The newest solid-state drives are just starting to hit retail. But would you buy one?
Intel X25-M solid-state drive has received glowing reviews for its performance
(Credit: Intel)Solid-state drives are attractive because they're generally faster than hard-disk drives, particularly at reading data--generally something PC users spend most of their time doing.
But price is still an obstacle, especially to the frugal consumer.
Sunnyvale, Calif.-based OCZ Technology is now offering some of the most competitively priced solid-state drives based the high-speed Serial ATA (SATA) II interface.
OCZ Vertex SSD drives start at $129 for a 30GB SSD. Other capacities include a 120GB drive for $469 and a 250GB SSD for $869. Though $869 may seem pricey compared to a 7200RPM 250GB hard-disk drive that can retail for well under $100, it's relatively cheap for a large-capacity SSD. In the past, SanDisk had sold a 256GB drive through resellers that was priced, almost incredibly, at more than $15,000. Axiom had been selling 256GB solid-state drives priced above $6,000.
OCZ says the Vertex Series of SSDs have a 1.5 million-hour mean time before failure (MTBF), "ensuring peace of mind over the long term." Solid-state drives, since their inception, have been plagued by doubts about write durability. SSD manufacturers such as Intel, Micron Technology, and Samsung say long-term durability is no longer an issue.
The OCZ drives are backed by a two-year warranty.
Intel's X25-M SATA solid-state drive is now widely available at retail. An 80GB X25-M is priced at just more than $500 at most retailers. Reviews of the X25-M's performance have been very positive.
Unfortunately, the only way to get the newest SSDs in some cases is by ordering a laptop. Samsung is now offering its latest-and-greatest 128GB SATA drives in ultraportable laptops such as the MacBook Air and the Dell Latitude E4200 and E4300.
The Latitude E4300 can be configured with a 128GB SSD for $460 more than the standard 160GB 5400RPM hard disk drive.
Micron Technology will bring out a 256GB solid-state drive early next year while it moves, along with Intel, to a new manufacturing process.
Micron SSD
(Credit: Micron)A Micron representative said Monday that the company will start volume production of a 256GB solid-state drive for consumer use in March 2009.
This follows Samsung's announcement last week that it had begun mass-producing 256GB solid-state drives.
The Micron RealSSD C200 will read data at 250MBps (megabytes per second) and write at 100MBps. It is sampling to customers now. Samsung, by comparison, is claiming sequential read rates of 220MBps, with sequential write rates of 200MBps.
The Micron representative said that the company is slightly behind schedule in delivering the 256GB product, as it was originally targeted for the fourth quarter of this year.
Solid-state drives are generally faster than hard-disk drives, particularly at reading data. Computer makers such as Apple, Hewlett-Packard, Dell, and Toshiba all offer laptops with solid-state drives ranging in capacity from 64GB to 128GB.
Intel is due to deliver a 160GB solid-state drive this quarter. The chipmaker is currently shipping 80GB solid-state drives to customers such as Hewlett-Packard, which offers it in its EliteBook 2530p ultraportable.
In related news, as reported back in May, Micron and Intel announced mass production Monday of their jointly developed 34-nanometer, 32-gigabit multilevel cell NAND flash memory device.
The "32Gb monolithic die will give us the ability to cost-effectively produce over 300GB-capacity SSDs in standard 2.5-inch and 1.8-inch form factors," Intel said Monday.
Multilevel cell technology allows makers of solid-state drives to deliver lower-cost devices at higher capacities.
The new Micron 256GB drive will not be based on the 34nm process, however. Drives based on this process will come out later in 2009.
Intel and Micron have a joint NAND flash memory venture, IM Flash Technologies (IMFT), which manufactures the NAND chips. The two companies market the products separately.
The companies "are ahead of schedule with 34nm NAND production" and expect their Lehi facility to have moved more than 50 percent of its capacity to 34nm by year's end, according to a statement.
"The results from IMFT continue to exceed our expectations," Randy Wilhelm, vice president and general manager, Intel NAND Solutions Group, said in a statement.
In October, Intel and Micron said they would discontinue supply of NAND flash memory from Micron's Boise facility. The NAND operation shutdown will reduce IMFT's NAND flash production by approximately 35,000 (200-millimeter) wafers per month, Micron said at the time.
