Customer Reviews

Mtron SSD MOBI MSD-PATA3018 - Solid state drive - 32 GB - internal - 1.8" - ATA-133

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I bought one of these to replace the HD in my Fujitsu P7120 laptop. Overall it is working reliably but with somewhat less performance benefits than I had hoped.

I used a third-party PATA to ZIF adapter to connect the drive into my laptop. Windows recognized it immediately, with no issues.

The time to load Windows (from when the BIOS first reads the disk until the login screen appears) has improved by about 20%.

Application startup also seems noticeably faster. Because of Windows caching, it's hard to be precise, but it seems like at least 20% faster for Adobe Illustrator and more for Word.

According to MTRON's specification for this drive, for small operations it should deliver up to 25000 sequential reads/sec, or 48000 sequential writes/sec, or 16000 random reads/sec, but only 60 (sixty) random writes/sec. The sequential read and write numbers are extremely good. Alas, the very poor random write numbers are typical for a flash SSD.

So the performance impact will depend greatly on the kind of disk I/O you are doing. The high read rates should benefit system boot and application launching. But the low random write rates will tend to slow down things like copying lots of small files. Unfortunately Windows also has a nasty tendency to do lots of small random disk writes for its own housekeeping purposes (logs, timestamps, etc), including during startup.

I had an initial BIOS glitch (I've put details in a comment below) but that was fixed by upgrading to newer MTRON firmware, which should now be present in all new drives.

The bottom line: The drive works reliably, and as far as I can tell it meets the promised performance. So I'll give it four stars. But at the same time, the overall performance benefit on my laptop has been rather less than I had hoped. Maybe the fault is with Windows rather than MTRON, but overall my laptop feels only slightly faster. Your mileage may vary, but you should probably expect incremental rather than radical change.

Update May 2009: I am now happily using this drive with the Windows 7 Release Candidate. Overall performance seems significantly better than under Vista. Some of that improvement may be due to the enhanced SSD support in Windows 7.

Bought one of the best drives they made a couple years ago. A self healing SSD with 64GB storage. Needless to say... it stopped working with light use of about an hour or two a day. Grub was on another drive; so I spared them the start and stop cycles at times. Also of note... if you fill in the RMA page... you get a mailer failure. I shall never buy another Mtron drive as long as I live.

Very good drive among other ZIF 1.8" SSD-drives.
I haven't noticed any significant difference for user experience (i'm running Windows 7)

Placed into HP Mini Netbook and formatted, installed Windows and it ran good for about 1/2 hour. Then upon reboot would no longer boot. Windows repair says the drive is no longer 32GB, instead it is 15MB (megabyte). I checked MTRONs website and their FAQ says this means the drive is dead. There are other brand ZIP PATA SSDs on the market, and I would urge people to consider one of those instead.

I ordered this drive from RocketDisk and received it very quickly. I wanted to replace the 16GB flash drive that came in my HP Mini 1030NR netbook. The (lack of) speed of the standard flash was slowing down everything I was doing with my netbook. After following a video tutorial I found at jkkmobile on how easy it is to get access to the flash drive location, I had the new drive installed in no more than 10 minutes. It takes a bit of time to reinstall the OS and applications but if you persevere it is worth the effort. I am running the Windows 7 RC and have to say it is way better than Windows XP that came on the netbook.

The netbook runs much better with the new Mtron drive. Everything is much smoother and faster. Highly recommended if you are frustrated with the awful performance of the standard flash drive that came with your netbook.

With a third party adapter I swapped an old 32 Gig hard drive for this one and it brought this old laptop to life (with a Gateway factory disk XP re-install). While it cost a bit of money to add to an old laptop (XP SP3, 1.6 GHz Pentium M with 500 Meg RAM), it gave me a lightweight web cruiser that goes very quickly in and out of standby and has 2 hours battery life on an original set of batteries. Love the quiet and cool operation. Definitely much faster (than the 6 year old original hard drive...no real challenge there). No BIOS issues. No XP install issues.

The Mtron 32GB 1.8 zif was the only thing available in the SSD market for my Sony TXN15 ultra-portable when I purchased it 4 months ago. While the 32GB size was a big step down from the 80GB HD that came with this notebook, the vastly improved speed is very noticeable compared to the 4200 rpm mechanical drive. Bootup with Windows XP is amazingly fast. Desktop displays in about 20 seconds. I've also noticed a significantly longer battery life when performing minimal disk intensive operations (like word processing) throughout the day.

Installation was simple and problem-free. I've addressed the smaller capacity by investing in 4 high capacity 16GB SDHC class 6 cards and a single 4GB memory stick. Now I have 52GB of on-line storage. Then I constructed a holder for the other 3 SD cards out of an old PCMCIA 4MB memory card which stores them in the TXN15's PC card slot. So now I have another 48GB of readily swappable storage at hand whenever I need it.

The market for IDE/PATA SSDs is small. Most manufactures are targeting the higher performing SATA interface. This leaves those wanting to upgrade older notebooks with a mechanical problem where space is required not only for the SSD but also an adapter to convert from SATA to IDE(and possibly voltage conversion). I have an older notebook(Fujitsu ST5021) that I wanted to ruggidize for high altitude/vibration applications. It requires a 2.5" IDE/PATA 5Volt drive. Most of the high performance SSDs all have SATA interfaces(except the MTRON MOBI which has IDE/PATA but with a smaller ZIF connector). There is not enough room in the HDD cavity of the notebook to install a 2.5" SATA SSD and a SATA to IDE adapter. The solution was to install this smaller Mitron 1.8" drive plus an adapter to convert from the Zero Insertion Force (ZIF) connector to a standard 44 pin IDE connector(my laptop only used 40 pins of the connector). The adapter also converted the supply voltage from 5V down to 3.3V(required by the 1.8" SSD). I bought the adapter here at Amazon; it is the "Addonics Toshiba 1.8 Zif 2.5 Ide Connector". As far as performance, it has totally transformed this notebook. It is very fast (used to be very sluggish, I'm running the WinXP Tablet OS, 2Gig main memory). I tested both the old HDD and the new SSD with a Disk Benchmark test program (free from ATTO). The old HDD(Fujitsu MHT2060A) had read/write performance of around 19MB/s. The new MTRON MOBI is delivering around 80MB/s. Another solution may be to install a 1.8" SATA drive plus a SATA to IDE converter but there are not many SATA SSD in the 1.8" form factor yet plus the IDE interface performance is limited to around 133MB/s and SATA is way higher and is a little overkill. But as prices drop and capacities increase this is a moot point. I can not comment on power consumption other than the notebook will operate about 3.5hrs before I need to recharge on a very old tired battery that should be replaced. The only negative(not much for my application) is the 32GB capacity. I have a few other older notebooks and plan to do this same upgrade. Best upgrade for the money.

My Notebook Sony TZ16SN made me bore of waiting to boot and work.
This SDD make me feel OK with my notebook again.

Installed in the OQO 02 and it boots 2003 Server or XP Media Center in 13 seconds from boot.ini.

Blazin fast and fits snugly without the necessity of the included rubber bumpers on the 4500 RPM spindle.