Toshiba today announced it has developed mini SSDs (pictured on the right hand side) that are just a seventh of the size of existing 2.5-inch drives. The Toshiba drives will features a mini-SATA (aka mSATA) interface connector, as specified by the Serial ATA International Organization (SATA-IO) just yesterday. The new specification is designed for notebooks and similar portable devices.
Boasting blistering read and write IOPS speeds, Kingston has just announced that the latest SSDNow drives, V+, are now shipping. Ranging from 64GB up to 256GB, the V+ drives have claimed read and writes speeds of 220MB/s and 180MB/s, respectively. The 2.5-inch drives are priced as follows for the 64GB, 128GB and 256GB models: $254, $500 and $992. Yikes. Read More
Introduced at Computex in June, the aptly named Colossus 1TB SSD from OCZ is expected to hit store shelves later this month, says Gizmag. The 14.1-ounce 3.5-inch drive claims to have a read speed of 250MB/s and write speeds up to 220MB/s via SATA2. The RAID 0 compliant drive will supposedly hit store shelves later this month for ~$2500.
This is something we’ve seen in super-high-end storage systems, but is now being implemented on a enthusiast consumer level. The OCZ Colossus, within its featureless 3.5″ enclosure, sports two RAIDed SSD drives mounted to a single PCB. You can bet it’s going to be fast, though the RAID controller is apparently rated to “only” 260MB/s. With two drives (or four in the Colossus 4X), you’d think they’d easily hit that, but you’d also be right to expect more from a configuration like this.
SSDs are still mad expensive, but Lexar has just announced a wicked fast line of Crucial SSDs, M225. Available in 64GB, 128GB, and 256GB, the 2.5-inch drives boast 250MB/sec read speeds and 200MB/sec write speeds (256GB model). All three drives sport a SATA 2.0 interface and a five-year warranty. Snag one now for $170 (64GB), $330 (128GB) or $600 (256GB).
For high performance drives, SSD seems to be where it’s at these days. Corsair is at the forefront of the market, and just announced three new drives that definitely bring speed to the party. Now if they could only increase the capacity without being Extreme!ly expensive.
Do you have a MacBook Pro? No, the new one with the gimped SATA transfer, but the one before it. Good, because Super Talent, which just won the prize for least presumptive company name, has a new line of solid state drives, dubbed the MasterDrive SX series, that may interest you guys. Write speeds are rated at up to 200MB/s sequential, not burst. Yes, that’s pretty fast.
SSDs are picking up steam in the computer market (although there were some bad news), and so it comes as no surprise that today Toshiba announced the world’s first laptop featuring their self-developed 512GB SSD [JP]. The Dynabook SS RX2/WAJ went on sale in Japan today already and costs $4,000.
Whoa heavy and a bottle of bread! Corsair just released a 256GB SSD SATA II 3.0Gbps drive for $660 *head spins like wolf in cartoons that has just been clobbered by a mallet*.
That’s right. This bugger is $658.22 at NCIX and is in stock. For something a little more sane you can rock their 128GB drive for $299 but who wants to go all chintzy when we’re talking a lump of storage so dense that matter falls into it when you pass by.
Did you know that solid state drives could suffer from fragmentation and slowdowns? SSDs are basically huge chunks of ultrafast flash memory designed for massive data storage. There are no moving parts but as you read and write to the disks, the quality and speed degrades over time.
It was only a matter of time before Western Digital dipped their manicured toes into the SSD pool. And today WD announced their cash buyout of SiliconSystems out of Aliso Veijo, CA. The $65 million cash acquisition has been around since 2002 and has a full range of storage solutions, but going forward they’ll be known as the WD Solid-State Storage business unit. It’s about time WD got into the SSD market and that’s all I have to say.
Fusion-io announced today the ioDrive Duo, which is currently being touted as the fastest SSD solution available. The drive is available in capacities of up to 640gig, with a transfer rate of 1.5 gigabytes per-second. Intended more for the enterprise and server market, the ioDrive is designed to be used more in a RAID-1 setup for optimal performance.
So they’re not really new. Just Intel SSDs with a Kingston SSDNow on them. Kingston hopes that speed and reliability from Intel products coupled with Kingston distribution and a 3 year warranty with 24/7 support will be a good combination.
Samsung has unleashed a new type of solid state drive today. It is a 100 GB SSD targeted at server applications where 15K rpm HDDs are traditionally used. Read on for more details and the full press release.
There’s SSD and there are external hard drives. Why not make an external SSD? So G-Technology released a set of external SSD today. Apparently these drives are for professionals who need fast and reliable storage that looks like a small communist era gas convector. Only they wont keep you warm and cost you a lot more money.
SSDs are slowing becoming available to geeks on a budget and the latest from RunCore carry attractive prices.
It seems like the price/value ratio of the SSD drives is slowly improving. The Buffalo LS-WSS240GL/R1 costs about 1200$ and has an appealing 240GB of storage. It provides USB, RAID 0, 1 and DLMA/iTunes server capabilities while you can turn the whole thing off when you turn your computer off. Don’t get too excited although because the 240GB is actually two 120GB SSD’s next to each other.
In Hungary, after stealing some IBM tech there were companies selling “super computers”. These machines had two motherboards in them, basically two computers pushed in to one case. I didn’t know they still do that.
Hey, look at this deal! You can see what all the SSD fuss is about for just thirty bucks after a $60 mail-in rebate.
Tiger Direct has the 32GB OCZ SATA II 2.5-inch solid state drive for $89.99 with a $60 mail-in rebate. The rebate deal is good until 11/30 – that’s tomorrow — so you’ll have to be relatively nimble if you want to see that $60 ever again.
The rebate applies to higher capacity OCZ SSDs as well, but it’s $60 across the board so the 32GB drive is the best deal.
OCZ Core Series 32GB SATA II 2.5" Solid State Drive [Tiger Direct via dealspl.us]
Another manufacturer has thrown its hat into the ever expanding, fantastically dull realm of solid state drive development. This time it’s Micron, which today announced that it plans to release a 256GB SSD early next year.
And just to keep things interesting, Micron claims, while puffing its chest out and standing on its tippy toes, that its 256GB SSD can read data at 250MBps, to Samsung’s measly 220 Mbps. (But Samsung’s can write faster, 200MBps to Micro’s 100 MBps.)
Can you imagine an iPhone, or other trendy consumer device, with 256GB of space to play around with. Think of all the Blu-ray rips you could fit on that.
Just a few months after letting loose their 128GB SSD, Samsung is joining Micron and Toshiba in the exclusive Quartergig Solid club in South _____shire (that’s for all the Austen fans). The new drive boasts read speeds up to 220MB/s and writes up to 200MB/s, which makes it half-faster than the Microns and way faster than the Toshibas.
Expect to see these all over the place soon.
