OCZ has made a lot of progress since introducing it’s first SSD in August of 2008 and their latest model continues to improve. While most MLC SSDs using the JMicron controller have been plagued with issues such as stuttering, the OCZ Apex drive takes a unique approach to remedy this. OCZ is not a manufacturer of the SSD chips so they don’t have a lot of control over the logic controller like Intel which SSDs don’t have this problem. But OCZ does have enough leeway to do some engineering and they have come up with a way to avoid the issues by using two controllers in a RAID setup. The result is a larger capacity drive with better performance without many of the issues that plague previous drives. PC Perspective was able to get ahold of this drive and test it out. If you are interested in the benchmarks please check out the links below.
Full Article: PC Perspective
Intel will soon release their latest SSD the X25-M which is a 2.5 inch drive with 160GB of capacity. The 1.8 inch versions, the X18-M, also with 160GB, will follow in the next month. These drives are of the MLC variety, but Intel does offer the faster SLC SSDs in 32GB capacity with the X25-E Extreme. Tests done on the Intel SSDs have shown that they are the fastest drives currently available to consumers. As of this time there has not be a specific price mentioned, but it should come soon as these begin to pop up in the retail distribution.
Full Article: Tech Radar
Earlier this year Samsung had announced that by the end of 2008 it would start producing 256GB SSDs essentially quadrupling the capacity in just a year. These new drives are also much faster than their predcessors featuring sequential read rates of 220 megabytes per second and sequential write rates of 200 megabytes per second. This brings the speeds of both write and read closer together which had been very asymetrical with previous SSDs. There was no mention of the random write speeds which has been a problem for all SSDs so far. The speed for this SSD is derived from its single-platform design which consists of a chip controller, 40 nm NAND flash, and Samsung’s proprietary firmware. The drive consumes 1.1 watts of power which is less than the 2+ traditional harddrives consume and it weighs in at 81 grams. Pricing for this drive has not been released yet no has any availability date for retail.
Full Article: CNet
After releasing a 128GB SSD and prepping to begin mass production on the 256GB model, Samsung has started to go after low-cost netbooks by releasing 8, 16, and 32GB SSDs that are only 30% the size of normal 2.5 inch SSDs. The speeds on these MLC based drives are a respectable 70-90 MB/sec. There is no official word on the price of these SSDs, just that they will start mass production next month and the latest netbooks soon after.
Perhaps since Dell knew about these SSDs ahead of time since they still have not released their netbooks, Dell 910, even having many rumors pin the release date sometime in August and it is almost over. Maybe they were waiting for these so that they could beef up their offerings. Only time will tell.
Full Article: Business Wire
Seagate doesn’t currently have any drives in the SSD market. Seagate currently is one of the largest makers of traditional hard drives and while it foresees a time when the solid state drive (SSD) is a better value than traditional HDDs; that time is not now.
Seagate announced that next year it will double its highest capacity traditional HDD to 2TB and will introduce its first SSD. CEO Bill Watkins says Seagate will first target enterprise customers with its SSDs where the benefits of lower power consumption and faster data access will be most welcome. The enterprise environment will also be willing to pay the premium SSDs will still demand whereas the majority of the consumer market is not willing to pay the premium at this time says Seagate.
PC World quotes Watkins saying, “SSDs are not price-competitive yet.” The cost per gigabyte for SSDs isn’t expected to come down for several years. Watkins believes that SSDs will become a focus for Seagate when the cost per gigabyte of SSD storage is around $0.10.
Currently, the cost per gigabyte for the average SSD is about $3.58 per gigabyte according to Krishna Chander, an analyst at iSuppli. There are problems with SSDs to be tackled over the next few years other than price. The typical SSD still has a storage capacity too low for most users and the SSD lifespan is short compared to a traditional HDD.
The answer to the problem of durability may lie in using the SSD for data reading and fast access to commonly used files and having less frequently used stuff moved off to a HDD for more permanent storage according to some. Despite the fact that Seagate doesn’t currently sell SSDs, it does own several patents that cover technology currently used in many SSDs on the market.
Full Article: Daily Tech
The news of the 2 TB drive should help push the current 1 TB drive price down in the coming months. It is interesting to see that they didn’t pick any capacity in between and went straight for 2 TB. I think they also made a wise choice to begin SSD development since that is the trend the storage market is heading. Plus more competition is always welcome.
Intel doesn’t enter markets gently. Its new high-capacity solid-state drives (SSDs) are expected to jolt a market currently dominated by Samsung, Toshiba, and SanDisk.
At the moment, Intel offers small-capacity chip-level (what are called Thin Small Outline Packages or TSOPs) technology that provides end-product sizes ranging up to 16GB. But this modest line of products will get a big boost in the second quarter when Intel offers 1.8- and 2.5-inch SSDs ranging from 80GB to 160GB in capacity, said Troy Winslow, marketing manager for the NAND Products Group at Intel. Intel’s new SSDs will compete with Samsung, for example, which is slated to bring out a 128GB SSD in the third quarter.
With new competition, drive speeds will jump. Currently, the fastest SSDs from companies like Samsung approach 100MB/second for reading data. “What I can tell you is ours is much better than that,” Winslow said. Hard drives typically read data at about half this speed.
“We will be supplementing our product line with a SATA offering,” he said. Serial ATA, or SATA, is an interface used in high-performance hard disk drives. Intel’s products will be based on the SATA II specification that offers speeds of 3 gigabits (Gb) per second. Samsung is now shipping 64GB SSDs to Dell using the same technology.
Full Article: CNet
This is some exciting news for those of us who are waiting for SSD prices to drop and storage to increase. I know Samsung has committed to delivering a 256 GB SSD by the end of the year, so this news should help keep them honest. If expectations are met, then the capacity will have quadrupled in a year which is incredible. SSDs are definitely the wave of the future in storage, just depends on when they become mainstream. Hopefully with this news they will arrive sooner than later.