Altech solidifies and drives Mtron deal

Resellers in Australia and New Zealand will have an opportunity to broaden their component options with a new deal signed between distributor Altech and Solid State Drive (SSD) manufacturer Mtron.

Altech's reseller partners will now have access to Mtron’s SSD's in the Australian and New Zealand marketplace, said Altech’s marketing manager, Kevin Hartin.

“We are looking at pitching the product to specific markets,” he said.

Hartin told CRN that SSD's will become increasingly important in the mobile hardware market. He said that as SSD's have no moving parts they are more robust than mechanically-based devices and use less power, thereby increasing the performance of notebooks.

“Fundamentally the technology can help run notebooks as fast as desktops. Notebooks are a little bit slower - performance wise – and suffer slightly when it comes to desktops,” he said.

The Mtron SSD features Hydra Architecture which maximises parallelism through multiple control channels and implements an intelligent algorithm, allowing it to take full advantage its flash memory control technology.

Hartin claimed this SSD technology will overcome most of the shortcomings of hard disk drive products. The Mtron SSD also boasts an average data access speed of 0.1ms, maximum read speed of 130MB/s and maximum write speed of 120MB/s.

“From our perspective Mtron is one of the first dedicated vendors in the SSD technology marketplace. Our other vendor partner, Samsung is also toying with SSD and other hybrid drives,” he said.

Hartin claimed SSD technology could replace existing HDD's in many IT applications given the obvious advantages of SSD such as no noise, low power consumption and faster access time, wrapped in an extremely robust package.

“If [resellers] are looking at straight margins on SSD then it would be better than hard disk drives and they can expect margins to be the same as enterprise storage products. However there is an opportunity for [resellers] to differentiate themselves by offering SSD options for notebooks, upgrades and create good opportunities for services,” said Hartin.

He said Altech spent three months testing the product and six months in negotiations due to the infancy of the SSD market.