Enterprise hardware company Smart Modular Technologies has announced a line of SSDs that appear to wipe the floor with pretty much everything out there. It comes in capacities from 200GB all the way to a current record capacity of 1.6TB. And not only is it the biggest single SSD available, it also is the fastest, using a Serial Attached SCSI interface to achieve (they claim) 1000MB/s read speeds… → Read More
If you’ve ever wondered why they can’t take these tiny SSD units and just pack ‘em into a thumbdrive case, this one’s for you. The new RC8 from Super Talent is in every way a real SSD, except perhaps that it’s not sitting in your PC’s case with a SATA connection. This one’s USB 3.0 and it appears to really cruise. We’re looking at over 200MB/s reads and writes. → Read More
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
If you’re in a business that handles sensitive information, or are just conscientious about your privacy, you might want to read this study on SSD erasure. As you know, there are ways of erasing traditional magnetic hard drives that are more or less totally irreversible. Writing all zeros, writing garbage, zeroing again, and so on. After a few cycles it’s fresh and clean.
SSDs are a different… → Read More
Generally, enterprise-orientated hard drives are much too expensive for the mainstream consumer. I can’t find the price on these new Hitachi SSDs, but I guarantee they’re not bargain bin. These suckers are aimed at speed and longevity. → Read More
Not everyone is buying into the SSD thing just yet — they’re still awfully expensive, and the technology seems to be improved monthly. But on the off chance you’ve just decided to leave the spinning platters of yesteryear behind, here are a few new Samsung drives that sound just dandy. → Read More
Buffalo announced a slew of new SSDs [JP], HDDs [JP] and NASes [JP] in Japan today, all of which might soon be available outside this country, too. Available with 32GB ($160)/64GB ($230)/128GB ($440) and 256GB ($840/build-to-order) on board, the four 2.5-inch SSDs are part of the Buffalo SHD-NSU2 series (pictured above). All of these SATA devices support Windows XP/Vista/7 andMac OS X 10.5, are… → Read More
In Dave’s SSD roundup the other day, the cheapest drive carried the day — naturally. Though the Kingston SSDNow V only has 40GB of space and you pay a pretty high price/GB, it’s really the easiest entry to SSD-land, and 40GB is plenty of space for a boot drive. In fact, you could even make do with 32GB. And lucky for you, OCZ just released a new Onyx model that gives you just that for under… → Read More
Forget about the just-announced Corsair Reactor and Nova SSDs because you’re not going to want those after you hear about the upcoming Force models. This new line forgos the Indilinx Bareboot controller for the faster SandForce SD-1200 processor, which enables the Force line to read at 285MB/s and write at 275MB/s. Yeah, that’s quick. Trim support is also present on the SATA II drives as long as… → 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
You’re just waiting for that clock to tick over to 5:00, right (well, you West-coasters anyway)? When I was a 9-to-5er, I had the same compulsive time-checking starting a little after 4, especially on Mondays and Fridays. Well, here’s something to tide you over until it’s safe to leave — something you might have to pick back up at home, since it’s a bit technical and lengthy.
The SSD… → Read More
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… → Read More
Although engineers continually devise new ways to conquer obstacles previously thought insurmountable, in the case of solid state storage, we may actually be approaching a point where the current theory just doesn’t work.
The size of cells in memory arrays is getting so small that each one now holds just 100 electrons. That means that an array based on current theory can only get 100 times bigger… → Read More
We’re seeing SSDs popping up more and more, in plain drive form or included with high-performance laptops.
There’s lots of news to sift through and it’s easy to get lost and wonder “Are any of these stupid things different from each other apart from capacity?” And the short answer is… yeah. But imagine I’m saying that while looking skeptical and making a “ehh” motion with my hand. → Read More
Intel has been the go-to guy for SSDs these days. While others are trying to bring the cost down or kick up the performance so high it costs a couple thou, Intel has been the one filling storage space in high-performance servers due to the drives’ reliability and high speed. But lovable memory maker Corsair is pushing out some drives that may hit Intel below the belt. → Read More
SSDs are fast, enduring and expensive. The G Drive mini is no exception; 120GB of solid state storage built into an all-aluminum enclosure priced at $599. Let us see what else can be expected from this small and reliable storage device → 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
There’s an interesting community-powered Q&A that’s just been posted over here at HardOCP in which their forum members were invited to ask questions of an Intel SSD engineer. There are many interesting questions asked and answered, regarding power consumption, which OS or file system to use, whether there are “grades” of flash, and more.
It’s kind of technical at times, but here are a couple… → Read More
Miniaturization is one of the driving forces in the tech world, not just in the size of your media player or whatnot, but in the size of the nano-scale components that make it up. Processors, for example, are approaching the barrier of quantum effects on their transistor units, and are having to work around it. Similarly, flash memory makers are going to be hitting a wall a few years down the line… → 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
So SanDisk has said they’ve got a technology called ExtremeFFS that will increase random SSD write speed by like a million percent. Sounds great, right? So what is it? Well, what they do is take all the stuff that’s going to be written on the SSD and instead of trickling it to the disk at the maximum random write rate (very slow compared to sequential writes), it writes it to… → 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
Remember the RAM-SAN 500, that flash RAID array that basically is the fastest thing on the earth right now? Well, if you’re a special effects artist or run a huge, high speed media database or something, you might need a little more space than they have available. So what do you do? You stack eight of them on top of one another and you run that thing as one hell of a high-speed storage… → Read More
When you have something as modular as a PC, with all its little bits individually replaceable but still interdependent, it stands to reason that advances in one area might necessitate changes in another. Better video cards demand faster interfaces; thus, PCI Express x16. Faster processors and motherboard functions require more power; thus, more pins on the connector. Now, SSDs are taking over the… → Read More
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