Hitachi Global Storage Technologies has announced the Ultrastar enterprise-class solid-state drive (SSD), which it claims is the industry’s first to use 25nm single-level cell (SLC) NAND flash.
Kingston appears to be only the first in what might be an industry wide move towards reducing pricing for NAND flash based products, as no SanDisk is reported to be following in Kingston's footsteps. SanDisk is said to be slashing the price of its retail flash memory cards and USB drives to keep up with the competition.
Intel has finally launched its 520 series of SSDs – previously codenamed Cherryville – its first SSD with a SandForce controller and a model set to replace the Marvell powered 510 series. The question is if this will make Intel a "me too" SSD manufacturer or if the company has managed to bring anything to the table.
With speculation that both motherboards and potentially DRAM will be increasing in price in the next few months, it looks like NAND flash based products aren't following the same trend. Kingston is said to be dropping is pricing on at least some of its NAND flash based products by as much as 15 percent.
PCI-Express SSD drives are not new in the market, with the technology being implemented in several portable devices and companies offering various PCI-E SSD drives for home and professional applications. One of the first to offer a commercial PCI-E SSD drive in the form of a PC card was OCZ, several years ago. The company today offers several similar devices, two of which we have here today; the RevoDrive X2, successor of the first PCI-E based SSD drives and designed for enthusiasts and the RevoDrive 3 X2, an improved version of the same device for workstation/professional use. Are 2.5” SATA SSD drives not fast enough for you? Then read on…
As one of the many companies to have recently pulled out of the hard drive business, Fujitsu hasn't made any real inroads into the SSD market, although this looks set to change with the introduction of a new series of SSD's in the retail market. For the time being it appears the new SSD's are only available in the APAC region and we don't have any details with regards to wider availability.
Even though SSDs are a relatively new technology and market penetration is not yet extensive, demand from performance-crazed enthusiasts has led several of the major manufacturers to release products designed for maximum performance regardless of their high cost. Today we will examine OCZ’s currently fastest 2.5” SSD offering, the Vertex 3 Max IOPS 240GB drive. As the name suggests, this disk has been designed and tuned to deliver the best possible IOPS performance which current controllers and flash memory technologies allow. How well it can perform in both synthetic benchmarks and real-world applications? We will find out in this review.
The SSD market is continuously growing, yet high capacity devices will most likely not be affordable by the bulk of consumers for several years to come. Even after the Thailand catastrophe which increased mechanical drive prices by as much as 300%, high capacity SSDs were far too expensive to be competitive. Many manufacturers are working on solutions to improve hard disk drive performance without having to use a large capacity SSD; Intel introduced the SRT (Smart Response Technology) n their Z68 chipset, Seagate designed hybrid mechanical drives with a small SSD cache installed and OCZ introduced various solutions, the most popular being a hybrid PCI-E 1TB drive. OCZ however also introduced another very interesting product, an SSD baptized “Synapse”, which has been designed to be used as a plug & play caching solution. OCZ promises SSD speeds while using virtually any mechanical HDD of up to 2TB capacity as a primary system disk. Sounds too good to be true? We will find out in this review.
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Kingston showed off some of its latest creations alongside the ongoing International CES event, in Las Vegas. Visiting journalists were shown a variety of products from Kingston's PC memory and SSD portfolios.
As notebooks and even more so Ultrabooks are getting slimmer, so are the needs for slimmer storage drives and Memoright has announced that it has launched a slimmed down version of its FTM Plus series of SSDs called the FTM Plus Slim. Ok, so the name doesn't exactly make sense, but its new 7mm thick SSD will allow for a wide range of notebooks and at least some Ultrabooks to be upgraded after purchase.
With Intel's Ivy Bridge based Ultrabooks and a fair few other Ivy Bridge notebooks and desktops expected to offer Thunderbolt connectivity – the first time for computers no from Apple – it looks like several companies are getting interested in the still relatively new, high-speed interface. OCZ has shown off its upcoming external SSD with Thunderbolt interface at CES, as well as its new Indilinx Everest 2 SSD controller.
SSD sales are expected to reach a record high this year, following on from a phenomenal year of growth in 2011, according to a study by the International Data Corporation (IDC).
OCZ is yet another company which started off as a computer RAM manufacturer and later diversified into other areas of the market. Nowadays OCZ is a renowned manufacturer of computer RAM, power supply units, solid state disk drives and more. OCZ however is one of the very few companies which offer mSATA SSD drives for high end notebooks and embedded systems. Today we are going to have a look at the Nocti 60GB SSD, a mSATA device designed mostly for high end notebooks and desktop systems, the motherboards of which come with an available mSATA slot.
After the Thailand catastrophe which tripled the prices of mechanical drives, solid state drives became a much more appealing option for many users; especially for performance-crazed enthusiasts. It also increased the sales of high performance and capacity drives, even though the bulk of the sales still rely on low capacity, cost effective products. Power users require not only a very fast device but sometimes also a device large enough to store their data and with proven reliability, with storage becoming a critical issue particularly when using notebook computers which are limited to a single internal 2.5” drive. This is where Corsair came in with the release of the Performance Pro series 256GB drive, a product designed to offer high performance, adequate capacity and maximum reliability to power and professional users.
Is it just us or are we seeing nearly a new SSD for hard drive caching on a daily basis now? Well, no matter, Crucial has announced its entry into the SSD caching business with a new drive that the company calls the Adrenaline which in essence is a Crucial m4 SSD, a bracket and some caching software, of which the latter makes this an interesting offer.
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