Final Thoughts
EMTEC is relatively new to the consumer market, and they have chosen a good platform for their SSD Power Plus series. Phison’s S10 controller has a lot of great features and companies like Corsair, Patriot and Kingston are using it in their solid state drives. The quad-core controller offers end to end data protection, Smart ECC, Smart Flush and Smart Refresh functions.
EMTEC sent us the 120GB version (model: ECSSD120GX150) of the drive, which has advertised speeds of 550 MB/s read and 160 MB/s read. The drive performed right up to these speeds, our ATTO Disk Benchmark the drive achieved reads of 563 MB/s and writes of 161 MB/s write. Remember that solid state drive controllers achieve peak performance by addressing multiple dies at the same time, but the smaller capacity drives do not have enough NAND chips for this to work correctly. The 240GB and 480GB versions of this drive have advertised write speeds of 320 MB/s and 530 MB/s respectively. Interestingly though the 240 GB versions of the Patriot Ignite, Corsair Neutron XT, and Kingston HyperX Savage (which are based on the same controller) all have higher write speeds.
The 120GB version is definitely not a good test subject to show the power of the Phison S10 controller and I can only recommend this drive is you are going to be installing it in a system where you are not going to be writing a lot of data to the drive. Write speeds are terribly slow for a solid state drive.
On the good side though the 120GB version of the drive that we reviewed today can be had for $44.99 online, which is one of the best prices we’ve seen for a 120GB solid state drive. Overall ThinkComputers gives the EMTEC SSD Power Plus 120GB Solid State Drive an 8 out of 10 score.
Pros:
– Very fast read speeds
– Features of the Phison S10 controller
– Supports DevSleep so lower power consumption
– Price
Cons:
– Very slow write speeds
