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… → 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… → Read More
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 → Read More
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… → Read More
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… → Read More
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… → Read More
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… → Read More
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… → 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
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… → 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
[photopress:FSD56GC25H.jpg,full,right] Super Talent Technology claims that this solid state drive (SSD) is the world’s thinnest, with a capacity of 256MB. Does that really matter to us in any practical sense? Probably not, no, but it’s always fun to look at these “most/biggest/bestest” deals. The FSD56GC25H (easy to remember!) can double as a SATA hard drive thanks to its… → Read More
According to an analyst’s recent visit to Asia, a certain unnamed computer manufacturer is seeing a 10-20% failure rate of notebooks with solid state drives. CNET’s Michael Kanellos posits that it’s probably Dell, since it’s “so far the manufacturer that has promoted flash drives in notebooks the most.” Apparently Samsung’s got a solid state drive in 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
[photopress:samsung_1_8_inch_ssd_2_small.jpg,full,center] There are some shady rumors going around that SSD memory might be sketchy. The rumors say that after 100,000 writes, the RAM starts to fail. Not so, says Samsung’s Michael Yang. He wants you to know that it might start to fail after 100,000 writes to every single cell in the chip, something that would be virtually impossible. Truly… → 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
We all like the MacBook Air. Well, most of us. I don’t. But if you’re thinking of getting one, and waffling between the HDD and SSD drives, go with the HDD. And don’t take my word for it, take uncle Walt Mossburg’s. His crew ran a series of tests on a standard hard drive-based Air and on a solid state drive-based Air, and found the SSD doesn’t make that much… → Read More
[photopress:girlycloudbook.jpg,full,center] I knew it. I told you people, and nobody wanted to listen. I said that the next great tech battleground would be in tiny, ultra-portable PCs and everyone laughed. Well chuckle no more, hombres, because the upgrades coming to the Everex CloudBooks could just start things off with a bang. The director of marketing for Everex says that the next rendition of… → Read More
BiTMICRO has apparently forgotten what decade we hare in and gone straight to the Star Trek era of storage. Their Ultra320 SCSI SSD holds a whopping 1,600 gigabytes of data and has sustained data transfer rates of 230MB/sec. That’s Star Trek, people. Too bad this thing is going to cost Star Trek prices too; a terabyte will run you about $250 now when you’re buying platters. Solid state… → Read More
Hewlett Packard has a new “ultra-slim” PC available starting at $729 with an optional 16GB solid-state hard drive for an additional $328 if you configure one to your liking. So for almost half the value of the computer, you can go from an 80GB SATA hard drive to a 16GB solid-state drive. It’s nice that HP and others are deciding to at least offer these solid state drives, but… → Read More
We’ve been hearing about these 32GB and even 64GB solid state drives set to make computers faster, less power-hungry, lighter, queiter, less evil, cleaner, and sexier. BiTMICRO is going a step further — no, make that about 20 steps further — by launching this new 832GB solid state drive (SSD) at CES next week. No word on pricing yet, but it promises to be cheaper that comparable… → Read More
I’m a big fan of Crucial. I have 2GB of RAM in my MacBook from them. I’m also a big fan of today’s announcement regarding their new SSD for notebooks. The 2.5-inch drive will come in 32GB and 64GB models with a low latency of 1ms. It’s hot swappable and slides into the SATA port or you can get an external kit, SK01, that converts the drive for compatibility via USB. No word… → Read More
We obviously don’t pay enough attention to Buffalo and I’m not entirely sure why, but the mighty herd out of Japan has announced the SHD-UHRS line of SSDs. Big deal, right? It can’t get any bigger than 64GB. *Buzz* Buffalo is dropping a 100GB SSD on your ass at the end of the month. The only downside is that it’s USB so you won’t be installing the baby behemoth into… → Read More
The conventional notebook hard drive continues to face down its inevitable replacement as Toshiba today announced that it’ll be entering into the solid state drive game. Mass production will begin in March of next year with 1.8-inch SATA drives being offered in 32-, 64-, and 128-gigabyte capacities. Throughput for the drives will be 3Gbps with a maximum write speed of 40MB/second and a… → Read More
This morning, Samsung announced it would begin shipping its new 1.8-inch 64GB SSD. That’s 64GB of porn data that can be accessed very quickly. Some of the features that make this SSD pop include faster startup times, skip-proof data protection, since there’s no moving parts, and extended product life. It also uses less power, meaning there’s no need to scoop up that 600W power… → Read More
At Computex Taipei 2007, SanDisk showed off its two new additions to its line of solid state drives (SSD): SanDisk 1.8-inch 64GB UATA 5000 and 2.5-inch 64GB SATA 5000 SSD products. This was trumped by PNY’s announcement of a 2.5-inch 128GB SSD. SanDisk and PNY are stating read speeds of 67MBps and 66MBps, respectively. How’s that for fast boot times and file access, eh? Neither company… → Read More
What could be better than waking up at the crack of dawn and finding out that there is an LED-backlit laptop? A lot of things, actually, but it would be nice if the Japanese tech overlords would send us the latest VAIO. We’re all frothing over the highly rumored LED Macbook. Sony would make a killing, but they put their heads so far up their butts’ years ago that it will never happen. → Read More
Anyone with $4000 to shell out and a hankering for a new laptop should take note of this beautiful new notebook from HP and Maybach. Though it does come after Ferrari and Lamborghini made laptops with Asus and Acer, the Maybach laptop seems to be a whole new ball game. Equipped with what looks like a snakeskin leather trim and a Maybach logo on the front, this notebook truly is feature rich. It… → Read More
SanDisk feels it’s ready to take on the mobile PC market with its first solid-state hard drive. The SSD Ultra ATA 5000 1.8-inch hard drive comes in a 32GB size and can boot Windows Vista Enterprise in under 35 seconds. This drive is being touted for its speed, thanks to solid-state memory instead of moving parts like a conventional hard drive. The geeky-goo from the press release: ” With no… → Read More
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