SSD Drive Toolkit

OCZ Technology Company is preparing to release a new line of solid state drives – Summit. New 2.5” SSDs have SATA interface, MLC (Multi-Level Cell) flash memory and state of the art Samsung controllers. 30 and 60 GB models contain 32 MB memory buffer for cache, while 120 and 250 GB models would have doubled memory buffer – 64 MB.

OCZ Summit SSD

Summit lineup will be on sale in late April. Depending on capacity Summit solid state drives will cost between $128 (low-end 30 GB model) up to $775 (high-end 256 GB SSD). As we see, in course of time SSD technology slow but steady becoming available to the most users.

American company Violin Memory introduced a data storage system Violin 1010. This system designed on the basis of high-performance SLC NAND flash memory and DRAM-chips. According to developers, this device can be used with a variety of intensive applications including databases and real time analysis.

Violin 1010

Models of Violin 1010 series use Violin Switched Memory (VXM) proprietary technology, which provides several advantages over contemporary solutions: improved energy efficiency (GB/W), improved latency factors and input/output IOPS performance. It’s possible to install up to 504 GB of DRAM memory and up to 4 TB flash memory. Drive can be connected to fiber-optic network, Ethernet and via the PCI Express interface. Violin 1010 supports Windows, OpenSolaris and most distributions of Linux.

Back in December last year Super Talent announced a new solid state drives lineup – UltraDrive. This lineup includes LE(base on SLC memory chips) and ME (based on MLC chips) models. Three year warranty on the LE-models is one year longer than the ME-models. And now, finally, 2.5” SSD drives of UltraDrive series are ready for purchase. LE models of UltraDrive lineup has capacities from 32 to 128GB and the top ME model has a 256GB capacity.

Super Talent UltraDrive SSD

The read/write speeds of UltraDrive LE SSD is to 230 and 170 MB/s, respectively. UltraDrive ME SSD read/write speeds are slightly lower – 200 and 160 MB/s, respectively. The cheapest 32GB solid drive UltraDrive LE worth $128, and the price of the most expensive 256GB UltraDrive ME SSD is $645. UltraDrive supports all popular operating systems. Jeremy Werner, senior product marketing manager, says, “The UltraDrive is a product that surpassed our wildest expectations, easily leaving most of today’s available SSDs in the dust. It is one of the first next-generation SSDs likely to entice users to upgrade their laptops to take advantage of noticeable performance gains in boot time, application loading, and accessing data.” Time will show it, the drives began shipping to OEMs march 18.

SSD drives which are based on flash memory in most cases are more productive than traditional hard disks with magnetic plates. SSD disks better resist to external harms. But they are much more expensive. To date, replacement of hard drive to SSD drive in the laptop adds to the price $100-600 depending on capacity.

Nevertheless we see how fast SSD drives are closing to their competitors’ price. Today you can find the low-end models with capacity of 32-64GB which can be purchased for $90-150. But 3-4 years ago price for such a device reached $1000 or even more. The question arises – when will SSD drives be selling at the same price as HDDs? And will they at last?

Brian Beard, manager of Samsung Semiconductor flash memory marketing unit, attempted to clarify the situation. According to him, the achievement of price parity is only the matter of time. Over the past five years flash memory price each year is declining dramatically – by 40%, 50%, 60% yearly or even more. And there is a tendency of further price lowering. Brian believes, SSDs would have equal price with hard disk drives in the next few years

(more…)

It’s good to know that there’s people in the world which like to do fun things. Company of friends decided to connect 24 SSDs to one PC. And they successfully did it. Moreover, the resulting experimental system was lightning-fast.

24 Samsung SSD Drives in One PC

In less than one day guys assembled powerful PCs based on two 3.2-GHz Quad-core CPU Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9775, motherboard Intel Skulltrail D5400XS, 4GB of RAM FB-DIMM DDR2-800, two ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 video cards. But the key feature of computer is disk subsystem: twenty four 256GB Samsung SSD drives with total capacity of 6 terabytes. To organize the drives massive enthusiasts used RAID-controllers Adaptec Series 5 and Areca 1680ix-24.

