SSD Drives: Faster Bigger Cheaper
2008 Is The Year Of SSD's For Consumers
The SSD market is changing so rapidly it's unreal. At January 2008 CES a ton of Solid-State disk products were announced. Only dribble of SSD's came out as NONE of the manufacturers wanted to reveal their pricing. The first to lay their cards down would get undercut. Then the bloodbath began. And the dribble became a deluge of shipping drives. SSD transfer rates are now pushing 200mpbs Read speeds. Price per gigabyte, better design, and SSD read/write reliability is improving each month and prices are dropping. That is to say; 'Welcome to this website!'
Last Updated: December 29, 2008
Solid-State High Performance Means:
- SSD Costs BELOW $3 GB Per Gigabyte
- Fast Data Reads Exceeding Hard Drives
- High-Density 100-200mbps NAND Flash
- Interfaces: SATA I & II + IDE-ATA
- No Moving Parts - No Access Noise
- Weight Saving ~50% Less Than HDD's
- Zero Latency With No Seek Time
- Lower Power Consumption and Heat
- Extended Product and Laptop Battery Life
- Shock Resistance - No Drop Risk
- Standard Form-Factors and Screw Mounts
- 1.8" 2.5" 3.5" Drives + Adapters-Brackets
Can You DIGG it? Bookmark To Track Pricing In The SSD Marketplace
SSD DRIVES OF NOTE: December 12, 2008
Intel's Top Performer: SLC Single-Layer 32GB SATA-300 SSD with the highest Read AND WRITE performance to date: At a price - ~$699
Patriot PE128GS25SSDR Warp Series Extreme Performance 128GB SATA-II 2.5" SSD
Super Talent 2.5" 120GB MasterDrive MX SATA2 SSD
OCZ OCZSSD2-2C120G 120GB 2.5-Inch Core Series V2 SATA II + USB SSD
This drive features a MINI-USB connector beside the
SATA interface. - A brilliant innovation allowing
you to use the drive without having to internally
mount the SSD at all. Great for testing, backups,
epescially for computer technicians. SMART DESIGN
that's also features OCZ's impressive 170 MB/s read
and 98 MB/s write speeds.
Imation/Mtron Solid State MOBI 3000 - FULL SIZE 3.5" Mounts - SATA-150
Mtron ships some of the fastest SSD's known to date -
and are co-branding with Imation. Mtron's drive
controller and flash NAND technology splits the line
into a 'Value' 3000 series, and a high-performance SSD
7000 line - priced accordingly. They also make 3.5"
form-factor direct replacement drives, whereas most
others are focusing on smaller laptop/portable 2.5"
and 1.8" drive sizes. Mtron's premium 7000 series SSD
has mind blowing benchmarks detailed here at
NextLevelHardware.com
Looking for VALUE? $85 SSD from PQI 32GB MLC Drive: Up to 150mpbs Read - 90mbps Write Speeds + mini USB 2.0 Port
PHOTOFAST CR-9000 2.5" SSD : 6 slot SDHC to SATA SSD adaptersupports any size 4GB/8GB/12GB/16GB/32GB/64GB/128GB/192GB
Convert your 2.5 SSD to standard 3.5" mounts w/an ICY DOCK ADAPTER CASE
Tom's Hardware has an informative take and Solid-State Mtron benchmarks pitted against a WD Raptor 10k RPM drive and the rip-snortin'
250gb
7200rpm 16mb cache SATA II 2.5" Scorpio Black series
laptop drive.
eBay's starting to list an interesting selection of solid-state drives - tho beware of discontinued, previous generation, used SSD's:
MISCELLANEOUS SSD NEWS AND TIDBITS
Feeling sticker shock? Conventional spinning disk drives still deliver the most bang for the buck. In traditional platter drives, one of the top performing laptop drives is the Western Digital Scorpio BLACK 320gb 2.5"
At
prices around $100, the Bloack series is both BIG +
FAST - and a safe bet until you're ready for an SSD.
July 3rd, 2008: Apple announced a $500 price-drop on the Apple MacBook Air SSD Laptop
French website HardMac had an interesting tidbit today on DIY MacBook AIR SSD upgrade replacement:
"You will need 1.8" PATA SSDs, 5mm thick featuring a ZIF socket. There are different sizes of ZIF, you will need the smallest version. To our knowledge, only SSDs from Samsung or Supertalent are compatible with the MacBook Air, with storage capacity topping at 64GB."
If it's any consolation to "Classic" white and black MacBook owners Apple MacBook
Most SSD's manufactured today use the SATA - SERIAL interface. But 40-pin ATA drives can be found at ATA & SATA SSD's
Choose carefully: Newer Transcend models such as
Transcend 2.5" Solid State Disk 64 GB - Internal 2.5"
IDE/ATA
from thier faster next generation are available.
Transcend has been in the SSD market a long, long,
long time for industrial, military and embedded
markets. So they might be good at leveraging a faster
drive lineup and putting the Price-Squeeze on everyone
else.
Sandisk 32GB & 64GB 2.5" consumer market drives now in wide production as are their pSSD 1.8" Parallel ATA models. Sandisk enjoys consumer mind-share, shelf-space and wide distribution from their reputation for flash memory alone. I can forsee them dominating the consumer space in SSDs given their marketing prowess.
TDK is working on an "HS1" series line of 1.8-inch SLC solid-state drives with the Micro Serial-ATA (SATA) interface. The Micro SATA specification provides for a smaller connector for the high-speed SATA interface used widely in PCs today.
Lexar announces Crucial Technologies
ARS Technica has a great article on NAND SSD's expected to reach and exceed 200mbps
