SSD Drive Toolkit

Other World Computing company has introduced a new solid state drive with impressive performance characteristics. The device is called Mercury Electra 6G and can read data at the speed up to 556 MB/s and write – at the speed up to 523 MB/s.

The device is connected to a computer via SATA3 interface. According to the manufacturer, the speed of the Mercury Electra6G is 7 times more than that of conventional hard drives. If motherboard doesn’t have SATA3 interface drive can be connected to SATA2 but in this case speed will be approximately 2 times lower.

Cheapest model of Electra 6G with 120GB of capacity will cost you $230. For more demanding users, OWC offers other options, including a 240GB model for $480 and 480GB for $ 930. All three drives are available now.

Intel has introduced an updated version of the Intel SSD Toolbox (Version 3.0) for Intel’s Solid State Drives.
The new version offers improved user interface with nice-looking grapical elements, where you can see information about all drives of the system. There’s all sorts of useful information presented, including model number, capacity, version, firmware, “health” of the drive and the expected lifetime of the disk. Toolkit includes S.M.A.R.T. attributes viewer as well as SSD Identity Device information for Intel and other manufacturers.

Among the capabilites of Intel Toolbox 3.0: performance optimization by using the TRIM command, firmware updating(from Windows), complete or quick diagnostic test of a drive, checking and configuting the system for best performance of Intel SSD, which improves productivity, efficiency and reliability. Also this utility lets you perform secure data erasing on non-system Intel SSD.

You can download the utility on the Intel’s website.

I-O Data announced its latest Solid State Drive in the SSDN-SV Series. The company made doubtful decision to put SATA II interface on the device. Having SATA III interface wide spreading nowadays it looks not very understandable. New model has TRIM support,  206 Mb/s write speed, 143 Mb/s read speed and 64/128 GB capacity options. There’s no information about controller and NAND memory type used but it will available around August 2011 when I-O Data will start shipping of the SSD. Most modern SSDs are using SATA 3.0 interface and can easily deliver write/read speed way over SATA2.0 capabilities, so when some company release device with old variant of the interface one could expect low prices… But not in this case – 64 GB will be available for $158 and 128 GB for $306. I can’t call it competitive prices. But let’s hope I-O Data know what it’s doing and there’s some other qualities of this SSD which will increase overall value.

California based company Super Talent Technology revealed new SSD model of its enterprise TerraDrive series – PT3. Introduced solid state drive uses SandForce 2200 – advanced SSD controller from well know company SandForce. It also has SATA III (6 Gb/s) interface which allows PT3 to get 500MB/s read/write speed. Despite of using MLC-based flash memory PT3 delivers 2 000 000 hours MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures), good enough even for business critical tasks. You can choose from 64/120/240/480 GB variants of capacity for this SSD. Price and date of entering the market are still unknown.

SanDisk, known for its memory and flash products, has release the most miniature Solid State Drive in the world.  Its size does not exceed the size of a postage stamp and its weight is less than the weight of a paper clip.

Sandisk Smallest SSD

The device is supposed for OEM using in smartphones, tablets and othe mobile gadgets. SanDisk offers wide range of capacity for this SSD, it varies from 4GB to 64GB, so gadget manufacturers will be able to find the model that fits them best. New Solid State Drive has 100/160 Mb/s write/read speed. It’ also equipped with SATA interface what makes it compatible with large part of nowadays consumer electronics.

We still can’t tell when you’ll be able to buy electronic solutions with that SSD on board but there’s many producers prepared to use it.

G.Skill International Co. has added several new Solid State Drives models to its PHOENIX PRO series. New drives have 40, 80 and 160 GB capacity. This MLC NAND SSDs are fabricated in 2.5-inch form-factor with SandForce SF-1200 as base controller. They support SATAII interface, TRIM command and 2.000.000 hours MTBF(Mean Time Between Failures).

G.Skill Phoenix Pro 160GB SSD

As producer claims, you can expect pretty good performnace – 285/275 Mb/s read/write speed along with 50000 IOPS on 4Kb pieces.
All new solid state drives will have 3 years warranty. G.Skill hasn’t dislose any infromation about the price or selling start date.

Taiwanese company InnoDisk, which specializes in the developments of flash drives, has just announced the release of new speedy SSD drive series – Matador II. These SSDs appears as PCI-Express extension card with capacity from 128 GB to 2 TB.

Matador II SSDs were developed for high-end gaming computers but it’s not the only application of new solid state drives. InnoDisk claims that technical characteristics of Matador SSD easily allow them to be used in servers and military systems. The key feature of new series would be excellent read/write speed as manufacturer promises (but we all know about their promises… :) Matador II is supposed to deliver data transfering speed for reading at 800 MB/s and for writing at 600 MB/s. That’s not a record, there’s other devices with great theoretical speed (like G-Monster Promise SSD with 1 GB/s speed), but that’s several times faster than today’s consumer HDD has. Of course  with such a performance it’s likely Matador will be not only as fast as spaceship but also as expensive as the one.

InnoDisk plans to ship 1 million of Matador 2 SSD drives in next year, that’s really a lot for relatively small company. I don’t think they will be able to do it, but they can lower global SSD price by trying. Time will tell.

PQI – one of the few manufacturers with USB 3.0 data storage device models . That would be two devices: external hard disk drive H566 and solid state drive S533. Both drives were recently released.

