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.
Should 4GB or 8GB prove to be too small for your Eee PC needs, Green House in Japan has two larger capacity modules that may interest you. There’s a 32GB and 64GB module, and they just slip right into your Eee PC.
Due for release later this month, there’s no official price. That is, the price is listed as “open” on the Green House Web site, though AkihabaraNews claims they’ll be €115 ($144) for the 32GB and €235 ($294) for the 64GB.
You know, in case you were bitten by the netbook bug.
via AkihabaraNews
Give your server a shot in the arm with a Samsung Server SSD drive. The 32 and 64GB hard drives were designed to hit lightning fast 100MB/s in reading and 80MB/s during reading speeds. No word on individual pricing, but you can pick up an HP ProLiant Blade server with these drives right now. BTW, if you do get one of these drives, how about making a similar video to this one with your new investment.
Will it work? Samsung knows.
Toshiba just stepped up to the SSD plate and knocked one out of the park with its 256GB solid-state hard drive. The laptop drive is understandably small, but also quick with 128MB maximum read speed and 70MB write speed via 3Gbps SATA interface. Mass production of the drive should start sometime in the coming months and should hit the consumer market shortly after that with a yet to be announced price.
Intel might as well just build entire computers. Make the whole thing one big system-on-a-chip, huh? The company recently announced some solid state drives; the 1.8-inch X18-M and the 2.5-inch X25-M. Both drives are currently available in 80GB capacities, with 160GB versions expected later this year.
Intel claims that the multi-level cell drives are good for up to 250MB per second read speeds and up to 70MB per second write speeds with 85ms latency. Both 80GB drives are shipping to system builders now at $595 for up to 1,000 units.
One of the biggest obstacles in the uptake of SSDs is the price, as I’m sure you, sir, are well aware. We keep hearing about the benefits of SSDs, but how many of us have flash-based storage outside of our mp3 players? It’s just not cost-effective — yet. Predictably, Samsung wants to change that.
They’re introducing a line of low-capacity SSDs that are “highly cost-efficient to manufacture.” There’s a catch. They’re not very high performance, and in fact the lower capacity you go with, the lower the write speeds: 32GB, 70MB/s. 16GB, 45MB/s. 8GB, 25MB/s. Ew! Still, Samsung came out on top of the latest roundup, so at least we’re getting the worst from the best. No pricing was mentioned, which bodes ill for your wallet.
The guys from Tom’s Hardware have a lot of time and solid-state drives on their hands. They compiled a list of 14 SSDs and compared them. In the end, they feel (just like I do), that SSD isn’t really the best choice right now. The technology is still too new and expensive, so the benefits do not justify the cost — yet.
If you’re dying to know and really don’t want to read the whole thing, let me save you some time. All of them are pretty evenly matched. The only difference is that some of them are faster at reading/writing and others are more energy efficient — but never by that much.
The only one Tom’s Hardware thought was really worthwhile was Samsung’s 64 GB SSD SATA-2 drive, which was the complete package at a reasonable cost. I hope the 128GB ones perform as well.
Welcome to the era of no moving parts. Micron is preparing 256GB solid state drives for use in laptops and mini PCs and expect to have working models available in the next year. No pricing, but the drives use 2.5 watts when active and require limited cooling, ensuring your mini notebook won’t fry your lap.
SSD manufacturers have been on a learning curve, Klein said. “One of the things that SSD manufacturers have been slow to learn (is that) you can’t just take a compact flash controller, throw some NAND on there and call it an SSD,” Klein said. The controller manages the reading and writing of data on an SSD. “The application of storing data on a notebook–and certainly on the enterprise–is far different than that controller was designed to support,” he said.
The drives have special processors and a 64MB DRAM buffer to keep the data flowing.
While I’m never the first to jump on Vista for this or that problem (I’m guessing it’ll be a great OS in a couple years), this is pretty dumb. Larger capacity solid state disks are in the works and, being more complicated internally, will require a more sophisticated controller. You don’t think about your hard drive controller that much, and that’s probably because hard drive technology has been in the same generation for practically 20 years. And you expect a company like Microsoft to future-proof their OS so that the next wave of technology will work best on Windows — what a selling point it would be if SSDs just worked better on Vista, right?
But Vista isn’t a forward-thinking OS, it’s a retrospective OS, the last and largest in a line of dinosaurs. And Sandisk says Vista isn’t ready for the next generation of SSDs. They’re gonna get zapped on this.
Samsung’s just announced that its 128GB solid state drive “is now in volume production.” We’ll likely see them available in the coming months, but it’ll be really interesting to see what they’ll be priced at. In case you hadn’t noticed, SSDs aren’t exactly affordable in any substantial quantity yet.
The 128GB of storage, though, finally puts these drives at respectable capacities – although I’d argue that a 64GB SSD would probably suit most people just fine, too. This new drive from Samsung features a 3 gigabit-per-second interface and is rated at 90MB/s read speed, 70MB/s write speed.
You may remember a story a little while back suggesting that SSDS did not in fact save battery power. Well, that really pulled the tail of the great cat “The Internet,” resulting in heavy criticism of the testers’ methods. People feel that the higher-end SSDs may have been using more power, but the tests ignored that their higher capacities meant they would do more work under that testing situation. The masses clamored for a “real-world” test.
So Laptopmag more or less provided one. They set up a laptop to load webpages every 30 seconds (no caching) and had it do that until it died with three different hard drives — two SSD, one 5400RPM HDD. The SSDs died 10 minutes later than the HDD: not a major gain, but not a loss, as Tom’s Hardware’s report would have you believe. I’d have liked to see some movie or music playing as well to exercise the things a little bit, but I’m sure that’s forthcoming in the torrent of clarifying tests every site in the world will be running in response to this little dispute.
