I have yet to jump on the SSD bandwagon and most consumers are probably the same way. I have tested netbooks with SSDs inside and while the performance gains installing applications and booting the systems are noticeable, they aren’t enough to justify the extra cost in my book.
The price of SSDs is coming down, albeit slowly. Kingston has a new SSD upgrade kit that is now available called the SSDNow M Series that comes with all the gear you need to install an SSD inside your desktop computer or notebook.
For the most part notebooks and netbooks that come with SSDs tend to have smaller capacity SSDs inside. In the netbook realm, you usually get 4 or 8GB SSDs while notebooks commonly go up to 32GB and 64GB capacities. Toshiba has announced a new notebook that offers many times more storage than your average SSD equipped notebook.
The Toshiba Portege R600-ST4203 is now available with a massive and expensive 512GB SSD. The SSD is made by Toshiba and is crammed inside the notebooks 12.1-inch chassis. The machine weighs 2.4 pounds and is 0.7-inches thick.
SSDs have been around for a while now and for enterprise use, they make a lot of sense. The savings from the lower power consumption alone is often enough to justify the upgrade for large data centers. Consumers still don’t have a compelling reason to upgrade to SSDs, other than the simple desire to use the new technology and gain small improvements in performance.
For consumers looking to upgrade their notebook or desktop computer to a SSD Imation has announced that it is now shipping both its M and S-class SSDs along with upgrade kit bundles. The price for the SSDs themselves starts at $189.99 for the M-class with 32GB, 64GB, and 128GB capacities available. The S-class starts at $659.99 with 64GB or 128GB versions available.
This morning A-DATA announced their new X25-M series SSDs that are actually co-logo’d with Intel which from what I can tell means the drives have been tested on the latest Intel-based laptops and workstations, and actually feature Intel Multi-Level Cell NAND flash memory. According to A-DATA, the X25-M series are currently the world’s fastest SATA 2.5-inch SSD drives with read speeds up to 250MB/sec and write speeds up to 70MB/sec with only an 85 microsecond read latency. The new drives are available in 80 or 160GB capacities, though I couldn’t find any pricing information in their press release.
Their site’s a little vague on details at the moment, particularly when it comes to the all-important pricing info, but PhotoFast has announced their new G-Monster series of PCIe SSD drives that will be available in 256GB, 512GB and 1TB capacities. While SSD technology is still lacking in some areas compared to traditional hard drives, they seem to make up for it when it comes to speed, and the G-Monster series promise a read speed of 750MB/s with a comparable write speed of 700MB/s.
My main computer is pretty fast, with a nice overclocked Core 2 Duo, speedy RAM and a kick-ass video card. Unfortunately it does have one piece slowing it down. While my hard drive is SATA (none of that ancient IDE crap here), I’d love to switch it out for a faster SSD drive. My main issue is that the speed gain just doesn’t justify the price. But what if price was no object? Just what could you do with say, 24 top-of-the-line SSD drives? You can open the entire Microsoft Office suite in half a second. You’d have transfer speeds topping out at 2GB. You’d even be able to make the kick-ass video seen above.
Sometime’s the simplest of demonstrations can be the easiest way for a booth to extol the virtues of their product. And while we already know that SSDs have many advantages over traditional hard drives, Crucial wanted to drive home the fact that their solid state drives were particularly well suited for even the most bumpiest of computing conditions. So they created the ‘Shake-O-Matic’ torture test, pictured on the left, that uses an industrial looking sawzall to shake the crap out of an SSD while it was actually being used by a nearby laptop to play a movie.
The line graph on the LCD display in the background is showing a measurement of around 220G’s, but during the demo I saw that peak to upwards of 430G’s without affecting the video playback on the laptop whatsoever. And while you can’t quite make it out on the picture, the ‘Shake-O-Matic’ also had a large dial on the front with settings that included wake, flake, shake, bake, quake, break and ache. But they never turned it past ‘wake’, since the device was deafening even at that lowest setting.
Walking the CES show floor you hear a lot of pitches as people try to lure you into their booth to gawk their products. Normally I’m immune to such things, but the siren call of a 1TB SSD drive was enough to pull a full 180 and see if pureSilicon’s claims were true. Sure enough, sitting in a glass display case was one of their Nitro Series solid state drives boasting 1 terabyte of storage. The drives come in an eye-catching and lightweight carbon-composite and aluminum bonded enclosure, and boast a transfer rate of 300MB/sec. (240MB/sec sustained read and 215MB/sec sustained write.)
The 2.5-inch nitro series are actually designed to be used in servers, data centers and record-breaking supercomputers, and should be available this year for an undisclosed gigantic pile of money.
Solid state hard drives just feel like the future, don’t they? Light weight, extraordinarily durable, low power consumption, and no moving parts which eliminates that “thinking” noise that you’re probably used to your computer making when it’s trying to index your porn collection. Generally, they’re also much smaller and more expensive than conventional old-school magnetic HDs, but Super Talent’s MasterDrive 2.5″ SSDs aim to give you a usable amount of storage for an affordable price. You can go for either 64 gigs for a MSRP of $180, or 128 gigs for about $300. Read/write speeds are a respectable 100/40 MB/s. These prices and capacities finally (finally) start to put SSD in serious competition with platter drives.
My advice? Spring for a small SSD in your laptop, and then just get yourself a nice hefty RAID system to store all of your gig-munching multimedia. No word yet on release date.
Related Tags: 
Permalink