One of the most difficult steps was finding of the optimal configuration of SSD drives. After a series of experiments and errors had been found the best option – 10 drives connected to the controller Areca, 8 to the controller Adaptec, and the remaining 6 directly to the SATA-ports of the motherboard. In this approach fantastic performance was achieved – serial read/write speed exceeded 2GB/s. But to obtain such a result experimentalists had to disconnect one of the video cards because the computer hadn’t enough power to initialize the Areca controller. In addition they had to unplug all optical drives to free ports. Power supply to this unique system was provided by two kilowatt Corsair HX1000W units.

Let’s note some main characteristics of assembled PC:
* The speed of reading from the SSD with a serial access: 2121.29MB/s (measured using IOMeter);
* Writing speed with serial access: 2000.195MB/s (measured using IOMeter);
* Loading of all Microsoft Office applications in only 0.5 seconds;
* Loading of 53 applications in 18.09 seconds.
You can see whole process of assembling and testing in the this video:

Taiwanese company A-DATA, which has extensive experience in the development of flash memory based devices, announced release of  new generation SSD drives – SSD 300 Plus. New disks have 2.5-inch form factor and are equipped with SATA II interface. A-Data tells that they are much faster then predecessors.

A-DATA SSD 300 Plus 256GB

The secret to a significant increase in productivity of new flash drives is using of fast Mobile SDRAM memory, which serves as a cache buffer. It stores most frequently used data, thus reducing the number of requests to the ’slow’ flash circuits. This solution isn’t new – a similar scheme is used in high-performance Intel Extreme Series SSDs and in some corporate-level models from other manufacturers. Also to improve performance A-DATA applies the new controller.

The new A-DATA SSD disks have truly impressive characteristics. Stable reading speed is 250MB/s, writing speed – up to 160MB/s. Other specifications, unfortunately, has not yet been published.

There will be 32, 64, 128 and 256GB capacity options presented in A-DATA SSD 300 plus series.

About A-DATA:
A-DATA is the world’s second largest vendor of memory modules, 2006 Taiwan Top 20 Global Brands as well as Emerging Brand. The company’s main product lines include memory modules, Flash memory drives/cards, and multimedia application products. A-DATA’s corporate philosophy emphasizes constant innovation, first-rate quality and superior product performance; its innovative products have led the way in the memory industry.

Solid state drives are gaining increasing popularity and you can be sure that more and more people interest about purchasing that devices. Enthusiasts will find these drives excellent tool for getting the record results in the PCMark 2005 tests. Users who work with graphics programs will receive significant disk subsystem performance growth. For example Adobe Photoshop starts almost instantly with SSD. Gamers certainly appreciate the increased speed of levels loading etc. In any case, this technology is just interesting.

OCZ Vertex 2.5'' SSD

People from PC Perspective(pcper.com) decided to research productivity of OCZ Vertex SSD. This line of Solid State Drives is based on multilevel (Multi-Level Cell, MLC) flash memory NAND-type. This type of flash memory (MLC) is supposed to have less performance than SLC-based flash memory. Up to 64MB of cache memory is the solution to this problem in OCZ Solid State Drives. In addition, the products are based on an advanced architecture with an updated controller. This controller for OCZ Vertex 120GB is the Indilinx IDX110 chip, and cache memory module manufacturer is Elpida. The main capacity of SSD consists of Samsung chips.

For their tests researchers selected a several more drives to compare:
* OCZ Summit 250 GB SSD;
* OCZ Apex 250 GB SSD;
* Intel X25-M 80 GB SSD;
* OCZ 64 GB SSD SATA-II;
* Western Digital VelociRaptor 300 GB WD3000GLFS;
* Western Digital Raptor 150 GB.

The main competitor is Intel X25-M 80GB drive which is built on the MLC NAND flash memory. Thus, the memory type is the same as OCZ Vertex 120GB has, so let’s to see which product will be faster. Main infromation is presented below:

(more…)