As one of the stalwart members of the SSD industry, many of you might be familiar with Plextor and their lineup of M6V, M6S, and M7V SSDs. However, a little-known fact is that Plextor is actually owned by Lite-On, the maker of various disk drives. Judging from today’s release of the MU-II series of SSDs, it seems like Lite-On plans to continue expanding their involvement with a first-party branded drive.
The drives use Toshiba A19nm-TLC instead of the A19nm MLC found in the MU and the 15nm TLC expected of the M7V. The drives all offer sequential speeds of up to 555 MB/s reads and 520 MB/s writes while the 120GB model drops to 500MB/s on writes. Random reads and writes are decent at 370-300 MB/s and 350-220MB/s for reads and write respectively.
The drive also features the Phison PS3110-S10 controller so expect performance similar to the Toshiba Trion series. The use of A19nm should offer a slight speed advantage due to better programming times while also offering better endurance. The MU-II offers slightly more than 1MB of cache per GB due to the extra overprovisioning of the drives. The 120GB models gets a slight boost with a full 256MB of cache. Lite-On wraps it all up with a standard 3-year warranty.
