Solid-State computer drive storage is poised to have it's best year ever in 2012. Not just in terms of unit shipment volumes, but in awesome performance at very affordable prices.

OCZ Technologies continues to lead the pack. Fast and cheap SSD's like the OCZ Octane Series SSD deliver more bang for the buck than any solid-state drive in history. Their recent acquisition of Indilinx and its controller technology assures OCZ direct control over production capacity, design and specs of one of it's most critical components. No other company has done more for advancing the SSD market than OCZ.

Unit shipments of SSD drives are on a sharp uptick that's showing no signs of stopping. As more and more laptop and (to a lesser degree) desktop computers incorporate stock solid-state drives, there appears there will be no let-up in demand for the foreseeable future.

Hybrid SSD drives are clearly the inevitable route to both high-performance storage and affordable capacity. Seagate just released their second-generation Hybrid, the Momentus XT 750 GB Solid State Hybrid Drive that not only rectifies some of the problems of the 1st generation drives, but has refinements that takes performance to the next level. I'd suspect by the end of 2012 Seagate will take this 2.5" laptop SSD Hybrid to 1 Terabyte capacity.

The reliability of SSD storage has always been a strong selling point of SSD technology. And it only gets better. SSD drives have evolved steadily with smarter controllers and firmware that manage block allocation, wear leveling and drive reliability and Read/Write endurance with absolute finesse. Enterprise users need this MTBF reliability - and casual consumers with far less demanding needs will simply enjoy hassle-free storage technology.

Lastly, although SSD's have been primarily an INTERNAL storage solution -- The explosion of USB 3.0 SuperSpeed and Intel ThunderBolt ports slated for 2012 are going to drive a growing interest in EXTERNAL SSD drives to take advantage of the huge leap in bandwidth. So expect a lot of products that leverage solid-state drives for auxiliary and backup storage to show up in droves.

Tags: Best SSD 2012, 2012 SSD Technology

As 5th and 6th generation SATA SSD drives hit the scene in 2011 - Here's some technology advancements, predictions and product trends to watch for:

1. "Me Too" performance. Most SSD's are based on a very few drive and NAND flash controller chipsets available to OEMS. Some SSDs are simply rebranded OEM reference designs - and that puts many of them in the same ballpark of performance. With few exceptions, SandForce controller based drives are delivering the best overall consumer SSD prices and benchmarks

2. Incremental speed gains thru minor Firmware tweaks, cache size options and flash memory clock speed timing is what differentiates many drives in benchmark tests. But these performance differences may become less apparent to end users.

3. The emergence of SATA III - 6Gbps interface SSD drives. The new Serial ATA 3 spec provides the potential to DOUBLE SSD performance - in theory. As more personal computers begin to include SATA III controllers, solid-state drives will take advantage of the increased bandwidth - but unless in multi-drive RAID configurations, NAND flash speeds have to improve too.

4. 3.5" form-factor solid-state drives have become more common. Consumers want a drop-in drive replacement option and would rather not fuss with SSD adapters and brackets and whatnot. Early full-size SSD's cost a premium, but now there's little price differences between 2.5 and 3.5 models.

5. The return of more SSD drives with USB mini ports built-in - Especially SuperSpeed USB 3.0 SSD's. There's just alot of convenience with built-in USB. JMicron's revised SSD controller chipset supports this very convenient USB transfer option. Many 2nd tier SSD suppliers will rebrand JMicron based drives and compete heavily in the cheap SSD 'value' end of the market.

6. JMicron 61X controller based SSDs don't suffer from the bad reputation of slow writes and 'stuttering' that plagued their 1st and 2nd generation JMF 60X based SSDs. The JMF supports much larger DRAM cache sizes and works with a wider variety of NAND flash chips: Toshiba, Intel, and Micron - in addition to Samsung flash. Still, this controller family is only right for 'Value' drives - not top performance.

7. Intel's in-house design fab will continue to push the efficient and optimized SSD performance envelope. Intel was getting leap-frogged by the new SandForce controller drives. However, Intel's 3rd generation Intel 510 Series SSD - is now shipping in 2011 to keep up with the competition.

8. Product branding and SSD naming conventions will continue to confuse buyers in the consumer market. What's the difference between an OCZ Summit - Vertex - Apex - Turbo - EX - Solid - Solid v2 and Solid 2 series SSD? Or... a SuperTalent LE - ME - GX - GX2 - DX drive? Deep analysis of the variants by cross-referencing spec sheets and Read/Write numbers will still be needed.

9. The arrival of 5Gbps SuperSpeed USB 3.0 peripherals in 2011 will open up opportunities for higher-capacity USB 3 SSD's to be used as external backup drives. Perhaps right only for those who can afford the large 500GB+ SSD sizes most people want in a back-up disk. USB3 and Solid-State drives - especially in a RAID configuration - are a great match for the available bandwidth the SuperSpeed bus offers.

10. Likewise, the even more capable 10Gbps Intel and Mac ThunderBolt Interface introduced on Apple's MacBook Pro and iMac line will provide plenty of excess bandwidth for years to come. It's a match made in heaven for the solid-state future of Multi-Drive storage arrays.

11. SSD price competition in 2011 will likely be heaviest in the 100-GB-128GB drive market. It seems to be the sweet spot of SSD affordability with enough capacity to meet most users needs. Price pressure - and endless rebate promos will likely pull these down from around $250 closer to under $200 by the end of 2011.

Tags: 2011 SSD, Best SSD 2011

G.Skill announced it's upcoming FALCON series SATA II SSD recently -- with impressive performance numbers to rival OCZ's VERTEX which also uses the Indilinx controller. No surprise since we're simply hitting a point where the chip sets inside a solid-state disk will largely determine core benchmarks, and other aspects of Firmware and amound of onboard cache will be marginally incremental in tweaking SSD thruput #'s only to a minor degree.

