Posted 03/11/10 at 10:47:39 AM by Paul Lilly

We're not the least bit surprised that OCZ has come out with yet another solid state drive (SSD), but here's something you probably weren't expecting: It costs less than $100.

OCZ's new Onyx SATA II 2.5-inch SSD series looks to tackle the mainstream market by putting more focus on price than it does with raw performance or high capacity. Available initially only in 32GB form, the Onxy drive offers up to 125MB/s read and up to 70MB/s write speeds, so it's not going to knock out the competition. But it will make a solid argument for a netbook or boot drive.

"As new technologies become available, OCZ continues to expand both our enterprise and consumer SSD lines, and one of our goals is to make SSDs more affordable to end-users. Our new Onyx series SSD does exactly that and is a perfect solution for netbooks, laptops, or home desktop PCs," commented Ryan Petersen, CEO of the OCZ Technology Group. "Designed to offer the best of both worlds, the new OCZ Onyx SSD delivers the speed and reliability of solid state storage to mainstream consumers at an aggressive price point that makes the technology more accessible to customers who want to take advantage of all the benefits of the SSDs without incurring the high cost normally associated with the solution."

Few other details are available, such as which controller the Onyx uses, though we do know it comes with 64MB of cache and serves up TRIM support.

No word yet on when this one will make it to market.

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Posted 03/05/10 at 08:42:26 AM by Paul Lilly

Citing sources from hard drive makers, news and rumor site DigiTimes says that Apple's iPad could end up slowing SSD growth in the market place. Say what?

The reason, sources say, is because the iPad might create a shortage of NAND flash chips. Apple already consumes about one-third of the total NAND flash output because of the company's immensely popular iPod and iPhone devices, and if the iPad proves to be just as hot, NAND flash supply could tighten.

The news gets even worse for SSD fans. The cost of NAND flash has been the biggest roadblock in pushing SSDs into the mainstream, and the sources noted that prices are continuing to increase. That should change once the NAND flash industry transitions to a 20nm process technology, however that isn't expected to happen until at least the second half of 2011. Bummer.

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Posted 03/04/10 at 10:58:28 AM by Paul Lilly

In another nod towards the increasingly popular SandForce controller, Corsair today announced its Force Series SSDs built around SandForce.

"The Force Series are the fastest SSDs that Corsair has launched to date," stated Kevin Conley, Vice President of Engineering at Corsair. “We have been very impressed with the SandForce SSD Processor innovations in the months that we have been working with them, and we can’t wait to get these extraordinarily fast SSDs into the hands of our most demanding customers."

And fast they are, at least on paper. By combining the SandForce SF-1200 SSD processor with MLC flash memory, Corsair claims its new SSD line can race along at 285MB/s read and 275MB/s write speeds.

These will be available in 100GB and 200GB capacities and come with TRIM support in Windows 7. No word yet on price or availability.

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Posted 03/03/10 at 07:03:40 PM by Ryan Whitwam

Sometimes a company just does something unnecessarily extravagant to get attention. This time the company is Patriot, and the extravagance is building a PC with 40 SSDs in one huge array. This feat was accomplished using 5 LSI Mega RAID SAS/SATA 9260-8i raid cards to connect up the 40 TorqX SSDs. The System also packs two 1000w Thermaltake power supplies, and a server board with dual Xeons and 48GB of DDR3 RAM.

We would like very much to play with this system, but it’s unlikely that Patriot will be letting it out of their sight. According to a questionable claim apparently made by a Patriot rep, the system would be able to rip a Blu-Ray in 0.9 seconds. Technically, we’ve never seen an optical drive capable of that sort of read speed. It’s possible this was just a ham-handed attempt to show the speed of the drives. If so, the array is able to write about 8GB per second. Yeah, we’d take that.

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Posted 03/03/10 at 01:59:49 PM by Paul Lilly

Western DIgital is no stranger to low capacity, high performance, pricey storage solutions, only up until this point they've always fallen under the company's VelociRaptor line. That all changes today, as WD announced its first-ever consumer-oriented solid state drive (SSD), the SiliconEdge 2.5-inch SSD family.

