SandForce has taken a leading role in the field of SSD controllers and appears to extend it with the company’s new SF-2200 and SF-2100 processors. Out of these two the SF-2200 is particularly impressive, offering 500MB/s read AND write speeds over SATA 3, as well as 60,000 IOPS in 4K random reads. These chips will [...]
With CPUs, GPUs and motherboard chipsets, a smaller production process (measured in nanometers) is always seen as a sign of improvement in both efficiency and performance. With NAND flash memory, not so much. They actually wear down faster than their predecessors, which raises some questions about how the new drives are being marketed. Micron is [...]
The rumor mill has indicated a February release for the next-generation MLC SSDs from Intel, i.e., the X-25 G3, but some additional information has surfaced that point to a March release. Most of the improvements are already known, but a reseller spreadsheet from the German site ComputerBase adds some more details to the mix, including [...]
As most of you probably know, Intel recently launched its new Sandy Bridge platform. In addition to some new CPUs, the manufacturer also introduced new chipsets. One of the important improvements has to do with solid state drive performance when using PCIe drives (or PCIe-based RAID with SATA drives.) Intel’s new chipsets are better at [...]
A lot of things are happening in the SSD industry right now. For one, Toshiba is making an entry into the enterprise side of the market with the new model Mkx001grzb, which promises excellent server performance. It will have to–a name like “mkx001gzrb” will hardly inspire potential customers on its own. At any rate, this [...]
Super Talent is now adding a new device to its UltraDrive MX series. What makes this unit stand out in the crowd is capacity–a full 480GB. It’s a SATA 2 SSD, but it can apparently also be hooked up via a mini-USB cable and run externally without using a separate case. Using it over USB [...]
So far hard drive manufacturer Hitachi has been an unknown quantity in SSD circles, so it may sound somewhat surprising that the company is now launching a series of high-end SAS drives aimed at corporate data centers and other demanding users. The technology is however developed in collaboration with Intel. The upcoming UltraStar series comes [...]
The OCZ Enoy is an ultra-fast external SSD that uses USB3 to crush any and all competition based on conventional hard drives. For anyone with a need (or desire) for extremly fast external storage, the only alternatives are of course based on solid state drives. OCZ’s Enyo is available in 64GB, 128GB and 256GB capacities [...]
The first hybrid drives that came out a few years ago didn’t offer much of a performance boost. Now Seagate is trying again to give us the best of both worlds with its new Momentus XT, a roomy 500GB 2.5-inch hybrid drive with 4GB of SLC NAND flash for laptops for less than $150, and [...]
First some background: The longer you use an SSD, the more likely it becomes that you see degradation in performance, even if the device isn’t filled with data. When the performance of conventional hard drive deteriorates it’s usually sufficient to defrag, because in this case it is beneficial to have all data stored in sequence [...]
