Product On Review: MX-ES
Manufacturer And Sponsor: Mach Xtreme Technology
UK Street Price: £41.99
You’d be forgiven for being unfamiliar with Mach Xtreme and their range of products. Based out of Taiwan and relative newcomers having been around only since 2010, they’ve carved out a very strong niche by specialising only in higher performance flash memory devices for the enterprise and power user market.
As you’d expect for any company with a name like Mach Xtreme speed is their watchword and time their focus. By bringing fast storage and memory to the user they aim to increase the former whilst saving the latter. They currently specialise in SSDs encompassing a comprehensive range of form factors, High Performance and Affordable USB thumb drives, and System RAM.
Today we’re taking a look at the 32GB MX-ES, a high performance USB3.0 Flash Drive built on Single Level Cell NAND. The drive is also available in 8GB and 16GB flavours with lower headline performance.
About The MX-ES
Thanks to its use of advanced SLC NAND flash technology, the MX-ES USB3.0 flash drive transfers data in the fast lane, featuring ultra high transfer rates making data transfer easy. The MX-ES Series USB3.0 pendrive utilizes SLC NAND flash to offer higher performance and longer endurance over traditional MLC NAND flash, which is typically used in other USB3.0 pendrives.
Thanks to its use of advanced SLC NAND flash technology, the MX-ES USB3.0 flash drive transfers data in the fast lane, featuring ultra high transfer rates making data transfer easy. The MX-ES Series USB3.0 pendrive utilizes SLC NAND flash to offer higher performance and longer endurance over traditional MLC NAND flash, which is typically used in other USB3.0 pendrives.
NAND cells of all types have a specific failure rate, and are usually good for a certain number of read-write cycles before failure. This is one of the reasons why SSDs have overprovisioning within their specs - to attempt to equalise out the number of times any cell is written to over the whole drive. Multi Level Cell NAND is typically used in flash products which prioritise cost, rather than SLC which is more durable and has significantly higher write speeds.
By choosing SLC NAND Mach Xtreme can reach far higher write speeds with fewer controller channels than comparable products with a similar capacity, as well as boast better durability. The trade-off is one of cost, although by keeping the price well under £50 Mach Xtreme are keeping the MX-ES competitive within the wider drive ecosystem. Depending on your workload, the cost may very well be worth it.