Intel drops 2.5" SSD pricing

Intel will soon lower prices of its X25-M series of 2.5-inch solid state drives and boost production of its 1.8-inch SSDs. The 160GB X25-M, which uses mulit-level cell flash memory, is now priced at $630 after launching for $945 last December, and is due to get another $100 price cut soon, while the 80GB version of that drive will fall to $270, down $50. Street prices are even lower, as retailers try to make the Intel drives appealing compared to OCZ’s Vertex SSDs.

OCZ Vertex 120 GB SSD review

This is an excerpt from a full review by guru3d of the OCZ Vertex 120GB SSD.  If you have been wondering about the durability of these new solid state drives, you will either be pleasantly surprised, or not so convinced that this is the new “holy grail” of storage.

The difference between SLC and MLC

All flash memory is not created equal. There are 2 main types, SLC and MLC:

SLC and MLC (single and multi level cells) SLC stores one bit per cell, MLC doubles it. MLC -we see a lot in flash-memories used for example in your digital camera. If we break it down:

• SLC is faster, and has around 10,000 up-to 1 million write cycles
• MLC is somewhat slower but cheaper, unfortunately also less reliable (sometimes as few as 10,000 write cycles).

And that’s where we land at limited write cycles. The reality is that you purchase a SSD drive on borrowed time. By its very nature, flash memory cells can resist only so many write cycles before they are prone to failure.

Click to read more ...

Swap out your laptop's hard disk for a spiffy new SSD

There is a nice article on TUAW that describes the steps you need to make to have a smooth migration from your lame  20th century spinner, to a new 21st century SSD.  Even though they cost a lot more, it can bring to life an older laptop that would love to have a new heart transplant.  Giving it many more years of life.

For the step by step, hit the source link below.

source:tuaw

Ultra-fast 256GB Corsair SSD coming soon

Corsair is set to release an ultra-fast 256GB solid state drive, according to a Tuesday HotHardWare report. The move would effectively double the company’s current number of SSD offerings and would share Samsung technology. The new SSD has a new controller, however, and and integrated 64MB of cache that improves performance significantly. When the new SSD arrives in stores, it is likely to be called P256, and will sport a SATA 3.0Gbps interface and be housed in a heavy-duty aluminum enclosure. Double-stacked MLC flash memory chips from Samsung are used in the drive. According to some benchmark testing from HotHardWare, the drive has average read speeds of just over 200Mbps, while average write speed performance was 169.1Mbps at 0.1ms random access times and burst speeds as high as 248.2Mbps.

While no release date has been given, the Corsair P256 is expected to cost $749.

Update on Monday, May 11, 2009 at 6:54PM by Jon Arnason

Corsair this afternoon said it had started shipping the P256, its fastest and also most capacious solid-state drive. The 2.5-inch SATA II drive holds its namesake 256GB thanks to multi-level cell storage but has a fast Samsung  controller that lets it read data at 220MB per second and writes at an equally quick 200MB per second. A 128MB cache and native command queuing further add to the practical speed.

OCZ intros Mac Edition SSD, notebook RAM

OCZ has swung its attention towards Macs by launching storage and memory specifically geared towards iMacs, MacBooks and Mac minis. The Vertex Series Mac Edition is specifically validated in Apple’s testing centers to work in the MacBook and MacBook Pro and provides much faster speeds than the stock rotating hard disks, reading data at 240MB per second and writing it at up to 170MB per second (100MB sustained). OCZ vows not only faster load times but also the improved battery life and impact resistance inherent to most SSDs.

The drives come in the same 30GB, 60GB, 120GB and 250GB capacities as regular Vertex models and should be available soon, though any pricing differences between the Mac Edition and regular models aren’t made clear, nor are whether the drives will be pre-formatted for HFS+ or support firmware updates through Mac OS X.

OCZ’s memory kits come in the form of DDR2-667 and DDR3-1066 versions intended both for older (with DDR2) and current-generation (DDR3) Macs. Both are again tested in Apple labs; bundles come designed with Apple’s normal configurations in mind and will be available in either individual 2GB sticks or 2x2GB bundles. Prices and exact availability aren’t mentioned.

