Angelbird SSD wrk 256GB Solid State Drive Review

Introduction

I was pretty excited when I got this Solid State Drive (SSD) in the mail, since it is the first chance I’m getting to get hands-on with one of Angelbirds drives.

Being a new player, Angelbird needs their products to stand out from the rest. This doesn’t seem to be a difficult thing for the designers of Angelbird, as all their products have a sleek simplistic, but beautiful design. Among the current products are mobile and normal Solid State Drives as well as a creatively designed PCI-Express host- and raid-board.

Angelbird Technologies GmbH is a relative new player in the market, “a hi-tech company based in Vorarlberg, which although the smallest province of Austria, has an international reputation as a region of pioneering and innovation. The company’s headquarters is in the town of Lustenau surrounded by mountains and close to the border of Switzerland and Germany. The team behind Angelbird is young, experienced and passionate, with a love for quality and attention to detail. Angelbird products are developed with the environment in mind.” That is how the company is described by Roman Rabitsch, CEO.

The Angelbird SSD wrk is based upon the Silicon Motion 2246EN controller and uses 20nm Micron custom packed NAND chips. The flash chips are synchronous MLC that should give us a steady and good performance in our tests. The interface is SATA3 6GB/s and backwards compatible to 3Gb/s and 1.5GB/s SATA interfaces; it is also SATA 3.1 compliant.

The drive is rated for more then 2 million hours MTBF and comes with a 3 year limited warranty. Power consumption is barely noticeable with just 0.25W in idle and 1.97W maximum draw. It also promises great data retention with 10 years at 25°C and reliability with build-in EDC and ECC function.

Other features offered by the drive are advanced dynamic global wear-leveling and bad block management algorithm as well as increased data reliability through reduced coupling effects with data shaping. It also features overload protection and of course S.M.A.R.T.

Being a 2½ inch slim drive, it measures 7mm in height, 100.2mm in length and 69.8 in width, ready to slide into your laptop or notebook. The rated specifications are 563MB/s sustained read speed and 450MB/s write speed with up to 72k IOPS and an access time of 0.1ms. It’s time to get this disk on the test bench and see if it lives up to those specifications.