Now that SSDs are becoming more and more mainstream, with an increasingly higher number of people starting to seriously consider purchasing such a product for their desktop or portable computing systems, we can notice a slight increase in the number of companies coming up with such offerings as well. And one of the latest flash-memory manufacturers to join the SSD fray is the Taiwan-based Team Group, which has just announced its new P2 line of IDE solid state drives.

Before going further with the features the new P2 SSDs are going to provide, we can't help but wonder just why the company has chosen the IDE interface (which, as we all know, is a bit slower) instead of SATA or SATA-II used by the majority of SSD manufacturers (not to mention motherboard builders). In any case, regardless of the reasons that prompted this decision, it's a questionable one to say the least.

Anyway, coming right back to the features of the new P2 SSDs, it's important to mention the Team Group is offering a complete lineup, the fresh series including modes whose storage capabilities range between 32GB and 128GB.

As mentioned above, the effect of using IDE is a noticeable slow down in data transfer rates. So, while the 32GB version provides read speeds of up to 80 MB/s and write speeds of up to 50 MB/s, the 64GB and 128GB models are even lower, namely around 60 MB/s maximum for read speed and 40 MB/s for write speed.

Of course, similar to all other SSDs, the P2's are also quite resilient to usage and shocks. Hence, they're able to withstand vibrations up to 15G, shocks of up to 1000G, sport a MTBF of around 2,500,000 hours and also a read/write life of around 3,000,000 hours.

No pricing details are available just yet, but we hope we'll find out more on this issue in the future, because, if these things are affordable enough (OK, dirt cheap), they might stand a chance on this segment.


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