Samsung on Wednesday night said it has begun mass-producing 256GB solid-state drives. This size tops the largest-capacity SSDs found in laptops today.
Samsung currently offers 64GB and 128GB SSDs for laptops.
The new 256GB drives are faster too, the company claims, more than doubling the performance rate of Samsung 64GB and 128GB SSDs.
The drives combine sequential read rates of 220 megabytes per second, with sequential write rates of 200MBps. "This sharply narrows the performance gap between read and write operations to only 10 percent, compared to a read-write speed difference of between 20 (percent) and 70 percent for other SSDs," the company said.
Samsung did not mention random write performance, however. Despite being generally faster than hard-disk drives (particularly at reading data), solid-state drives fall short of hard disks when they randomly write data. Random writes are generally considered to be the Achilles' heel of solid-state drives.
Getting this 256GB SSD in a notebook "is analogous to having a 15,000-(revolutions-per-minute) drive, without all of its size, noise, power, and heating drawbacks," Jim Elliott, vice president of memory marketing at Samsung Semiconductor, said in a statement.
The 256GB SSD boosts data transfer when large multimedia files are simultaneously read and stored. "It can store 25 high-definition movies in just 21 minutes, a significant advancement over a 7,200rpm hard disk drive (HDD), which takes about 70 minutes," the company said in a statement.
The drive's performance is derived from a new single-platform design consisting of a chip controller, NAND flash, and special drive firmware developed by Samsung. "This single platform is designed to easily adapt to Samsung's 40-(nanometer) class NAND flash memory," according to the company.
It consumes 1.1 watts of power, versus 2 or more watts for a comparable HDD. Similar in weight to a 128GB SSD, at 81 grams, the 2.5-inch multilevel cell 256GB SSD has the same 9.5-millimeter drive thickness.
Samsung's 256GB SSD is also available with optional proprietary encryption programming that provides full-disk encryption, a key feature for some corporate users.
Pricing was not immediately available.
Toshiba will begin shipping a 256GB solid-state drive, matching Samsung, its bigger, badder rival.
Another nail in the hard-disk-drive coffin? Well, not quite. But Toshiba's drive rivals magnetic drives in size while delivering better performance.
Solid-state drives are more expensive than hard-disk drives but are also generally more power efficient and faster.
Toshiba is trying to keep pace with the 800-pound SSD gorilla, South Korea-based Samsung. Samsung is the largest flash memory chip supplier in the world and has stated in the past that it would sample a 256GB SSD in September. Toshiba is ranked No. 2.
And the two companies are duking it out in more ways than this: both are also vying for SanDisk, the largest maker of retail flash memory drives.
Dell, to date, has used mostly Samsung SSDs, as has Apple. Dell has said in the past that in tests of an SSD in a Latitude notebook, it saw a 35 percent overall system performance increase over a standard 2.5-inch 5400rpm notebook hard drive--the type of hard disk drive used in ultraportable notebooks today.
The Toshiba drive delivers a maximum read speed of 120MB per second and maximum write speed of 70MB per second using a high-speed SATA 3-gigabit-per-second interface.
Like Samsung, Micron, and Intel, Toshiba is using multi-level cell (MLC) technology in its high-capacity drives. An MLC memory cell structure allows drive makers to build larger capacity drives at lower cost but it is not as fast as single-level cell (SLC), nor inherently as reliable. (SLC solid state drives are used currently in laptops such as the Apple MacBook Air and ThinkPad X300.)
Toshiba, like Samsung, says it has developed a controller chip that mitigates the shortcomings of MLC. The "MLC controller...achieves higher read-write speeds, parallel data transfers, and wear leveling," the company said. Wear leveling reduces the "pounding" on one spot--that could wear out the cell--by spreading out the writes over many different cells.
(Credit:
Toshiba)
Toshiba has plenty of other company in the high-capacity SSD market, too. Intel says it will ship a 160GB SSD in the fourth quarter, and Micron has stated that it plans to have a 256GB SSD in the same time frame. STEC already ships drives in this capacity.
Samples of Toshiba's 2.5-inch SSD are available now, with mass production following in the fourth quarter, the company said. SSDs currently come in two sizes: smaller 1.8-inch form factors and slightly larger 2.5-inch designs.
No pricing was given.
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