Sharkoon out with Do-it-Yourself SDHC SSD drive

Even though we saw a brief look at this product a little while ago, Sharkoon has just officially announced its 2.5-inch sized Flexi-Drive S2S, which is a DIY SDHC based SSD.

This SATA I and SATA II device supports up to six 32GB SDHC flash cards using either MLC or SLC memory. That means it will create a drive capable of 192GB, but for best performance, RAID 0 is used and that will halve the maximum capacity to 96GB.

Sharkoon is now introducing an alternative that allows users to build a Notebook SSD themselves. The Sharkoon Flexi-Drive S2S is an SSD adaptor with the size and connections of a 2.5 inch SATA hard drive. The necessary flash memory is provided by the up to six SDHC cards that can be installed in the enclosure. Users can select the manufacturer, number, chip type (SLC or MLC) and capacity of the memory cards according to their needs. As the installed memory cards use Raid-0, the performance and capacity of all installed cards should be the same. At this time the maximum available SDHC capacity is 32GB, allowing for a maximum of 192GB to be installed in the Flexi-Drive S2S. Testing with HD-Tune, six 8GB SDHC memory cards with Class 6 speed ratings had a read speed of 140 MB/s and a write speed of 115 MB/s.

The press release we received claimed HD-Tune read speeds of 140MB/s and write speeds of 115MB/s. It will be very interesting to see how the Flexi-Drive S2S performs in our labs - we will endeavor to get one in for testing soon.

You can find more information on the product over at this website.