solid-state

To say that high-capacity solid-state drives are getting inexpensive may be a bit premature considering you could purchase an entire MacBook Air for the price of a high-capacity SSD. That said, it could be a lot worse.

Lexar Media, an arm of solid-state drive manufacturer Micron Technology, said today that Crucial-branded m4 SSDs are now available worldwide, coming in capacities of 64GB, 128GB, 256GB, and 512GB.

The 512GB model is $999--the cost of a low-end 11.6-inch Air. Now, that may seem pricey but let's not forget the good old days when high-capacity SSDs were priced in the exosphere, … Read more

If you can't decide whether to get the Samsung 470 solid-state drive because it's so expensive, there's now another one that's even more tempting--the Vertex 3 from OCZ.

At around $500 for 240GB, the OCZ SSD isn't any cheaper, but it is much faster than the Samsung 470 and supports the new SATA 6Gbps standard (SATA 3). Most existing computers, however, support the popular SATA 3Gbps (SATA 2), which has data cap speeds of close to 300MBps.

SATA 3, available in computers powered by Intel's new Sandy Bridge chipset, on the other hand, offers twice that speed. And the Vertex 3 delivered in our testing, emerging as one of the fastest internal drives on the market.

Sharing the same design as a standard 9.5-millimeter, 2.5-inch internal hard drive, the Vertex 3 also includes a drive bay converter that helps it take the place of any 3.5-inch hard drive. This means it will work in any case where a traditional SATA hard drive, be it a 3.5-inch or 2.5-inch, would be used.

The OCZ Vertex 3 is also available in 120GB and 480GB capacities. The former costs around $250, and the latter is outrageously priced at more than $1,800.

To see if the drive is worth the investment, check out CNET's full review.… Read more

When upgrading from a spinning hard disk to a solid-state disk in your Mac, you may experience slower startup times than expected. Solid-state drives should be booting your system in 15 seconds or less--a considerable upgrade from traditional hard disks--but failing to set your newly installed drive as the default startup disk can keep your boot times slow.

Apple Discussions commenter "Luis Ortega" writes:

I just installed a 256gb ssd drive (from OWC) into my 2007 Santa Rosa 2.4 core 2 duo 17" macbook pro.

I had done a clone from my old hard drive (7200rpm … Read more

Intel has entered the high-capacity big leagues with a new series of solid-state drives that offer up to 600 gigabytes in capacity.

The world's largest chipmaker is tapping into its most cutting-edge manufacturing technology to get the larger capacities--with chip geometries shrinking to a mere 25 nanometers. Those geometries are a step ahead of its newest Core i series processors, which are built on a slightly "fatter" 32-nanometer manufacturing process.

Intel's third-generation SSD 320 Series comes in 40, 80, 120, 160, 300, and 600GB options.

And, of course, they're faster. The new SSDs deliver up to 39,500 input/output operations per second (IOPS) random reads and 23,000 IOPS random writes on its highest-capacity drives. Maximum sequential write speeds have doubled from its second-generation SSDs to 220 megabytes-per-second (MB/s) sequential writes. Read throughputs have been boosted to 270 MB/s sequential reads. These numbers are comparable to--and in some cases exceed--published numbers from Samsung, a leading SSD manufacturer and supplier. … Read more

Seagate today announced its latest enterprise solutions, including two new members of the Pulsar solid-state drive (SSD) family, two Savvio 15K and 10K hard-disk drives (HDD), and the latest Constellation ES.2 3TB HDD.

The company says these drives "raise the bar in enterprise storage" by collectively offering the best of their class in terms of throughput speed, endurance, and storage space.

According to Seagate, both the Pulsar.2 and Pulsar XT.2 SSDs are the result of more than 200 years collectively of development and offer a 2 million-hour MTBF rating. The Pulsar.2 SSD comes with … Read more

Hard-disk drives are becoming so inexpensive that prices alone--seemingly improbable a couple of years ago--garner headlines. So, how will speedy yet pricey solid-state drives keep up?

