Strontium Hawk 120GB SSD Review Storage   Page 1

Reviewer: Jon Coulter Article Publish Date: 10/15/2012

 

 

 

 

Introduction

 

 

 

Strontium is probably not a name you’re thinking of when contemplating your next solid state drive purchase and many of you may have never heard of Strontium. Strontium is a memory reseller based in Singapore. Strontium has a very large presence in Asia and Europe and is now beginning to make inroads in the United States.

Strontium’s latest offering is the Hawk 120GB. This new drive is actually a rebranded SK Hynix HFS120G32MNM 120GB drive that is branded and backed by Strontium. This is the first drive to come through the lab sporting brand new 26nm SK Hynix Synchronous NAND and we hope to see a lot more of this NAND because as you will see it has very impressive performance when utilized with an LSI 2281 FPU.

The price point of this new NAND is just as impressive as the performance which is something we don’t see very often. This 120GB drive is available for an almost unheard of $85 directly from Strontium. SK Hynix recently purchased Link A Media Devices so we are a little surprised to see an LSI SandForce FPU at the heart of the Hawk 120 as opposed to an LAMD Amber FPU but this is most likely the result of Corsair still having exclusive rights to the LM8700 for the time being.

The Strontium Hawk is shipping with the newest LSI SandForce 504 firmware so TRIM should be a non-issue. This is the first drive we’ve tested with 504 firmware or this particular NAND so this drive has a couple of firsts for RWL. I’m sure you are anxious to see what SK Hynix 26nm NAND performance looks like on an $85 dollar drive with RWL type performance so let’s get this show started and begin by taking a look at what Strontium has to say about their new Hawk 120:

Strontium® HAWK Solid State Drive (SSD) is the ultimate solution in taking your computer system to the next level. Driven with the award winning SandForce® controller and coupled with the quality solution from SK Hynix, our SSD ensures outstanding sequential read/write

speeds and is powered by a backwards-compatible with SATA Revision 3.1 (6Gb/s) interface.

If you need to replace and upgrade your laptop and desktop hard disk on PC or MAC platforms, HAWK will maximize your purchase in your computers while at the same time dramatically enhance the efficiency of thesystem and its applications. In addition, SSDs feature higher speed,

reduced latency, enhanced durability, shock-proof, silent operation andmore reliable as compared with traditional hard drives. Equipped with multiple management functions including “TRIM” feature to boost speed by wiping data internally, it also has an ‘End-to-End Protection’ feature to prevent data loss and reinforces security of the data by using encryption algorithm of 128bit AES (Advanced Ecryption Standard) to ensure the security of the data.

Strontium® HAWK SSD simply makes your computer more responsive than ever. With quicker boot up and shorter lead time in applications loading, it will definitely enhance your daily productivity and ensure your system takes flight to the next level. Best of all, HAWK is also backed by a three-year warranty and the reliability of Strontium®