Apple has dropped the price of its solid state drive MacBook Air by $500. Now, the useless laptop equipped with a solid state drive can be had for the low, low price of $2,598. That’s with a 1.8GHz Core 2 Duo processor.
Note that the upgrade price from the 1.6GHz to 1.8GHz has also dropped, from $300 to $200.
Not that solid state drives save you any battery power, mind you.
via AppleInsider
You may have seen the teardown of an Eee 1000H a week ago. That was cool and it also revealed that the hard drive was trivially easy to replace. Of course, the 5400RPM, 80GB drive was never meant as a performance piece, more a cost and energy saver than anything. But if you could replace it with something awesome, why wouldn’t you?
And that’s just what these guys did. They took a nice, fast Samsung SATA II 64GB SSD, popped it in there, and ran a few tests. Basically, it booted 10 seconds faster, started every program in half the time or less, and had a longer battery life and way better file read times to boot. Of course, this particular SSD costs a grand, but it was more a proof of concept than anything. I look forward to the day these things are standard. It’d give a nice performance boost in Diablo III.
Toshiba has announced an upcoming speed increase to its line of 1.8-inch hard drives typically found in UMPCs, subnotebooks, netbooks, and various other small computing devices.
In August, Toshiba will begin shipping 80GB and 160GB hard drives running at 5,400RPM to manufacturers. Current 1.8-inch drives top out at 4,200RPM.
The storage capacities offered by the 160GB MK1617GSG and 80GBMK8017GSG mirror those of larger form factor HDDs, while reducing thestorage footprint by nearly 40 percent compared with the 2.5-inch form factor. Combined with the new micro-SATA connector, Serial-ATA 1.5Gb/s interface and 5,400 RPM spin speed, the MKxx17GSG series offers small and light-weight solutions at increased data transfer rates for enhanced performance in sub-notebook PCs.
These new drives should be a good option for people who don’t want to spend the money on solid state drives and the 80GB and 160GB capacities of these faster drives from Toshiba offer exponentially more storage space than SSDs as well.
We’re still very much in a storage transitionary period here, what with platter-based HDDs being so big and affordable and SSDs creeping up on them both in size and performance-wise. Western Digital isn’t giving up on the HDD yet — they think there’s still a little bite left in that old hound. But they’re giving it a boost.
WD is hard at work on a freaky new hard drive, a derivative of its Velociraptor line, except these new ones will be spinning at a hot 20,000RPM, hopefully to bring their read/write speeds in line with SSDs. And they’re supposed to be silent. The idea is that it’s a 2.5″ drive in a 3.5″ enclosure, so they can put extra shock and sound dampeners in there. No one really knows much about these things, but we’ll keep you updated.
I certainly don’t care to have an SSD in my MBP, but if you’re really itching to get one in your MB or MBP then give Expercom a call and they’ll take care of it for you. Of course, you’ll be paying out the wazoo for a 60GB or 120GB SSD. Your two options are to send your rig into Expercom, or purchase a 15-inch MBP with a 2.4GHz proc/2GB RAM/120GB SSD for $2,649 or a white MB with a 2.2GHz proc/2GB RAM/60GB SSD for $1,649. If you just want to purchase the drive itself for your existing laptop then you’ll have to fork over $600 or $900 and leave your precious in the hands of those at ExperCom for a few days. Because the SSDs are not covered by AppleCare, ExperCom will either service your Mac or re-install the HDD, which you get back with your SSD if you choose to swap them out. Sort of not worth it in my opinion.
via TUAW
SSDs are starting to make their big debut, and I for one welcome our new solid-state overlords. We’ve already seen these in a few high-end laptops and of course all those subnotebooks, but for the most part, mainstream laptops still rely on HDDs. It seems Intel is making a push this year to include SSDs in Centrino-based laptops, and although capacity and performance are becoming less of an issue with SSDs, the cost still places them pretty firmly in the mid range and high end.
I recently got the chance to test out a few solid state drives sent to me by Texas-based DV Nation.
I tried a super fast MemoRight GT 32GB 2.5-inch SSD, and two 32GB Mtron SSDs, one 3.5-inch and one 2.5-inch. I also tested a standard desktop and a standard laptop hard drive to see how they stacked up.
Here’s what I found.
Solid state drives have always excelled in power economy and heat levels, but have faltered in the price-to-performance ratio, and even lagged behind in sheer performance by some measures. That last complaint is valid no longer. Memoright’s high-speed drives operate at far higher speeds than other SSDs on the market, and show nearly double the performance of the closest competitors in the spinning disk category where it counts — or more. 
With four 32GB modules in RAID 0 configuration, the Memorights showed read and write speeds of 450MB/S and 323MB/s, respectively. That’s madness, friend. Their I/O counts are off the charts as well, I’m talking like 20 times HDD performance.
It’s not a total shutout, of course; the WD VelociRaptor is comparable on several measures but gets its ass handed to it on just as many. And it’s worth noting that the Memoright modules cost fully ten times as much ($1000 per 32GB). But when Tom’s Hardware goes this gaga over something, you know it’s worth the cash if you’ve got it.
The take-away message here is that the performance gap between SSD and HDD has been decisively closed; it’s now just a matter of getting that price down. Man, I can’t stop thinking about that 0.45GB/s read speed. I’m freaking out here.
