ Vertex 3 240GB
OCZ Vertex 3 MAX IOPS 240GB
ADATA S511 240GB
Intel 510 120GB
Corsair F100 100GB
OCZ Vertex 2 120GB
Crucial Real SSD C300 64GB
MemoRight FTM.25 115GB SSD
Samsung SpinPoint F3 1TB

Software:
Atto Disk Benchmark
HD Tach
CrystalMark
HD Tach 3.0.4.0.
AS-SSD Benchmark
IOMeter
SiSoft Sandra
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call Of Pripyat

All our results were achieved by running each test five times with every configuration this ensures that any glitches are removed from the results. Trim is confirmed as running by typing fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify into the command line. A response of disabledeletenotify =0 confirms TRIM is active.

Crystalmark is a useful benchmark to measure theoretical performance levels of hard drives and SSD’s. We are using V3.0 x64.

Fantastic read performance, although due to incompressible data being used, write performance suffers a little.

4k QD32 performance suffers, due to the incompressible data being used in this test.

When we enable the alternative ‘compressible’ setting called 0×00 fill, performance results increase dramatically, especially write performance.

These performance results show that the MemoRight drive is right at the top of the performance pile, and the 4k QD32 write test is almost identical to the OCZ Agility 3 240GB drive.

The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage.

All the results from the top drives are very close, which is to be expected as they all use the SandForce SF-2281 controller. The MemoRight drive actually comes out on top, behind the RevoDrive 3 x2 480GB, which is obviously in a different stratosphere.

AS SSD is a great free tool designed just for benching Solid State Drives. It performs an array of sequential read and write tests, as well as random read and write tests with sequential access times over a portion of the drive. AS SSD includes a sub suite of benchmarks with various file pattern algorithms but this is difficult in trying to judge accurate performance figures.

AS SSD uses incompressible data however performance is still strong via the MemoRight drive achieving sequential read speeds of over 508 MB/s. Fantastic results.

IOMeter is another open source synthetic benchmarking tool which is able to simulate the various loads placed on hard drive and solid state drive technology.

We use a custom 4k random write test to measure performance.

The 4k write test shows very strong performance indeed from the MemoRight Drive.

It doesn’t matter how good any of the synthetic suites are, the real meat of the testing has to be under absolute real world conditions. This proves difficult as to record results we have to narrow down fluctuation. Therefore while we would say these are the most useful results to get from this review, there is always going to be a slight margin for error – its not absolutely scientific.

Firstly we installed a fresh copy of Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit Edition onto each of the drives and performed a clean update from Microsoft with all patches and security fixes. We then install a basic suite of software, such as Office, Firefox and Adobe Design, then we install AVG free antivirus. We used a digital watch for this startup and repeated the test five times for each drive – once we had these five results we averaged the results and took that for the final figure.

First class results from the MemoRight drive, achieving a class leading result of 22 seconds.

Very strong results in this test, matching the other leading SandForce SF-2281 drives on test today.

MemoRight might not be a name immediately associated with Solid State Drives in the United Kingdom, but the FTM Plus is one of the finest and fastest SandForce 2281 powered 240GB drives we have tested.

The bundle includes a 3.5 inch adapter plate which will be useful for a system build, and the drive itself performs extremely well, right up at the top of the performance pile, only outperformed in several of the tests by the special MAX IOPS edition from OCZ.

While there are no performance related issues with the MemoRight drive, there may be difficulties actually purchasing the unit in the UK as we can find no retailers who stock the product. When we spoke to MemoRight about this, they assured us that the UK market is very important to them and that the situation will hopefully change in the coming months. If we get any more information on availability we will update this page.

Rating the drive is slightly complex due to this key issue. It is one of the best 240GB solid state drives we have tested, but we can't give it our highest award as we can find no retailers who stock it, therefore we have no idea on the price point and subsequent value for money aspect.

In closing, we will award the drive an unreserved ‘Worth Buying' status, because if this was released with competitive pricing, it would be right at the top of our list.

Pros:

• Class leading performance.
• Decent bundle.
• IOPS throughput is excellent.

Cons:

• No availability yet in the UK.

Kitguru says: A heck of a statement from MemoRight, if you can find one at the right price snap it up.

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