Visiontek GoDrive 60GB and Racer Series 120GB SSD Review

1. Introduction2. Visiontek GoDrive 60GB3. Visiontek GoDrive 60GB (Super High Res Gallery)4. Visiontek Racer Series 120GB5. Visiontek Racer Series 120GB (Super High Res Gallery)6. Testing Methodology7. CrystalDiskMark8. ATTO Disk Benchmark9. AS SSD10. PCMark 711. IOMeter12. Real World Testing13. Closing Thoughts14. View All Pages

Visiontek have earned a reputation in America as a reputable AMD partner. Their portfolio expansion seems to have worked for them so far, however their latest venture into the Solid State market may raise a few eyebrows, as the competition is so fierce. The Sandforce 2281 controller features in such a diverse array of drives that it is going to be extremely difficult for Visiontek to get noticeable market share.

I really did like their Racer Series 120GB drive. Thanks to the expensive 24nm Toshiba Toggle MLC NAND flash it delivered a high level of performance with both incompressible and compressible data streams. It often equaled the performance of the excellent Patriot Wildfire drive, which is still a personal favourite of mine.

AS SSD performance is strong with this particular drive, and it can deliver over 500 MB/s in other sequential read and write tests. 4k random write IOPS performance is also fairly strong, making it an ideal solution for an intensive data driven server based environment. Real world performance is without reproach, although it is no better than a handful of other high performance Sandforce drives using high grade Toshiba TOGGLE MLC NAND flash.

This drive is mainly available in America, and can be bought from Amazon in the US for $254.84.

The Visiontek GoDrive 60GB is a decent performer although it won't set the benchmark world alight. Compressible, sequential throughput is excellent however as this drive delivered a steady 516MB/s in the read test.

The use of lower grade memory means that it suffers when dealing with incompressible data, often close to bottom of the pack. In real world terms this doesn't often have a huge impact, although if you are focusing on database intensive environments then this isn't the best bet. IOPS performance is average at best. To be fair, the pricing is aggressive, retailing for $119.60 in the US.

There is no doubt that the Sandforce 2281 controller is still capable of delivering the goods and the reassuring 3 year warranty from Visiontek on both drives will give peace of mind. I feel that the company will need to focus on pricing however if they want to generate a lot of sales.

Pros:

• Sandforce 2281 controller is still quick.
• 3 year warranty.
• Racer Series is very fast.
• GoDrive is very reasonably priced.

Cons:

• Very intense competition for Sandforce 2281 sales.

Kitguru says: Two solid releases from Visiontek which will prove popular in the US territories.

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