Sony has decided to chew the cud as the world takes a turn from hard drives toward the world of solid state drives. While most low to mid range laptops and ultrabooks these days come with up to 128 GB of SSD, external SSD drives have been, as of yet, only manufactured by a handful of providers, who have always been dedicated. Sony has now revealed two drives, the SLW MG2 and MG4, of capacities 240 and 480 GB, into the market.
The hard drives have a form factor of 2.5 inch, since they have the SATA 3.0 surface. Quite naturally, their read and write speeds are as high as 560 MB/s and 530 MB/s respectively, which, while high, is still lower than what is found in drives using the PCI/E interface, and the speeds are essentially sequential. Even though these are SSDs, Sony has not listed the random read-write speeds of the device mainly because of the negative effect these speeds have on the minds of less-tech-savvy users.
Critics, however, seem to be frowning at the cost that the company might be selling the devices for, and argue that it is not reasonable given the number of drawbacks these drives have compared to its competitors, such as the TLC NAND technology by Toshiba or the V-NAND Flash Memory by Samsung, which have higher read and write speeds and also have more reliability than these Sony drives. However, this is just speculation – since the prices of the device have not yet been made public, it is not sure whether they will render value for money to the user.