Crave

Super Talent goes for the gold.

(Credit: Super Talent Technology )

Given the current economic climate, this may be the only USB drive that actually gets more valuable as time goes by. It's an 18-carat solid gold USB drive that screams, "Stock market dive, what stock market dive?"

The limited-edition drive from Super Talent Technology is a member of the Pico-C line, which is water-resistant and supports data transfer speeds up to 30MBps. The $599 bit of storage swankness comes with an 18-carat solid gold keychain and a serialized certificate of authenticity. It's wrapped in a black velvet jewelry box, and text or a logo can be etched onto the device at no charge.

The 8GB drive is available only on a preorder basis for a limited time, with three to four weeks lead time. Super Talent calls it a rare collector's item that would make an eloquent corporate bribe gift.

The 1-inch SSD.

(Credit: Super Talant Techonology)

Solid-state drives aren't always faster than regular hard drives, but they sure can be tinier.

The smallest regular hard drives are the 1.8 inchers that Toshiba has been making for ultracompact laptops. On Wednesday, Super Talent Technology announced two SSDs that come in a significantly smaller form factor: .85 inch and 1 inch.

The new SSDs use Intel Z-P140 NAND Flash-based SSD technology and employ the older parallel ATA (PATA/IDE) interface, as opposed to the current and popular SATA interface used in regular-size SSDs. Both offer rather modest read and write speeds of 40 megabytes per second and 30MBps, respectively. They are also available in very small storage capacities. The .85 inchers offer 2GB and 4GB, while the 1 inchers offer 2GB, 4GB, and 8GB sizes.

Thanks to their tiny physical form and limited storage space and speed, these new drives are only suitable for ultramobile PCs and digital-multimedia broadcasting devices.

It's unclear how much these new SSDs cost. Chances are, however, that you won't be able to purchase them at all; rather, they will be available to OEM manufacturers only.

(Credit: Super Talant Techonology)

Super Talent Technology is out with a new family of high-capacity USB drives that offer up to 64GB of space.

For now, the new drives are possibly the largest in the community of little drives. And they have style too.

Dubbed Luxio, the drives are housed in a sleek .8 inch by 3 inch by .4 inch UV-coated ABS/PC case with chrome-plated zinc trim. They come in black, silver, and wood grain colors and in three storage sizes: 16GB, 32GB, and 64GB.

All models in the Luxio family come with advanced AES-256 hardware encryption as a standard feature that allows for fast, convenient data security. The drives are packaged in a gift box with a custom-made black leather carrying case.

The Luxio models will begin shipping this week. The cost of the 64GB versions are expected to be around $149.

(Credit: Asus)

Super Talent Technology, a vendor that just announced high-speed and low-budget solid-state drives, introduced on Tuesday its new line of SSDs designed explicitly for Asus' Eee PCs.

The new line is available in three sizes--16GB, 20GB, and 64GB. The drives use a mini PCI-Express interface and offer rather modest throughput speeds of 40 megabytes per second in writing and 15MBps in reading.

Standard Eee PCs will generally use the 20GB version of the new SSD. Users then can choose to upgrade to 64GB or downgrade to 15GB versions. These drives can also be used in any devices that share the same mini PCI-Express interface. The "explicitly designed" notion only means that Super Talent has tested them and guarantees their performance and compatibility only with Asus' Eee PCs.

If you want to try them out, they will be available in November, and for relatively inexpensive prices--$53 to $149 a piece depending on the size.

Two weeks after announcing two new high-speed solid-state drives (SSD), Super Talent Technology on Tuesday announced it will release the MasterDrive LX as a budget solid-state drive later this week.

(Credit: Super Talent Technology)

The MasterDrive LX comes in 64GB and 128GB versions and will cost about $179 and $300, respectively. Both drives are SATA-II and use NAND flash technology. They will be compatible with computers that support the ever-popular 2.5-inch SATA hard drive.

The low prices do come with a shortcoming: the throughput speed. The new MasterDrive LX drives are significantly slower than other SSDs; it's even slower than some regular SATA hard drives. They support sequential read speeds of up to 100MB per second and sequential write speeds of up to 40MB per second. To put this in perspective, regular SATA hard drives can offer about 100MB per second, while the new Intel SSDs reportedly offer up to 240MB per second throughput speed.

