Product: Cavalry Pelican SSD (32 GB)
Manufacturer: Cavalry
Price: ~$100.00     Find Lowest Price @ PriceGrabber
Author:  aliencam (Cameron Kopas)

Solid state drives, or SSDs are becoming ever more popular as their cost decreases and their capacity increases. These drives have many advantages over modern hard disk drives, however, their perceived high prices and slower speeds have prevented them from being adopted up to this point. The Cavalry Pelican SSD is one of these drives that is capable of effecting a swift and necessary reversal of this misconception.

Packaging and Design.

The drive comes packaged in a blister pack that can be snapped open and closed. This means no cutting yourself on the packaging, and you don’t need a knife or scissors to get to it. It also means you can keep the packaging around and use it to store or keep the drive safe. The package comes with a cardboard insert giving specifications on the drive, the SSD itself, and a 6 inch USB A to USB cable (like a camera USB cable).

The drive is all black, with a product description sticker covering most of the top, and a smaller one on the bottom. The casing of the drive is all black metal, and both looks attractive (even if the top sticker is a bit much) and feels sturdy. I like the feel of this drive, knowing that it is flash, and feeling the heft of the metal casing (not too much, still less than a regular laptop HDD I believe) really assures me that this is significantly more rugged than other SSDs that I am reviewing. The drive is almost exactly the same size as a regular SATA laptop hard drive.  The picture below shows the Pelican stacked on top of my laptop’s HDD (which is still in the disk tray).

One major difference between this and a regular SATA laptop drive is my favorite part of the product – a USB-A port. The USB is right next to the SATA port, which seems like a perfect place for it to me. It is there without causing any other issues with the product, if you didn’t know what it was you probably would miss it completely.

The USB functionality of the drive works seamlessly, using the short (6 inch) USB cable that comes with the Pelican makes it perfect for use as a flash drive as well as a hard drive when needed. While it may be a little bit bigger than a flash drive that you would normally carry around, I still find myself using it to transfer large files (I don’t have another 32GB flash drive, let alone a 128GB that you could get in this format)

MFG Specs

Other Information:

I am happy to report that my particular drive (32 GB Cavalry Pelican SSD) outperforms the Manufacturer’s specifications, not only in benchmark software, but in a real-life test. Using Ubuntu Linux 8.10 Intrepid Ibex x64, I was able to get the computer to boot in 11 seconds. But using an EXT4 partition and Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty x64 Alpha 5, I could get it down to 10.  These is compared to my current HDD record of 25 seconds (I used the exact same computer, with similar OS configs, both were tweaked for boot speed). The boot chart for the Pelican shows an initial burst read speed of 108MB/s compared to the manufacturer specification of 80 MB/s. Here are the boot charts for the boots, with my platter-based HDD on the left, the SSD in intrepid in the middle, and the SSD in Jaunty  on the right.

Using SiSoftware Sandra, I benchmarked the USB capabilities of the drive, and for a 256MB file, it got a 29.87MB/s Read time and a 21.33 MB/s write time. The Endurance test read at a 1.8 MB/s sequential write speed.

The reported power usage on the package was 390 mA active, and 300mA idle, but I didn’t see any decrease in wattage on my laptop. This is likely due to the configuration of my computer, and when solid state drives become more commonplace there will likely be a larger power savings.

Teardown

The drive opens very easily, and you can take it apart without any of the fear you need to have while dissecting normal hard disk drives. There are four screws (two on each side) that are Phillips size 1. From there, there are four more screws inside holding the chip down. That is all, not really much to see in here except the plastic coating on the top and bottom plates, likely to prevent shorting the drive out if you were to dent it. The risers are metal, but that doesn’t cause problems unless someone is sloppy and drips something conductive all over the inside of the drive while it is on (unlikely). From the last picture you can see places where more chips could fit.  These are full in larger capacity SSDs.

Conclusion

The only real negative I can think of with this drive is that you can’t tell when it is on or being used. It is completely silent, completely still, and doesn’t have any lights. During testing I ran into a little issue with this, I plugged it into my laptop via USB and didn’t realize that the connection to the computer was actually loose. I began to worry why nothing could read it until I checked the connection. I really liked this drive for it’s sturdy construction, relatively low price, high speed, sturdy casing, and most of all, it’s USB connectivity. In short, a higher capacity version of this drive is going on my Amazon wish list right now, and it should go on all of yours. Seriously, its a hard drive with a USB port! How awesome is that‽

Cavalry has recently announced a new version of it’s Pelican SSD, the Pelican Elite. This drive claims to have a read speed of 240.1 MB/s and a write speed of 160.8 MB/s. With any luck we will have one of those to review and report on soon.

Pros

+ USB Interface
+ Does not need additional power
+ Low Power Usage
+ Durable
+ Able to open case easily.

Cons

- Many Operating Systems are not tuned for SSDs by default
- Might be slower than expected until you optimize the OS.

Tags: 32GB, Cavalry, Drive, Flash, Pelican, Review, SATA, SATA II, SSD, USB