G.Skill Falcon FM-25S2S-128GBF1

All things being relatively equal, we'll rapidly hit a point in the SSD market where given tiers of SSD's will start seeing rather predictable performance. As SSD's commoditize, PRICE, WARRANTY, TECH SUPPORT and the perceived value of the BRAND in the consumer market to become the differentiators as the raw numbers start to equalize.

Tags: fast ssd

On Monday March 30, 2009 - Western Digital acquired solid-state disk drive maker SiliconSystems for $65 million. WesternDigital - the current market leader in 2.5-inch computer disk drives now has a way into the growing SSD market. SiliconSystems makes SSD products for communications, industrial, embedded systems, medical, military, and aerospace. SiliconSystems' acquired product lineup includes solid-state drives with a variety of interfaces, including SATA, EIDE, PC Card, USB, 2.5-inch, 1.8-inch, and Compact Flash.

There was a time in the traditional hard disk drive industry when there were many players: Kalok, Quantum, Maxtor, Micropolis to name but a forgotten few that vanished, were acquired, or simply became a leveraged brand name. Spinning platter drive companies have been basically reduced down to the Big Four: Hitachi, Western Digital, Seagate and Samsung.

In the Solid-State Drive market you have very different players: the few MEMORY and CONTROLLER CHIP manufacturers around the globe where the guts of what's inside SSD are spec'd by a hanful of companies Intel, Micron, Samsung, and Indilinx. In exemplum, Samsung seems happy to OEM to lesser but recognizable brands. Intel SSD's are being rebranded by Kingston Memory and A-Data - but it's moot if they don't have a lower street price than Intel's. So what's the point there?

There'll be ruthless fallout and consolidation to come, great SSD's, mediocre performing SSD's, grey-box generic SSDs with the same guts as 'The Brands You Know - And Trust". And the difference between the OEM SSD and the Popular brands may only be in the packaging, marketing, and depth and length of warranty. The solid-state disk market is like it's hard platter drive counterpart - SOLID-STATE STORAGE ALREADY IS AND WILL BE A MASSIVE COMMODITY MARKET - that will inevitably have razor-thin margins but become a billion-ssd-drives-per-year industry where there's plenty of razor-thin slices of pie to go around.

Tags: OEM SSD, GENERIC SSD, Name Brand SSD

CONFUSED YET? -- Keeping up with SSD products and drive developments isn't easy. OCZ is kind of complicating things with it's SSD product line and naming scheme.

It would be nice if SSD manufacturers could establish some sort of benchmark standard - and name drives accordingly. Sometimes part numbers containing an 'S' or an 'M' give a clue as to whether top-performing SLC memory is used vs. more affordable MLC memory. Or perhaps drives could be numbered by their max Read speed benchmarks: i.e. We need something like the 150 Series for up to 150mbps reads, the 200-Series for 200mbps, etc. But no. Intel ain't doing too bad with it's simply divided product line: XM - MLC 'Mainstream' series or XE - SLC 'Enhanced'. Pelican SSD's are broken into the value MLC 'Pelican' models and the high-flying SLC 'Eagle' Series.

OCZ is kind of complicating things with it's SSD product line and naming scheme. We started with the Core Series then the Core Series V2 - then to the Solid Series then the Vertex Series and now to the Apex Series. But what do these names MEAN?!?

Core: 155 Read - 90 Write
Solid: 170 Read - 98 Write
Vertex : 200 Read 170 Write - 64Mb Cache Onboard
Apex: 230 Read 160 Write** (Write speeds revised LOWER to 120 in shipping firmware. OCZ opted to reduce peak Writes to minimize intermittent 'stuttering' problems exhibited in the JMicron controller chips.)

OCZ OCZSSD2-1VTX30G 30GB SATA 2 Vertex Series Solid State Drive Touts 200MB/sec Read, 170MB/sec Writes... so in a way it is their current best OVERALL performer using an Indilinx controller.


60GB Apex Series Solid State Drive will debut just under $300 The Apex line oddly NOT the peak of performance compared to the Vertex: It still uses a less-than-optimal JMicron controller - but compensates with 2 banks of MLC NAND flash in an internal RAID 0 config to get the most performance at a lower-cost.

Tags: vertex ssd, solid ssd, apex ssd

Here's a very affordable $19.95 SSD drive adapter for Dekstop computer cases. Convert your 2.5 SSD to standard 3.5" mounts w/an ICY DOCK ADAPTER CASE

Tags: SSD Bracket, SSD Case, SSD Adapter

The bulk of SSD solid-state drives are manufactured to the modern SATA II specification. Careful selection will find standard ATA SSD's (sometimes referred to as PATA - Parallel ATA as well such as this low-cost Transcend ATA interface 2.5" 64GB drive -for retrofitting in somewhat older computers before the SATA standard superceded it. Still a huge market out there for ATA interface solid-state drives - tho the latest NAND-Flash technology can now exceed the data transfer rates of an ATA interface.

Tags: sata ssd, ata ssd, pata ssd, zif ssd

Imation and it's Mobi brand were initially most noted for producing SSD's in standard 3.5" drive form-factors with standard screw-hole mounts. Most other SSD mfrs like Sandisk, Patriot, Transcend, Super-Talent et. al. are largely focused on the 2.5" LAPTOP replacement solid-state drive market. OCZ followed with it's Colossus line of high end drives.

There are adaptors and brackets to mount these smaller portable size drives in a 3.5" or even 5.25" drive case/mounts. Most notably ADDONICS which has long been a great source of adapters for many years.

Tags: ssd brackets, ssd adapters, ssd adaptors, ssd interfaces