However, the MasterDrive LX is still more desirable than regular hard drives in terms of battery life and durability. I hope this is just the beginning and soon you'll be able to buy SSDs for the same prices you currently pay for regular SATA hard drives.

The MasterDrive OX SSD

Tuesday, Super Talent Technology introduced two "dangerously fast" solid-state hard drives, the MasterDrive OX and the MasterDrive PX.

The budget MasterDrive OX uses multilevel cell NAND flash and has data speeds of up to 150MB per second in sequential read and 100B per second in sequential write, according to the company. The MasterDrive OX comes in capacities up to 128GB and has a 1-year warranty.

The higher-end MasterDrive PX, on other hand, uses single-level cell NAND flash and focuses on the reliability and endurance, rather than capacity. It, too, is supposed to have lightning-fast sequential read and write speeds, up to 170MBps and 130MBps, respectively, according to STT. The MasterDrive PX SSDs are available in 32GB and 64GB capacities, and comes with a 3-year warranty.

Both drives use standard 2.5-inch SATA-II interface and will be available later this week. The 128GB MasterDrive OX has a street price of about $419, which is about the same as the new SSD that Intel released a few days ago. The MasterDrive PX, on the other hand, is much more expensive, costing $499 for the 32GB version and $849 for the 64GB version.

The new Pico D USB drive.

(Credit: Super Talent Technology)

Super Talent Technology, a manufacturer of Flash storage and DRAM memory modules, on Wednesday announced the Pico D, the newest member of world's smallest USB thumbdrives.

Though tiny in size, measuring only 1.4-inch in length and weighing less than 0.2 ounces, the new Pico D series are shock- and water-resistant.

According to STT, these drives can transfer data at speeds up to 30 megabytes per second. Like the Cosair Flash Voyager Mini, the Pico D achieves the miniature size by using chip-on-board technology. However, the Pico D series offers storage capacity up to 8GB, twice that of the Flash Voyager Mini.

Like all other USB devices from STT, the Pico D series is backed with lifetime warranty. The series will be available for purchase sometime this week for about $40.

(Credit: Super Talent)

We've always been curious about Super Talent's name, and finally its origins are slowly becoming clear to us: It must be some kind of allusion to Hollywood celebrities, because the company seems obsessed with the anorexic dimensions of its storage devices.

The latest example of this apparent fixation is what it calls "the world's smallest 8GB drive," according to Fareastgizmos. Indeed, even with the countless flash drives on the market, the ultra-petite "Pico-C" would be hard to beat in the shrinkage department. It weighs less than a nickel and is only a little bigger than a quarter, as shown in the picture above.

The only potential problem, however, is that it may be too small. It's a good thing that the drive is water-resistant, because it's bound to be forgotten in somebody's pocket and end up in the wash.

A solid-state drive maker is claiming its new 256GB drive is the world's thinnest.

While that may be true, it won't fit into the world's thinnest notebooks, which makes the claim less impressive. The SSD from Super Talent measures 12.5 millimeters thick. Sure that sounds teeny tiny, but that's more like pregnant-Nicole-Richie-thin compared to the 9.5-millimeter drives on the market, which are more like Nicole-Richie-after-Thanksgiving-dinner-thin: seems like a negligible difference in size, but has major implications. If you haven't noticed, some PC makers are battling over who can create the skinniest notebook. So while packing 256GB into that size is impressive, thinner drives with less storage space are what the market is currently demanding.

(Credit: Super Talent)

In any case, the Super Talent SSD is a 2.5-inch drive that reads data at 65MB per second, writes at 50MB per second, and can withstand up to 16G of vibration. No price yet, but they sell to OEMs anyway.

Almost every hard drive maker is jumping on the solid-state bandwagon since solid state is expected to increase from its current 1 percent share in the memory market to almost 30 percent over the next three years. So expect the competition among them over who's the thinnest, fastest, lightest, and prettiest to continue ratcheting up.