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. → Read More
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. → Read More
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. → Read More
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. → Read More
SSDs are slowing becoming available to geeks on a budget and the latest from RunCore carry attractive prices. → Read More
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] → Read More
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. → Read More
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. → Read More
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 → Read More
Will it work? Samsung knows. → Read More
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. → Read More
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. → Read More
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. → Read More
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. → Read More
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. → Read More
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. → Read More
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. → Read More
