By Andrew Liszewski

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.

By Andrew Liszewski

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.

[ pureSilicon ]

By Evan Ackerman

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.

[ Press Release ] VIA [ Engadget ]

This post is syndicated with permission from Gadgetoholic.com

Back at the start of July OCZ unveiled its Core series of SSDs that addressed one of the largest complaints about SSD drives—the price. While the Core Series SSDs are still more expensive than traditional HDDs of much higher capacity, the Core SSDs are downright cheap compared to other SSDs.

The first benchmarks for the Core Series 64GB SSD from OCZ have surfaced over at Laptop Magazine. Laptop put the SSD through some synthetic tests and the Core series did well in most tests against much more expensive SSDs and traditional HDDs.

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