"The development of the WD SiliconEdge Blue product family leverages WD's extensive experience in designing and manufacturing highly reliable storage products and the company's worldwide sales and distribution network to accelerate SSD technology adoption by OEMs, technology enthusiasts, gamers and road warriors," said Michael Hajeck, senior vice president and general manager of WD's solid state storage business unit. "Customers who demand the ultimate in performance will find the WD SiliconEdge Blue SSDs exceed all their requirements."

The new drives ship in 64GB, 128GB, and 256GB capacities and features a native SATA 3Gbps interface. Read speeds come rated at up to 250MB/s, while WD says you can expect writes in the neighborhood of 170MBs. TRIM support also comes standard, as does NCQ.

In addition to performance, WD is touting the SiliconEdge family's ruggedness, saying the product line has "passed WD's extensive functional integrity testing procedures" consisting of over 250,000 of testing.

The drives are available now for $279 (64GB), $529 ($128GB), and $999 (256GB).

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Posted 03/03/10 at 01:59:06 PM by Paul Lilly

Western Digital's been quite the busy body today in the SSD sector. In addition to the just-announced MLC-based SiliconEdge Blue line, the storage vendor also just unveiled its WD SiliconDrive N1x 2.5-inch SSD family. Built around a single-level cell architecture (SLC), Western Digital says these provide a cost effective alternative without giving up a ton of performance.

"The WD SiliconDrive N1x SSDs are the newest addition to our SiliconDrive product family, which has shipped several million units since the first products were introduced. SiliconDrive SSDs have consistently met critical OEM application requirements for high reliability, high performance and long product deployment cycles," said Michael Hajeck, senior vice president and general manager of WD's solid state storage business unit. "Satisfying the challenging storage demands for a wide variety of OEM applications, WD has designed the WD SiliconDrive N1x and WD SiliconEdge Blue product families to facilitate SSD technology adoption in a multitude of existing and expanding new markets that can benefit from advanced storage solutions."

Like the SiliconEdge Blue line, the SiliconDrive N1x family also features a native SATA 3Gbps interface. Read and write speeds are a little more modest at 240MB/s and 140MB/s, respectively, compared to 250MB/s and 170MB/s on the SiliconEdge.

TRIM and NCQ support also come as part of the package, as does a five year warranty.

No word yet on price or availability.

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Posted 03/02/10 at 07:06:21 AM by Paul Lilly

OCZ, one of the biggest players in the solid state drive market, said during CeBIT that the company plans to focus its attention on pushing SSDs in the European market, paying particular attention to the enterprise sector.

"There are an increasing number of applications where SSDs are quickly replacing traditional hard drives, including mobile and high-performance computing as well as numerous enterprise environments," commented Alex Mei, CMO at the OCZ Technology Group. "At CeBIT 2010, OCZ continues to expand our robust SSD lineup with the introduction of next-generation solid state storage solutions in an increasingly wide array of interfaces that truly deliver transformational capabilities when addressing the unique challenges of enterprise clients."

Part of the process includes meeting the demand for PCI-Express and SCSI (SAS) SSDs. This includes both current options -- like the Z-Drive series, now being showcased in its fourth generation -- as well as upcoming parts.

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Posted 03/01/10 at 09:17:52 AM by Paul Lilly

Following the 'better late than never' motto, Plextor today announced it will try its hand in the SSD market with a pair of high performance offerings, the PX-64M1S and PX-128M1S.

"We're excited to leverage Plextor's expertise in optical storage and enter the SSD market as it continues to grow," said Esteban Kim, Director of New Business Development at PLDS. "PCMark, SYSmark, and HD Benchmark industry utility tests scored Plextor SSDs high and we're proud to have the new lineup available to our customers."

With the recent spate of SSDs boasting read and write speeds well above 200MB/s, Plextor may be stretching things a bit in classifying these as "high performance." The 64GB PX-64M1S comes rated at up to 110MB/s sequential reads and 65MB/s in sequential writes, while the 128GB PX-128M1S sports 120MBs and 70MB/s read and write speeds, respectively.

Both drives are available now for $225 (64GB) and $400 (128GB).

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