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 and 500MB/s writes. → 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 beast, though, and right now it looks like most SSDs aren’t really equipped to fully delete data. Why? It’s kind of complicated. → 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 equipped with 64MB of DRAM cache and come with a USB 2.0 interface. → 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 a bill! → 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 you’re running a Trim-friendly OS like Windows 7. Don’t expect all this SSD goodness to be affordable, though. → 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 considering the solid state market aside from these enterprise-level drives that have just been announced. → 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 revolution is moving along as we speak, a sort of slow revolution that will take many years to replace our trusty mechanical hard drives. Cost is one issue, but that’s changing, and the other is the idea of SSD wear and tear. You may have heard that consumer SSD drives have memory cells (which hold the 1s and 0s in SSDs) that wear out after 10,000 discharges. This leads to a sort of data fragmentation which can be damaging to both capacity and speed. In practice, that can be many years, but how the cells wear down, when, and how to minimize it is a serious area of research. Configuring the drive controller differently can lead to huge increases in performance, major lengthening of mean time before failure, and all that. Anand covers a lot of these issues in detail in this monster of a post. → 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 they’d easily hit that, but you’d also be right to expect more from a configuration like this. → 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 before it hits its absolute maximum — one electron per cell — and even that is ridiculous. → 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 points I thought were particularly interesting: → 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 and are looking for the tech that will take them over it. Graphene may be the answer they’re searching for — or not. → Read More
