Team Group's Combo series of solid state disks are quite interesting alternatives if you need a SSD that can also act as a portable storage solution since these drives come with both a USB 2.0 connection as well as the standard SATA II interface that enables the drive to be installed inside a laptop, the company now launching its third such device, the Combo C2 Elite.

According to Team Group this is actually an improved Combo C2 solid state disk, the Taiwanese company stating the new drive has improved the number of input/output operations taking place per second (IOPS), especially when we are dealing with small 4K data blocks (the type of files used by most operating systems, so this should actually improve the responsiveness of your system).

This improvement is most likely due to the 64MB DDR2 buffer memory that was added to the drive, Team Group also promising up to a 40% improvement in writing speed.

This actually ranges between 120MB/Sec and 160MB/Sec, depending on the drive capacity, the 240GB Combo C2 Elite SSD coming as the fastest drive in Team Group's arsenal.

Apart from this unit, the C2 Elite is also available in 60GB and 120GB version.

However, when connected trough the USB 2.0 interface both read and writing speeds drop dramatically (35MB/Sec read and 25MB/Sec write), this being a limitation of the USB 2.0 standard, since Team Group has not opted in this case for SuperSpeed USB.

This comes as a noteworthy omission to me, one that makes this more suited for being installed in a laptop or desktop computer then being used as a portable storage solution since I can't imagine how long it will take you to write 100GB at USB 2.0 speeds.

Unfortunately, Team Group didn't provide us with any info regarding price and availability.