A surprising product announcement, to say the least, at a time when CD / DVD / Blu-ray burning is largely a thing of the past.
The SSD or solid-state drive, everyone knows even if the name is not yet familiar to all of us. Indeed, this ultra-fast storage unit has quickly replaced the "platter" hard drives in our personal computers. The advantages of SSDs are multiple since, without any mechanical parts, they are already much less fragile than hard disks that cannot be moved while they are in use. Another advantage is that SSDs are capable of quite remarkable speeds and even more impressive responsiveness.
In fact, SSDs are now widely adopted by PC manufacturers and it is thanks to them that our Windows can boot up in just a few seconds. Of course, an SSD is, just like a hard disk, perfectly capable of writing, erasing, rewriting and modifying the data that are stored in these flash memory chips. Well, that's for the majority of SSDs and it does not apply to the SWOVA128G that Verbatim is about to launch.
Indeed, this SSD is qualified by its manufacturer as write-once. In other words, you can only write data once, like in the good old days of CD-R or DVD-R burning. Quite honestly, we don't really understand the interest of such a product, except perhaps for advertising purposes in order to send data that we know cannot be modified later. Verbatim also specifies that its SWOVA128G will be particularly compact (46 x 108 x 9.5 mm for 55 g) before announcing that the connection is made in USB-C 3.2 Gen 1.
Alas, the speeds offered by the storage unit are not stellar: Verbatim advances 540 MB/s in reading and up to 180 MB/s in writing... only once, then. Another major constraint, Verbatim specifies that it is necessary to have Windows 10 or Windows 11 with an x86 / x64 CPU and the .NET framework 4.8 from Microsoft. Fortunately, reading data is more permissive, it can be done on macOS, iOS, Android, ChromeOS or Windows 8.1 / 10 / 11. However, beware, Linux is not mentioned by Verbatim which also insists on the necessary exFAT compatibility.
To conclude on this amazing product, Verbatim indicates that it will be available only in Japan for the moment and does not communicate any price yet. It simply specifies that the SSD has a 10-year warranty.