Beyond the above-the-fold "2TB for $75" attention-getters, laptop hard disk costs have also been dropping like a rock, pushing mobile hard drives far below solid-state drives. The laptop market is one of the primary markets for flash memory-based SSDs, which are generally faster--in some cases much faster--than HDDs.

Case in point: the Hitachi Travelstar 7K500 HDD. The $64.99 price at Newegg.com not only gets you a 500GB capacity drive in … Read more

Knowing I was going to Las Vegas for CES, my friends said, "Have fun!" The truth is, friends, fun, whether or not the kind that stays in Las Vegas, is not the first thing one can expect from covering CES. It's always a lot of work.

I did have fun seeing my colleagues all in one place, however, especially those from the East Coast, whom I don't get to see very often. Now that we've all returned home or are on the way back, here are the things in the networking and storage categories that are sticking with me from the show.

In the networking department, faster is the main theme, and this is true for both wireless and powerline networking. Powerline networking is now pumped up to support 500Mbps by adhering to the latest IEEE 1901 standard  (up from the 200Mbps of the HomePlug AV standard). There were several 500Mbps powerline products announced at CES this year, such as the Trendnet TPL 401E and Netgear's XAVB5004.

Networking vendors also introduced the first hybrid wireless routers that have built-in support for powerline technology, such as the WNXR200 from Netgear.

Wireless networking this year is seeing many vendors moving to the three-stream standard that offers a throughput speed of up to 450Mbps (as opposed to the 300Mbps of the popularly used dual-stream standard). Examples of these are Netgear with the WNDR4000, Trendnet with the TEW-692GR, and D-Link with its HD Media routers.

On the client side, the three-stream wireless standard is supported by Intel's Centrino N-5300 and Centrino N-6300 Wi-Fi adapters. These two Wi-Fi chipsets, also known as Intel's Ultimate N Wi-Fi Link family, can handle all standards of Wi-Fi, including the three-stream standard. Trendnet also released the first 450Mbps gaming adapter. In the future, networking vendors will also release USB adapters that support this higher speed.

D-Link's HD Media routers, by the way, are the first that sport an SD card reader, and some of them are also the first with built-in USB 3.0 to support faster network storage performance.

Speaking of USB 3.0, most storage vendors have now moved to this standard for their external drives. This is a natural move, as USB 3.0 offers a speed that's easily 10 times that of USB 2.0 and is backward-compatible with all previous versions of USB standards. External drives are now also getting tinier, and many of them now are also based on solid-state drives. Examples of these are the GoFlex Slim from Seagate, Verbatim's Titan XS, and the i-Disk Rex 100 from Pretec.… Read more

Micron Technology is unveiling four new solid-state drives at the Storage Visions conference in Las Vegas this week. One 256GB model will cost $425--pricey compared to a traditional hard disk drive but competitive for the speedy flash chip-based storage drives.

Micron's RealSSD drives--marketed under the Crucial brand name--will be available for laptops in 1.8-inch and 2.5-inch form factors--the former size typically goes into ultra-small laptops like the MacBook Air, while the latter is the standard size for mainstream laptop drives.

Micron, which runs a joint flash chip manufacturing venture with Intel, is making the flash chips (that … Read more

Intel has rolled out an ultrasmall solid-state drive, targeting dual-drive laptops that pair an SSD with a hard disk drive.

Intel's Solid-State Drive 310 Series delivers "full SSD performance in 1/8th the size," according to Intel's announcement today. The SSD contains 34-nanometer (one of Intel's most advanced chip manufacturing processes) Intel NAND flash memory and is available in an m-SATA form factor (see photo) in 40GB and 80GB capacities. It weighs just 10 grams.

In addition to dual-drive laptops, Intel said it is targeting single-drive Netbooks and tablets.

In a dual-drive laptop, an SSD … Read more