SSDs have been on my Amazon Wishlist for over a year now, but the prices have always been a little higher than my blogger’s salary allowed. The good news is that when new technology gets older, we enjoy very nice price cuts. This is no more obvious then here with the new third-generation SSD 320 Series from Intel. → Read More
Today, Intel announced a new line of solid-state drives: the Intel SSD 510 Series. The new drives operate over 6Gbps SATA to take advantage of Intel’s new higher speed SATA bus interface (like the new MBPs). Speeds are now up to 500MB per second and 315MB per second for reading and writing respectively. That’s a pretty serious upgrade from just a year ago. The two drives available now… → Read More
All the cool kids in the neighborhood are building their PCs with solid state drives these days. Who wants to use a plain old hard disk drive, what with its icky moving parts, when you can cruise along on a drive with zero moving parts? I mean, it’s no contest. Problem: SSDs are usually what I like to call “mad expensive.” You’re paying a heck of a lot for a fairly small drive… until now~! Super… → Read More
It’s beginning to look like Expensive Speed Day here at CrunchGear, what with the USB 3.0 products and now this solid state drive from SanDisk. The G3 SSD is a solid-state drive available in 60GB and 120GB capacities for around $230 and $400, respectively. → Read More
Seagate, the big huge hard drive company, has just now officially announced its first ever solid state drive. The press release title says “Seagate Introduces Its First Solid State Drive: Pulsar” and above the title it says “December 08, 2009.” To be fair, Seagate CEO Bill Watkins hasn’t been keen on solid state drives, saying a little over a year ago that his company wasn’t really… → Read More
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. → Read More
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. → Read More
So we all know that SSD drives are fast, but how do those numbers translate into the real world? And what would happen if you had unlimited funds and wanted to build a 24-unit RAID to see exactly what they can do? → Read More
That’s a lot of gigs! Until just now, 256GB was the upper limit on SSD capacity, and chances are it’s the size you’ll be getting in your laptops and such over the next year — they’ll be available in April but probably super expensive. Toshiba, however, has decided that 256 is not enough, and has doubled the capacity of its 2.5″ drives to a massive 512GB, which… → Read More
This incredibly fast storage solution from Fusion-io is made for servers, but could easily be repurposed for home use, if you’re interested in spending a few grand on the setup. The idea is actually very simple: it’s a NAND storage array that connects via PCIe. In most computers your PCIe slots are taken up by graphics cards, since they’re the only pieces of hardware that need… → 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… → Read More
Like Seagate, Western Digital doesn’t see a market to enter in the form of SSDs right now. They’re open to it, and eventually will make their mark, but at the moment it’s not compelling to them. I love this quote from one of their head marketing guys that makes it sound like the company runs on clockwork: Western Digital enters markets that exist, announces products when they are… → 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
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… → 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… → 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… → Read More
It’s that time again. Time to break records in rapid succession! The plainly named Texas Memory has created a monster of epic performance. The RamSan-440 uses DDR RAM in RAID configuration to reach speeds completely unheard of — even in semi-enterprise solutions like the Memoright MR25. With the capability to sustain 600,000 inputs/outputs per second, a max datarate of 4500MB/s, and a… → Read More
Tom’s Hardware’s findings that SSD drives don’t actually save you any power is pretty surprising to me, especially following the experiment last week comparing an HDD Eee to a high-performance SSD Eee. Logic and reason seem to indicate that a passive drive solution with no moving parts would almost certainly have not just minor savings power-wise but possibly orders of magnitude. → Read More
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. → Read More
Cool. It’s still a little rich for my blood, but if you can figure out how to hot-swap the CF cards without losing data, this could be an awesome little gadget. It’s got a SATA interface, but you could probably rig it up to sit outside the computer so you can pop in new pairs of cards whenever you need to. It’s difficult to say whether it’s practical at this point. The… → Read More
Keep it on the down low, but it looks like OCZ has is using Samsung as a source for its 32GB and 64GB SATA II drives. I guess that’s not really that much of a shock. But it’s good news, because OCZ will actually be making these things available naked to consumers, as opposed to Samsung, which has most of its drives locked up in notebooks and such. So if you’re an early adopter… → Read More
Solid state drive capacity and availability continues to grow with the announcement of Mtron’s 128GB 1.8-inch SSD. It’ll have maximum read/write speeds of 120MBps and 100MBps, respectively, and will be targeted at UMPC devices. It’s got a PATA interface, so it can replace most existing notebook hard drives pretty easily. And with the 6X speed bump and half the power consumption… → Read More
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