SSD Drive Toolkit

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.

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:

Recently we reported on problems with the Intel firmware update for its SSD. New version of firmware  was supposed to speed up disk and activate the special control command (TRIM) in Windows 7. But with these improvements some users have received an addtitional surprise – their computers became unable to boot the operating system. After pour of complaints started to rush on Intel, the company quickly removed updated firmware from public access.

But now, after a month passed, Intel is ready to give the consumers of its SSD new advantages of TRIM and accelerate their device. New firmware version 02HD together with the updating tool v1.5 should finally give the holders of a 160 GB SSD promised 40% sequential write boost. In the first reviews of users, everything works as it supposed to be , so if you own a Solid State Drive from Intel, you’d better get latest update.
That’s what Intel wrote about the release:

This firmware update tool provides the latest firmware for the following Intel SSDs in all capacities:
-  Intel® X25-M/X18-M SATA SSD on 50nm (black case)  - updates to FW version 8820
-  Intel® X25-E SATA SSD on 50nm (black case)             - updates to FW version 8850
-  Intel® X25-M/X18-M SATA SSD on 34nm (silver case)  – updates to FW version 02HD
This firmware will enable your SSD to deliver the best performance in your PC. Use this update tool to get the latest production firmware.

OCZ Technology has announced the release of 3,5 ” SSD Colossus series. New line of Solid State Drives supposed to be used in high-performance segment, which requires a large amount of disk space. It is assumed that target audience of these flash drives are enthusiastic and corporate level customers. Senior model has a capacity of 1 TB.

In addition to the increased capacity Colossus SSDs with SATA II interface have high speed parameters due to the internal RAID0 architecture. According to OCZ, the new series of drives are excellent with such tasks as moving small files while working with email, web surfing, file transferring. Test results to confirm this information are not provided, but the specification of the solid sate drives is promising: maximum read speed is 260 Mb/s, write – 260 Mb/s, long continuous recording – 220 Mb/s (for 128-GB model -140 Mb/s).

Series is represented by four models: 128 GB, 256 GB, 512 GB and 1 TB. Maximum number of IOPS operations (input/output per second) in random write access for 4 Kb file equals to 14280, 16100, 12300 and 13300 respectively. For comparison: for a  160 GB X25-M Intel SSD this parameters is 8600. OCZ Colossus based on multilevel flash memory cells (MLC), has 128 Mb cache and are equipped with two controllers. Other characteristics are: seek time is less than 1 ms, the maximum impact power – 1500 G, mean time between failures (MTBF) – 1,5 million hours. Devices are enclosed in aluminum shell measuring 146 x 101,6 x 25,4 mm. Price of Colossus 500 GB (OCZ refers to Amazon.com) – $ 1770.

Once Intel has released a new version firmware for the X25-M solid state drives, she began to receive complaints from consumers, to Score stated that new dress broke their device.
The representative of Intel’s NAND Solutions Group at the customer support forum said the company plans to release fixed firmware by the end of  November.

Firmware upgrade was also designed to expedite the work speed of X25-M SSD. It is necessary part for of Intel SSD Toolbox, which monitors and manages the X25-M on operating systems Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7. New firmware and the Intel SSD Optimizer enable using of special command from the Windows 7 ATA Data Set Management (known as TRIM), which helps sustain good performance of solid state disk. TRIM physically removes files from the disk, which were previously marked for removal. For owners of the 160GB SSDs updated firmware will also increase thesequential write speed to 100 MB/s, it is 40% higher than current values.

The Intel Company has released special software called SSD Toolbox, which includes updated firmware for it’s advanced solid-state drives X25-M series and SSD Optimizer, which will improve performance of the SSD. New firmware in conjunction with SSD Optimizer and SSD Toolbox allows you to use a special ATA-command  to ensure continued high performance. This command, called Trim, synchronize list of actually deleted files with list of files, which are deleted but still physically exist on drive. Trim command tells SSD what exactly blocks became available. In other operating systems new tools for optimization are not yet available because the Trim command is part of Windows ATA Data Set Management Command and is only implemented in Windows 7. So Intel SSD will work faster only in Windows 7 for now.

Drives X25-M series are relatively new and are manufactured by the most modern 34 nanometer technology. Despite the novelty, these drives are affected of the general SSD problem – “degradation” after rewriting a large amount of data. According to the developers, the gain in speed from the new firmware and optimizing utility can be different. For 160 Gb Solid State Disk write speed is increased from 70 Mb/s to 100 Mb/s.

Intel SSD Toolbox Screenshot

It should be noted that experts from WindowsITPro reported that the Trim improves drive performance not in all cases, but only after complete removal of files. If you just  rewrites existing files, the level of degradation of the drive remains the same as before the using Trim command.

In any event, if you are using Intel X25-M SATA drives, you should be sure to download and install updated firmware and a set of utilities SSD Optimizer and SSD Toolkit to optimize the placement of files on the SSD-drive. You can use this link: http://www.intel.com/go/ssdtoolbox/

Recent news about hard drive Barracuda XT (ST32000641AS) often contained reference to the fact that Seagate has released a most capacious and the fastest HDD in the world. Only inquisitive minds were aware that new  hard disk drive with reading speed 140 MB/s leaves SATA-600 interface capabilities (600 MB/s) uncalled.

Marvel SSD with SATA 600

The optimists stated that Solid State Drives will help to reveal the potential of the new interface. Workers of PC World searched Marvell website and managed to discover the demo system equipped with a SSD having SATA-600 interface. Of course, support of the new interface on the motherboard side was provided by Marvell 88SE9123 controller, which after latest amendment got rid of problems with the support of Parallel ATA. These problems with PATA have retained the majority of motherboard manufacturers to integrate the first version of the controller on its products. Renovated Marvell 88SE9123 will soon be delivered.
Mysterious SSD with Marvell logo on the lid shown in benchmark data transfer rate of about 360 MB/s. Now this is the result which is unattainable for the solutions with SATA-300 and opens capabilities of SATA-600.

The first and still the only manufacturer supplying 34-nanometer SSDs based on MLC NAND memory is Intel. Unfortunately, new generation of solid state drives, presented with fanfares and exclamations, almost immediately encountered a critical bug that can cause complete loss of data. While Intel fixes the problem another manufacturer announced release on its new SSD.

Toshiba declared the beginning of supply to big OEM partners of new drives, which use 43-nanometer technology for flash memory. Devices have 64, 128, 256 and 512 Gb capacity and 1.8/2.5 inches forms. They are supposed to be used in new laptops, gaming and entertainment PCs.

Toshiba claims maximum reading speed is 230 Mb/s. Writing speed of this drives is slightly lower – 180 Mb/s. New SSDs have built in load balancing tools, that will help to increase life cycle of device. There’s also SATA II interface for connection to the PC and opportunity to use AES encryption algorithm.

Intel has confirmed the existence of a problem with its own new generation Solid State Drives and suspended sales. New SSDs are manufactured with 34 nanometer technology. In comparison with available on the market Intel’s SSD drives, these devices has more capacity, better performance and lower cost.

The issues in question relates to an error in the SSD’s firmware. If user will set BIOS password and then will delete it, there’s probability of failure that leads to loss of access to the information stored on SSD. Intel strongly recommends don’t proceed manipulations with BIOS password to users who have already bought new Solid State Drives. The company works hard to eliminate errors and promised to release corrected version of firmware within two weeks.

New generation 34-nanometer Intel SSDs are now manufactured in the 2.5/1.8 inches form factors and has 80\160 Gb capacity.