SuperTalent releases new relative affordable SSD drives

After being successful with memory chips, SuperTalent is extending its reach to SSD drives. Its new models that have capacities of 30, 60 and 120GB will cost $299, $449 and $699 respectively. The good thing is that they incorporate the newer MLC (Multi-Level Cell) technology. As previously mentioned, MLC technology is one of the technical features that will propel SSD drives to widespread adoption. (continued)

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6 reasons laptop manufacturers love SSDs

I recently wrote a post about how SSDs are expected to become ubiquitous and cost competitive by 2011. At the end of the post, I mentioned that it is not just a matter of technological development pushing things forward, and that it is also in the interest of laptop manufacturers to sell SSD equipped models as soon as they can. And here is why:

1. Fast read/write speeds: SSDs have started with competitive data rates and as more manufacturers put resources behind them within 2008 we will see them outpacing traditional drives. It is estimated that Intel will offer 200MB/100MB read/write speeds. Numbers will improve with time and competition.
2. Rapidly improving capacities: If you have followed what has happened with camera flash memory, you already know that the price that gets you a certain capacity now, will most likely buy you a lot more -in some cases double the initial capacity- after a few months to a year. With Toshiba to offer 512MB SSDs in 2009, be sure that hard disc capacities will be soon matched, and when the economics allow, exceeded. (continued)

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SSDs (Solid State Drives) to become cost effective by 2011

Happy with your super spacious 320GB hard disc? Wait till SSDs really start to come. At the moment they have fast read/write speeds, but that’s about it. You have to wrestle with limited capacities and prices that can instead get you some really nice tech goodies.

For laptop companies, SSDs are something like a godsend as they prolong battery life and take crash prone hard discs out of the reliability equation. According to Crave, while Toshiba currently offers capacities up to 128GB, it plans 512GB SSDs as soon as 2009. Overall, SSDs are expected to become cost effective by 2011. There is two driving forces behind SSD technology:

Falling costs: If cost falls by 50% annually, SSDs will stop being an ultra-expensive option (that can on its own buy a new laptop) and by 2011 it is expected that their price performance ratio will make them competitive to conventional hard discs.

(continued)

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Panasonic announces 64GB P2 card

Only last week we talked about how Fujifilm will sell P2 cards and how the 64GB model will offer enough capacity to avoid changing storage media while recording longer events. The fact that Panasonic -the company that brought us P2 cards- responds with its own P2 card is no coincidence.

Fujifilm will sell P2 flash cards for DV recording

Everybody is salivating over Panasonic’s P2 flash storage cards for digital video. They offer all the right -fast- data flow rates and are robust enough for even the roughest video applications. The main sticking point has always been incredibly high prices.

Fujifilm decided that now is the right time to market P2 cards and will initially sell 16GB and 32GB models, while later this year a 64GB model will be released. The later will give some breathing space to users that currently use mostly 8GB cards -for cost reasons- and have to swap P2 cards every few minutes.

BiTMICRO introduces 1.6 TB solid-state high performance storage

Hard-disc? What hard-disc? Spinning platters and moving heads are not yet out of fashion for our personal computers, but in high performance space and military applications expectations are very different. BiTMICRO is very experienced in this field and is now upping the ante by offering 1.6 TB of capacity -up from the previous 832 GB- with the E-Disk Altima Ultra320 SCSI SSD -phew!

It comes in standard 3.5 inch form factor and the transfer rate is a fast 230 MB/sec. What is amazing however, is neither its capacity, nor its data transfer rate. This thing operates in temperatures between -40 and +85 degrees Celsius, can withstand shocks up to 1500 Gs and has a reliability that many devices would envy. BiTMICRO is certainly going to great lengths to ensure manufacturing precision for reliable use of a lifetime.

eSATA trying to catch up with USB and Firewire

eSATA is offering the convenience of internal SATA speeds with a connector that lets external drives be connected to a PC. The aim is to provide the convenience of USB or Firewire. The later have been around for some time now, have a huge user pool and present a formidable obstacle to wide eSATA adoption. In an effort to attract more customer attention, the Serial-ATA International Organisation (SATA-IO) will bring in the second half of 2008 a new version called Power Over eSATA. It will offer enhanced convenience as no power connection will be required for external drives of up to 2.5 inches.

So far, very few PC users are even aware of the presence of eSATA, while the number of motherboards and PCs supporting it is limited.

Drobo Share offers what users were crying for

With the Drobo storage device Data Robotics dared create the storage device everybody was dreaming of. A box that can take up to four SATA disc drives of differing sizes that can safely store our files. This array overcomes the limitation of using identical discs for a regular NAS or a simple mirror array. At $500 it doesn’t come cheap, but people loved the simplicity of dropping in any SATA drive and utilising the full capacity for safe back-ups. The problem was that the Drobo is not a NAS and relies on a USB connection, and this was the reason users -including myself- were hoping for an Ethernet equipped version.

Data Robotics comes to the rescue with the Drobo Share.

Flash products at CES 2008 looking good!

The craze started with camera storage. Flash memory is now taking faithful care of all our photographic needs while people typically carry flash memory sticks with them at all times. In fact, we have become so spoiled, that hard disc drives look big, noisy and old fashioned. I am not saying of course that I dislike 500 GB or 1 TB of sweet cheap storage, but new flash product releases at CES 2008 look indeed very nice.

Pretec is once again putting on an impressive capacity show with compactflash cards of up to 48 GB and 50 MB/sec transfer rates! Compactflash card size has traditionally given them an edge over the smaller types, but SD and Memory Stick cards are not far behind.