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.

The interface is actually specced at 6Gb/s (~750MB/s, theoretically), so there might be a small amount of shenanigans going on here, but those are still monster speeds. Even the best consumer-grade SSDs only do about half that right now. And it fits in a 2.5″ form factor, too.

Smart is also touting their “Guardian Technology,” some on-drive tech that helps extend the life of the drive and, presumably, keep the data in order so it can be read off at those incredible speeds.

No pricing was given for the Optimus line, though it is described as being “cost-effective.” I’m guessing it’s going to be expensive as hell, but we may see some trickle down of this speed over the next year or so.

Update: There are larger-capacity SSD-based PCI cards, but strictly speaking they aren’t drives the way this one is a drive – i.e. with a serial interface and 2.5″ or 3.5″ enclosure. Could be splitting hairs, but worth mentioning.

[via Geek.com]

Here are the test results from their announcement video:

Looks mighty speedy! The aluminum casing hides a full SSD architecture, with 8 flash channels and a real live Sandforce controller.

It’ll come in 25, 50, and 100GB flavors. Prices aren’t set yet, but Super Talent said it’s going to be more like SSD than USB drive prices. Tom’s Hardware says the 50GB version will cost $110, which actually seems a bit low to me. We’ll let you know when this

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.

The new SSD 320 Series is Intel’s successor to the X25-M SATA SSD series. These new drives are great for the average user, but if you plan on doing a lot of video editing or sound production then it is worth going for the faster 510 Series. For the most part, the speeds are great at 270MB/s and 220MB/s read and write, thanks to the 3Gbps SATA II interface.

Prices

• 40GB: $89
• 80GB: $159
• 120GB: $209
• 160GB: $289
• 300GB: $529
• 600GB: $1,069

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. The issue lies in the fact that the system driver that lives on your computer sends data to the SSD to be written, and the SSD’s onboard controller writes it… but where your system thinks it is and where the SSD controller actually writes it don’t really match up.

Think of it like a coat check. You go and drop off your coat and a few of your friends’ coats as well. As far as you’re concerned, your coats are “at the coat check.” But in reality the coat is at position X, indicated by whatever’s on the ticket, and the coat check people really know where your data is. In a similar way, your computer knows where your data is, but doesn’t actually know (and can’t know, since these on-SSD systems aren’t standardized yet) where exactly it is on the SSD. And for some reason when it tries to erase things securely, it doesn’t erase where that data is, only where it thinks it is.

Something like that, anyway. The end result is that it’s very difficult to erase SSDs by the old method. The solution? Encrypt your drive from the start and then lose the key when you need to erase. They may fix this make this more intuitive in the future, but for now that’s your best bet.

The full study can be found here (PDF).

[via TechWorld and Lifehacker]

The 2.5″ versions use a 6Gb/s serial-attached SCSI interface, allowing them to top 500MB/s read and write on the 200GB and 400GB capacities, and the controller allows for 46K and 13K read and write IOPS. That’s on par with the high-end stuff, so I’m going to guess the prices will be around $3/GB or so.

The 3.5″ variety is slightly slower, using a 4GB/s connection and falling behind on read/writes — still quite fast, of course, but not quite so much as the smaller one.

Just an FYI so you know how SSD speeds and such are standing now. I don’t expect anyone to run out and buy these, but a little refresher on what’s being sold is always in order. More info over at Hitachi.

The 470 series comes in 64, 128, and 256-gig capacities, for $200, $400, and $600 respectively. As usual, you get performance increases as you go up in price and capacity, so it makes (technically) for a better buy, but who’s going to spend $600 on 256 gigs of storage? Yet who wants to spend even $200 on a 64GB SSD if it’s only half as fast as the next one up?

It’s this conundrum that has led to buyer’s paralysis, at least in my case. And in fact, it’s really not even correct. The 64GB one really isn’t inferior except in random reads per second and sustained write rate. It’s actually not a bad deal at all.

Of course, they’re only available in Europe right now. I know, very inconvenient.

[via Tech Report]

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.

The new external USB HDDs, all part of the HD-CXTU2 series (pictured above), will be available with 500GB ($130)/1TB ($180)/1.5TB ($240) or 2TB ($310) on board.

Buffalo also unveiled two new NASes today, one storing 2TB (LS-Q2.0TL/1D for $500), and the other with 1TB capacity (LS-Q1.0TL/1D for $350). The 2TB model is pictured above.

Buffalo plans to ship all of these storage devices in Japan next month, but hasn’t said anything yet regarding an international release.

Sure, 32GB is going to be barely enough for Windows 7, your programs, and a little scratch space for My Documents, and the 125/70MB/s read/write speeds are nothing to write home about, but it’s an SSD for a hundred bucks. The quickness will be apparent, even though this is the lowest grade stuff you can get. It’s still going to be faster than a spinning drive.

[via Hot Hardware]

The Force series will feature 100GB and 200GB models at launch, but Corsair has yet to announce their prices. However seeing as the slower and smaller Nova 128GB model retails for $369, it’s safe to assume that the new Force drives will retail well north of that price-point. We should find out shortly. The Force line is expected to be available within two weeks.

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.

All that dough will get you a drive that “opens files up to twice as fast as a 7,200 RPM HDD,” according to SanDisk. Read speeds reach up to 220 megabytes per second while write speeds top out at around 120 megabytes per second. The drive “can endure up to 80 teraytes of data written to it over its lifetime,” which is either a lot or a little depending upon what you’re planning to do with this drive.

SanDisk G3 Solid State Drive [SanDisk.com]

Press Release

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.

