SSD Drive Toolkit

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.

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.

G-Technology company announced the first in the industry external storage drives that are built on the basis of solid-state drives in the 2.5 inches form factor.

New models are G-DRIVE mini SSD with capacity 120/250 Gb and G-RAID mini SSD with capacity 250/500 GB. The second one SSD Drive use solutions with support of Raid 0/1. Developers are confdent that their device will be interesting primary for advanced users, engaged in the processing of digital photos and video outside the studio.
According to the manufacturer, the lack of moving parts makes the product is very resistant to the adverse effects of vibration, shock and changes in temperature. In addition, these products are characterized by relatively low power consumption and low noise level.
Communication opportunities are represented with FireWire 800, FireWire 400 and USB 2.0 interfaces that G-DRIVE mini SSD has and eSATA that added to G-RAID mini SSD along with above interfaces.
It’s expected that sales if new drives will start in january 2009, the G-DRIVE mini SSD can be purchased at a price of $ 600 (120 GB) or $ 1300 (250 GB), while the acquisition of G-RAID mini SSD will cost $ 1000 (250 GB) or $ 2200 (500 GB).

Taiwanese manufacturer of flas-memory devices, Power Quotient International (PQI) is going to introduce its new SSD drives on CES 2009. It would be not only internal drives but also external storages and even ExpressCard-based devices for mobile computers.

PQI SSD Drive S525

The traditional SSD Drives will become two new models S518 and S525, made in 2.5-inch format with maximum capacity at 128GB. These models will have SATAII interface for connection to the system.

PQI SSD S520

S520 SSD designed for mobile systems has slighty unusual view because of USB connection port. Thus S520 can be connected not only to your laptop but also desktop PC as well as systems without ExpressCard slot. Capacity of novelties – 32 GB.

PQI SSD S530

Last but not least interesting model is the Combo Card S530. This device supports eSATA port as well as USB connection. Thus it would hard work to connect it to a personal computer. Maximum reading speed is 90 Mb/s. Of course if you use USB speed is reduced to the capacity of the interface. You can write to hte Combo Card S530 upto 64 GB of data.