Super Talent's 2TB PCIe RAIDDrive promises 1.3GBps sequential writes, 1.2GBps reads

I gotta get me one of these! Or 2 or…who am I kidding.  These things will not be cheap.

San Jose, California – April 1, 2009 – Super Talent Technology, a leading manufacturer of Flash storage solutions and DRAM memory modules, today announced its patented RAIDDrive™, which dramatically increases the performance and slot capacity of PCI Express-based storage solution. The new RAIDDrive is the market’s largest and most innovative server-based solid-state storage solution, and an extension of its patented technology from the RAIDSSD™ product lines.

RAIDDrives support up to 2 TB of MLC or SLC Nand Flash memories, have a turbocharged DRAM Cache, and the RAIDDrive ES is fully battery backed to protect data in the event of power loss. The RAIDDrives connect through a PCIe Gen. 2.0 x8 interface and are capable of delivering sequential Read speeds of up to 1.2GB/s, sequential Write speeds of up to 1.3GB/s. More performance details will be unveiled in June. As an optional feature users will be able to configure the drives with an internal RAID5 capability to deliver an extra level of data protection for mission critical applications.

Installing 2 of the puppies in a RAID 0 volume on a Mac Pro and you will see performance like never before.  There will not be much of a bottleneck anymore:)

WD ENTERS SOLID-STATE DRIVE MARKET WITH ACQUISITION OF SILICONSYSTEMS, INC.

LAKE FOREST, Calif. - Mar. 30, 2009 - Western Digital Corp. (NYSE: WDC), a world leader in hard drive storage for computing and consumer electronics applications, today announced that it has completed a $65 million cash acquisition of SiliconSystems, Inc., Aliso Viejo, Calif., a leading supplier of solid-state drives for the embedded systems market.

Since its inception in 2002, SiliconSystems has sold millions of SiliconDrive® products to meet the high performance, high reliability and multi-year product lifecycle demands of the network-communications, industrial, embedded-computing, medical, military and aerospace markets. These markets accounted for approximately one third of worldwide solid-state drive revenues in 2008. SiliconSystems’ product portfolio includes solid-state drives with SATA, EIDE, PC Card, USB and CF interfaces in 2.5-inch, 1.8-inch, CF and other form factors. SiliconSystems has developed extensive intellectual property to address the stringent embedded systems market requirements to ensure data integrity, eliminate unscheduled downtime, protect application data and software and provide for data security and protection through its patented and patent-pending PowerArmor®, SiSMART®, SolidStor® and SiSecure™ technologies.

WD’s storage industry leadership, worldwide infrastructure, and technical and financial resources will enable further growth in SiliconSystems’ existing markets and customer relationships. SiliconSystems’ intellectual property and technical expertise will provide additional building blocks for future products to address emerging opportunities in WD’s existing markets.

Hit source link below for full press release.

source:westerndigital

Fusion-io Reveals Wicked Fast ioDrive Duo SSDs

Fusion-io, the company famous for producing the world’s fastest and most expensive SSD solution, is back again with another blazing fast innovation. This time, we’re drooling over the ioDrive Duo, which is hailed as the fastest and most innovative SSD this planet has ever seen. Per usual, the server-based PCI Express SSD offering is aimed at enterprises who can and will pay more for vast quantities of lightning fast storage space. How fast, you ask? Oh, just 1.5 gigabytes per second of sustained throughput Yeah, wow.

The ioDrive Duo essentially doubles the slot capacity of the company’s PCI Express-based ioDrive, providing solutions in 160GB, 320GB, 640GB and 1.28TB sizes. The whole bunch can “easily” sustain 1.5Gbytes/sec of read bandwidth and nearly 200,000 read IOPS, with sustained write bandwidth measuring in at 1400MB/sec and latency under 50 µsec.

The new ioDrive Duo devices will go on sale for presumably incomprehensible prices this April save for the 1.28TB edition, which won’t ship until the second half of 2009. Look at it this way — Fusion-io is just giving you more time to save up.

source[HotHardware]