Definitely not a liquid.
Solidata is a relatively new player in the solid state scene, being recently brought into the country by Solid State Central. While the company looks for resellers to get the drives out there, we're gonna look at the drives themselves to see whether or not they stack up.
The K5-64 is an SLC-based (Single Layer Cell) drive that has 64GB of speedy flash chips inside, something uncommon for a drive of this size. While it does drive up the cost a little, it also means that the longevity and speed of the drive should remain consistent during the lifespan. Since most SSDs are rated for around ten years, it's a good thing to have - even if 64GB will inevitably seem puny ten years from now.
Built into a classy brushed aluminium case, this drive didn't warm up under use at all. It gave impressive average read speeds of 218.5MB/s, burst of 186.4MB/s, access of 0.1ms, average write when copying Program Files over of 115MB/s and an impressive 190MB/s write when copying the Crysis install folder. If you've read Dan Rutter's piece on harddrive speed (page 63 if you haven't), which means that compared to all drives we've looked at barring Intel's fastest, this outperforms them significantly under the same conditions.
It's also running the Indilinx controller that saw use in the OCZ drives we've looked at in the past two Issues, but the SLC memory chips allow extra performance to be squeezed out.
You can grab one of these for the large pricetag of $859 out in the wilderness, which might seem high compared to other high-capacity drives, but at least this one can offer good performance with more than enough room to fit an OS and accompanying games.
Issue: 133 | February, 2012