Mach Xtreme's MS-DS 120 GB SSD delivers the same performance as the SandForce drive from the big and more well known manufacturers. If you look closely at the design of the drive itself, it becomes clear that the drive is produced by the same company which makes the SSDs for OCZ too. This is a good thing, because it means that the drive uses well-proven and reliable engineering.
Like all Sandforce drives, the MX-DS 120 GB shows amazing results in our synthetic benchmarks with well above 250 MB/s in both read and write. The high write speeds especially impress - many other SSDs are lacking here. However, overall our application benchmarks show that during normal use the numbers are less spectacular, while still impressive. When switching from a traditional harddrive to SSD, you would still see huge gains, but moving from an older generation SSD to something like the MX-DS 120 might not be able to justify the cost at the outset.
The SandForce SF-1222 packs the much talked-about TRIM feature supported by the latest version of Windows and Linux. The garbage-collecting capabilities of TRIM could become extremely important in the long run, as the drive begins to age. Unlike with magnetic storage devices such as hard drives, where new data can simply be overwritten on top of existing data, for NAND-flash based devices, the portion of the flash chip must be physically erased first, consuming some write cycles. TRIM makes sure that the drive knows immediately when blocks are freed after a file delete which give it a chance to wipe all portions of the flash chips "clean" when the drive is idling, so the cleaned areas are ready to receive new data, faster. Without TRIM, the drive would have to waste those write cycles whenever the OS seeks to write data, which happens to be occupied by deleted data, and that lowers write performance.