Are SuperTalent DuraDrives any good?

[gameface]

I recently came across someone selling some surplus units of the DuraDrive ET (PATA/IDE version) at what seems like a remarkably good price for an SLC drive. I was looking for an inexpensive but decent SSD for an older tablet and this might fit the bill nicely (apart from having to adapt the 1.8" size to the 2.5" bay -- but that's another thread).

Does anyone have any information on their performance and/or what controller is inside? I've not come across any reports of stuttering-type problems with SLC drives in general (the JMicron 602 problems seem to be limited to MLC units), but I've not found anything specific to the the DuraDrive line, and very little on SuperTalent in general. (Only that in some of their other lines they use a mix of JMicron and Indilinx controllers.)

I'm not looking for the ultimate in speed here (I realize the limitations of this machine and the PATA interface), just looking for something decent, without long-term performance issues. Again, these being SLC drives, I'm expecting the performance to be more than adequate, but a bad controller implementation could still mess things up.

 

[Blain]

SuperTalent DuraDrive Link

True, they are solid state drives, but the max read/write speeds for those SuperTalents are slow
* Sequential Read Rate 65 MB/sec (max)
* Sequential Write Rate 50 MB/sec (max)

Compare to an old 320GB WD Caviar SE SATA-150... Max Read = 65MB, Max Write = 65MB

 

[gameface]

OK, I'll repeat my response here, for the sake of continuing the discussion.

Random read and write performance better matches my usage patterns, so I'm not very interested in (IMO) inflated max transfer numbers. For example, look at the charts in this part of a recent AnandTech SSD round-up:

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3631&p=22

Even the Intel drives are nowhere need the max speeds, and most of the Indilinx drives come in around 13 MB/s. If the DuraDrives are close to this, that's good enough. My only concern is to avoid the bottom end of that scale (under 1MB/s).