So enterprise-class SSDs: great. But will we see consumer offerings from Seagate? As prices continue to fall and demand rises, it’d be foolish for the company to not eventually get into the consumer SSD market. Just don’t plan on anyone with a Seagate nametag showing up to the party before most of the other guests.

[ Press Release | Product Page ]

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.

I’m still working through it, but it’s an easy recommendation for those of you at all interested in the nuts and bolts of the devices we use every day. He’s collected some ideas, and proposes some, for lengthening SSD life expectancy as well as speeding up read/write operations. It’s interesting to see this kind of theorizing in the public arena; you’d expect to hear it in the break room at Intel while engineers woolgather and brainstorm, but to have it all laid out for you to read like this is a treat. Well, for some.

Price is $299 for 128GB, so it’s still quite a luxury item, but the multiple-non-high-end-drives-in-RAID approach seems to be gaining traction. Of course, for that price, you can get a regular high-end SSD, but if you want to maintain that 260MB/s all the way up to a a terabyte, the Colossus is probably your best bet (though it will be expensive as hell).

There is a band-aid solution, one that is in reality already being applied: multi-layer cell arrays. You just stack one one array on top of the other and boom, double the size. Trouble is you end up with a lot of heat being trapped in there. And even stacking the arrays has its limits. So what’s next? Don’t ask me. Just don’t expect to keep being able to store twice as much stuff in your laptop every year from now till eternity. And the next time you see a hard drive or memory architecture engineer, give them a big hug from me.

The benefits of SSD over HDD are certainly well-known, but between SSDs the differences are still microscopic when compared with the former. Unless you’re planning on getting one of these insane >$1000 PCI-mounted arrays, you’re getting a lot of sameness between drives. Doubtless some manufacturers will start making real advancements that put them ahead of the pack, but as it stands it seems that no one drive (or type of SSD drive) is king of the hill. Check out this solid state roundup over at Hot Hardware, where they do in fact find one better than the others (no spoilers), but all recommendations with drives like this come with a lot of qualifications.

I can’t wait to get my first SSD and load up some games on it, but I think I’ll wait another six months or a year.

These brand new 256GB SSDs are yet to be fully tested, but a quick eval shows extremely promising results. In fact, the Intel drives get punished in write and burst speed, although read speed is comparable. Now, they’re likely to be more expensive, so it’s not a total KO or anything, but if you’re putting together an SSD-based server or workstation, you might want to wait for the results on this one to come back before you place your order.

Keep in mind that the name will be P256 instead of S256 when they go to production.

[image credit: Hot Hardware]

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.

There are two versions of the G Drive mini; a double interface and a triple interface. I’ve got the triple one with FW800, FW400 and USB 2.0 ports. The package (above cables and CD) includes a leather carrying case that you can hook up to your belt or something, although I wonder who would actually do that.

The drive is about twice as thick as a 2.5” HDD and it’s equipped with a heat sink on the bottom. Passive cooling lets the drive operate without noise. Being sturdy and well-built, I can imagine the mini to endure medium-height drops and bumps. It’s a nice-looking kit, however the edges of the cover are sharp. If you’re not careful, you could cut yourself. Considering how little effort it would take to round those edges, it’s odd that it hasn’t been done.

SSD is faster than HDD, although I didn’t notice any serious speed differences while I was copying to and from the mini. But that’s not the point. This device is for people who need portable and reliable storage — professionals who travel a lot and don’t mind spending a small fortune for an SSD. With the mini you don’t have to worry about moving around while copying files or be afraid that a single drop to the ground will kill your storage.

Pros:

- Small, reliable, silent, sturdy

- Faster than USB enclosures

- Sexy

- Leather case

Cons:

- Expensive

- Edges are sharp

Price: $599

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 SSD RAID array to see exactly what they can do?

Samsung did exactly that, and came up with some astounding numbers:

• Microsoft Office opens in 0.5 seconds.
• 53 programs take 18 seconds to start
• Entire system can be defragged in about 3 seconds

Now of course, the price to build something like this is prohibitive, but the important thing is that Samsung has proven that it’s possible, and pretty damn cool if you can set it. Bye-bye mechanical drives.

It’s kind of technical at times, but here are a couple points I thought were particularly interesting:

• SSD makers could do a 3.5″ form factor, but at current prices the components are barely filling out a 2.5″ enclosure. Fortunately rail adapters are cheap.
• Despite showing performance gains over HDDs when using SSDs, most filesystems are totally unoptimized for SSD use. Data placement is handled by the firmware, and although the drives could be “defragmented,” it’s not in the same way HDDs are. Apparently Windows 7 is ahead of the pack on SSD integration.
• Your little 1GB thumb drive uses some of the same tech, and it would be possible to make a full-size hard drive out of that quality of cell and driver. It would be really cheap, but it would be extremely slow and unreliable. So keep using the major brands as a yardstick for pricing and watch out for unrealistic deals.

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.

As solid state memory technology advances, it gets smaller and smaller. IBM and AMD recently created a 22nm SRAM cell, though Intel pooh-poohed the achievement. The next generation will prove even more difficult, as the physical limitations of the material (silicon) will make arrays of the current design ineffective. So either they have to find a way to work around the problem with silicon (via multi-level cell arrays, for instance), introduce a new material like graphene, or try something completely different.

Graphene is a one-atom-thick sheet of carbon, which exhibits properties favorable to SSD engineers: when used to store a charge, it leaks little voltage, produces little heat, and works in a large range of temperatures, unlike my laptop (the battery got so cold that it thinks it isn’t there). It also will work down to a much smaller cell size — 10nm — which means more density and more storage space.

Unfortunately it’s not as simple as just switching out the materials; years of research will have to be done, but it’s one of those things that you’d better start on early or when the time comes, you’ll have beeen outflanked by more forward-thinking research teams.