Imation Makes it Easy to Upgrade to SSD

It’s no secret we believe high-performance SSDs are the future for everyone and, for those who can afford them, they should be the present too. Since last summer, we’ve seen more and more laptop vendors offering solid-state drives as costly configuration upgrades that add anywhere from $450 to $1,000 to a system’s price tag. But we’ve also seen a number of memory-makers enter the SSD upgrade market with affordable drives that allow end users to swap out their ordinary 5,400 rpm and 7,200 rpm drives with something far faster.

Nowadays, you can often find a value-priced SSD upgrade on a site like newegg.com for as low as $99 for 32GB. Larger drives can be had for under $200 on sale. But those who consider upgrading face two issues:

• Mediocre Multitasking - While almost all value SSD drives give solid read transfer rates of over 100MBps and decent write rates of 70MBps or above, many of them have difficult handling multiple theads at once. They often suffer from severe write amplification, a flaw that causes the disk to have to write a lot more memory blocks than necessary whenever data is saved. We ran into this problem when zipping 5GB of mixed media files. Value-priced SSDs, like the OCZ Core Series, took significantly longer to complete the test than their mechanical counterparts. When we tried to open apps while zipping a file, several value -priced drive slowed to an absolute crawl.
• Hassle of Replacing a The storage device that holds your OS, programs, and data.
  Learn MoreHard Drive – As we’ve shown on several occasions with netbooks like the MSI Wind, it’s very easy to remove a notebook’s hard drive and replace it with an SSD. But the real hassle comes from moving the data, the applications, and the operating system. To have everything work smoothly, you really need to use a backup program like Acronis True Image, that creates a perfect image of your old drive, and then restore that image to your new SSD.

Imation is trying to resolve both of these issues by releasing its new Imation M-Class SSDs ($349.82). The M-Class drives use value-priced SSD NAND flash chips, but promise whopping read transfer rates of up to 150MBps and snazzy 90MBps writes, while starting at a mere $179 MSRP for the 32GB version. The SATA drives are available in 32,64, and 128GB capacities and come in 3.5 or 2.5-inch form factors, the latter of which is standard for most notebooks.
Whether Imation addresses the problem of medocre multitasking with its M-Class drives drives is yet to be determined (we expect to get a review unit in the next couple of weeks),but it’s clear already that the company has taken significant steps to alleviate the hassle of moving your data. Starting in March, the company will offer the M-Class with an upgrade kit that include:

• The SSD itself
• a USB-to-SATA or SATA connector cable
• Power cable
• Acronis True Image HD for moving all the data from one drive to another
• An instruction manual

We can’t wait to see if this bundle makes the process of moving files easier and cheaper for the average upgrader. One question is whether notebook users, who usually have only one hard drive bay, will need to buy an external back-up drive to copy their system data to or whether that USB-to-SATA cable will allow them to mount the Imation SSD externally and copy their files directly from one drive to the other, before cracking open the notebook chassis to do the swap.