Assembled in the UK using top quality components from manufacturers such as Samsung and Hynix, Ortial offers DDR3 and DDR4 server plus SO-DIMM laptop memory upgrade kits and a key differentiator from many competitors is the limited lifetime warranties the company offers on these components.

With the popularity of solid state drives (SSDs) growing exponentially, Ortial now moves into this hotly-contested arena with two new products. Targeting gamers, consumers and professionals looking for fast, high-capacity SSD solutions at affordable prices, Ortial's portfolio opens with capacious 1TB and 2TB SATA III models.

On review, we have the 1TB model which has a price tag on Amazon of around £180 excluding VAT. This looks good value as storage costs pan out at a very reasonable 18p per GB and only 21p per GB with VAT included. Ortial's generous hardware warranty makes its argument even more compelling. Both models come with a standard 3-year warranty which Ortial will increase to 4 years when you register them online.

The SSD is solidly constructed with an impact-resistant aluminium shell. It's unlikely to make a great deal of difference in modern PCs, but a metal shell will dissipate any heat better than cheaper plastic ones.

Ortial's SSDs employ standard MLC (multi-level cell) NAND technology which combines a high endurance with good read and write performance. There is a concerted move to 3D NAND technology which is designed to offer higher storage densities, but increased manufacturing costs mean you'll be paying a premium for these SSDs. The SSDs use a Silicon Motion SM2246EN 4-channel SATA III SSD controller. This is a highly popular controller used by many other brands and offers a great combination of high performance and low power consumption.

For performance testing, we installed the SSD in a PC equipped with a 3.5GHz Core i7-5930K CPU plus 16GB of DDR4 memory and running Windows 10 Pro. The SSD popped up ready for action without any problems and we created a single 953GB volume using all available space.

The SDD supports TRIM garbage collection and Windows 10 Pro automatically added it to its weekly optimisation schedule. From the Windows Drive Properties Tools option, we could view the TRIM status of the SSD and also run manual optimisations.

We used a range of benchmark tools and started with the well-respected ATTO Disk Benchmark software to get a clear idea of sequential read and write performance. Using the default set of parameters, we watched it record top sequential read and write speeds of 554MB/sec and 487MB/sec, confirming Ortial's performance claims.

The CrystalDiskMark 6.0 app was in complete agreement with it recording read and write speeds of 559MB/sec and 483MB/sec. We also used the AS SSD tool and saw high random I/O throughputs across all three apps of around 50,000 IOPS for read operations and 78,000 IOPS for writes.

Another key benefit of SSDs is reduced system boot times, and to test this we loaded one SSD in an HPE ProLiant ML110 Gen10 tower server and stacked it up against a standard SATA III SFF hard disk. With Windows Server 2016 installed on both storage devices, we recorded boot times from system power on to OS login screen presentation. The SSD consistently improved boot time by an average of 20 seconds.

Product: 1TB SATA SSD
Supplier: Ortial Technologies
Web site: www.ortial.com
Sales: sales@ortial.com
Tel: +44 (0) 330 124 3777
Price: 1TB - £180 ex VAT