External Hard Drive PQI H566 is prefabricated in 2.5-inch form factor and endowed with 8 MB of cache memory. It operates at 5400 rpm(revolutions per minute). Capacity of the model varies – 320/500/640 GB. Data reading speed for H566 is 105 MB/s, writing speed – almost 100 MB/s.

Let’s look closer to the more interesting second novelty – SSD disk PQI S533. It is made in the same form factor as H566 (2.5 inches) and supports USB 3.0 interface as well. SSD is available in 80 or 160 GB capacity versions. Its performance characteristics are really impressive: the writing speed reaches 198 MB/s and reading speed soars at 274 MB/s.  As we can see after brief calculation S533 runs almost six times faster than similar drives with old USB 2.0 interface. If S533 will really show such a performance in using it definitely will become desirable present for Christmas or New Year for any computer user.

PQI also has presented a memory card(Express Card) which has two USB 3.0 slots built-in.

Seagate Technology, the world’s largest hard drives manufacturer, announced its first Solid State Disk (Solid State Drive – SSD). Seagate Pulsar made in 2.5-inch form-factor has  height of 7 mm and is equipped with a3 Gbit/s  SATA 2. The SSD is designed for rackmount and other servers and allows to reduce energy consumption of data centers.

SLC(Single-Level Cell) lies at the heart of the drive technology, as it provides higher reliability in comparison with the multi-level structure technology, Seagate assures. According to the Seagate, Pulsar’s Annualized Failure Rate (AFR)  is 0,44%. AFR is equal to the Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) divided by the number of hours that the device worked for a year and expressed as a percentage. For example, if MTBF is 1.5 million hours and the device operates 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, his AFR is 0.58%. Basically AFR is probability of Failure for one year of the SSD usage. As for the interface SATA it was selected to meet wishes of Seagate’s clients, said the company.

Peak performance of Pulsar for 4KB-blocks is 30 thousands reads per second and 25 thousands write operations per second. Read speed of 30 thousand operations per second can be sustained by any Pulsar SSD while the write speed varies depending on the capacity of the drive – from 2600 to 10500 transactions per second (it’s pretty less than peak speed). Peak data transfer rate in the read mode is 240 MB/s, writing – 200 MB/s.

“Seagate is optimistic about the enterprise SSD opportunity and views the product category as enabling expansion of the overall storage market for both SSDs and HDDs,” commented Dave Mosley, Seagate executive vice president, Sales, Marketing, and Product Line Management. “Our strategy is to provide our customers with the exact storage device they need for any application, regardless of the component technology used. We are delivering on that strategy with the Pulsar™ drive, and you can expect additional products in the future from Seagate using a variety of solid state and rotating media components.”

The drive comes in three versions – a capacity of 50 GB (ST950011FS), 100 GB (ST9100011FS) and 200 GB (ST9200011FS). There is protection against power supply failures – device has nonvolatile cache and in case of power supply interruption, sent  to the device, but not recorded in the flash memory data is not lost. SSD’s operating temperature varies from 5 to 60 degrees Celsius, harmless non-operating temperature – from -40 to +70.

According to officials of Seagate, Pulsar will be followed by other series of Seagate Solid State Drives. Ultimately vendor intends to provide solutions for networked storage systems of higher price range (such as EMC Symmetrix), midrange (Clariion), data storage systems with direct connections to the server (DAS) and blade servers, which Pulsar focuses . Commercial delivery of the Pulsar began in September 2009.

According to Gartner in 2010 will be sold twice the SSD compared to 2009, and the volume of the market value will reach $ 1 billion. Samsung was the first large producer of traditional magnetic disk which stepped on the SSD market. Western Digital company in March 2009 has acquired SiliconSystems, supplier of solid state drives, for $ 65 million.

According to analysts, the success of Seagate at the new market will depend on the existing relationships with the partners of the company like Dell, HP, IBM and other manufacturers of enterprise solutions. It won’t be easy for Seagate to get huge slice of SSD profit as it enters the market not first by the long way. In addition to the aforementioned Samsung here already a dozen manufacturers are presented, including Texas Memory Systems, Intel, Fusion-io, STE, and Pliant, Violin Memory and SandForce.

Micron announced new SSD series with native SATA 6 Gbit/s interface support. RealSSD C300  is based on Micron’s 34nm MLC NAND technology, it also satisfies ONFI (Opena NAND Flash Interface) 2.1 standard. Manufacturer promises that using of newest SATA interface will allow SSD to reach incredibly high data read/write rates – up to 355 MB/s read and up to 215 MB/s write. That’s why Micron claims new RealSSD C300 would be the fastest SSD disk in the world for consumer market. Micron also states the SSD gets 45,000 score in PC Mark Vantage test suite, this result can really induce you to get one at home.

Micron RealSSD C300 1.8-inch SSD

RealSSD C300 will be available in 1.8-inch and 2.5-inch form factor and there will be two version of storage capacity – 128 and 256 GB. But you have to wait for Q1 2010 to buy  it as now Micron only made paper announce. Price for the SSD hasn’t been disclosed yet, but be prepared to spend several hundreds of dollars for sure.

Dean Klein, vice president of memory system development at Micron says:

The C300 SSD not only delivers on all the inherent advantages of SSDs – improved reliability and lower power use – but also leverages a finely tuned architecture and high-speed ONFI 2.1 NAND to provide a whole new level of performance.

To prove all statements Micron released video presentation where you can see RealSSD C300  vs. 7200 RPM HDD comparison. Operation system loading time is shrank, application starting speed is increased, etc. All that benefits are shown in the video below: