SSD Drive Toolkit

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.

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

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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.

Intel SSD Roadmap 2009

According to the leaked Intel’s SSD roadmap (that you can see above) capacity if its solid-state drives will be doubled by the end of 2009. This is due to the transition from old 54nm technology to 32nm. New technology process together with an updated controller will improve SSD performance. The new SSD lineup will include 3 capacities for the X18-M and X25-M MLC SSDs: 80GB, 160GB and 320GB. For the top Intel’s model X25-E SLC SSD will be 2 capacities available: 64GB and 128GB. Detailed pricing is unknown but we can expect low price/GB of capacity at the moment of new solid-state drives release.

Transcend prepared a new line of portable SSDs. Stylish 1.8″ solid-state drives weigh only 50 grams. The black glossy box measuring 80 x 50 x 12.5 mm fits either 32 (84 euros) or 64 (135 euros) or 128 (205 euros) GB data depending on model.

Transcend SSD

Drives are equipped with eSATA and USB2.0 port. All 1.8-inch SSD doesn’t show high speed of reading and writing (in comparison with their 2.5″ brothers) – this is price for the small size . In this case,”price” resulted in 90 MB/s reading and 50 Mb/s writing speed.

The CES (Consumer Electronic Show) exhibition was the scene of many exciting products with strong epithets. PureSilicon company showed Solid-State Drive with a maximum storage density nowadays. The device is built in 2.5-inch size and has 1TB capacity.

pureSilicon 1TB Nitro

Physically this SSD has dimensions 100.2×69.85×9.5 mm. Four devices, known as 1TB Nitro, can be installed in one slot defisgnef for 3.5-inch HDD, which allows significant volume savings and oppotunity to reduce power consumption. In active mode SSD consumes 4.8W, in idle mode – 0.1W. In terms of volume units, density storage of 1TB Nitro is 15.4 GB/cm^3, that is tree times as high as any other SSD on the market.
The device is equipped with SATAII interface. PureSilicon claims 240 Mb/s reading speed and 215 Mb/s writing speed. Systems that demands high performance and power consumtion are the most likely scene for 1TB Nitro.

At the International Consumer Electronic Show 2009 in Las Vegas SanDisk Corporation announced release of a new generation solid-state drives designed for modern powerful laptops.

SanDisk pSSD-P2 and pSSD-S2

As reported in the published official press release new SSDs (pSSD-P2 and pSSD-S2) are positioned as a reliable and more productive alternatives to traditional mechanical hard drives. pSSD-P2 and pSSD-S2 are based on the NAND MLC (MultiLevel Cell) flash memory with SATA interface and will be available with 8, 16, 32 and 64GB capacity.
The price of newcoming models is still unknown as well as the date of of release.

The Intel company has announced the start of sales of new SSD (Solid State Drive) – X25-M 160 GB. It’s 2.5/1.8  inches disks with SATA interface. X25-M based on MLC (Multi-Level Cell) NAND flash memory chips.

Intel SSD x-25M 160GB

Intel claims that SSDs have 250 Mb/s reading speed and 70 Mb/s writing speed. Also with this device you can count on 1 200 000 hours of work without failures (average). X-25M can effectively operate in temperatures from 0 to 70 degrees Celcius scale.In addition, the product has very good resistance to adverse effects of shocks(1000G for 0.5 milisecond) and also relatively low power consumtion (150 mW during workload).

Intel future SSD plans

Intel continue to gain market of SSD with its solutions. The tactic is simple – create SSD with good quality and low price. It’s not necessary to achive best quality or lowest price, just to be better than average in both categories. Price of latest Intel’s SSD is expected around $600 for OEM vendors. But it’s possibly price will be slighty less than that for end users when we would have opportunity to order SSD X-25M. Of course it’s more expensive than price on HDD, but SSDs can do large jump in advance on notebook market during 2009. Time will tell us.