Items tagged with solid state storage
Need the kind of fast storage only solid state drives (SSDs) can provide but aren't willing to sacrifice a ton of capacity in exchange? Maybe you don't have to, depending on how thick your wallet is. Dell this week announced that its Precision M6600 and M4600 mobile workstations are now available with 512GB SATA 6Gbps SSDs options. "To help businesses address these issues, the Dell Precision M6600 and M4600 are the first mobile workstations to offer 512GB SATA3 Mobility SSDs, giving users lightning quick 500MB/s read and 300MB/s write times. With the M6600 offering two full storage slots with up to two 512GB SSDs and one mini-card slot with up to 128GB, workstation users can experience more than...
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The popularity of its iPod, iPhone, and iPad product lines have propelled Apple to the top of the charts when it comes to NAND flash consumption. iSuppli reports that the Cupertino-based company has surpassed HP (the former champ), with 2010 purchases coming in at $17.5 billion. That's a massive 79.6 percent jump from 2009, during which Apple bought just $9.7B in Flash. "Apple's surge to leadership in semiconductor spending in 2010 was driven by the overwhelming success of its wireless products, namely the iPhone and the iPad," said iSuppli analyst Wenlie Ye. "These products consume enormous quantities of NAND flash memory, which is also found in the Apple iPod. Because of this, Apple in 2010...
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Quick, what's bright red, crazy fast,and comprised of multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash memory? If you guessed PhotoFast's new PowerDrive-LSI PCI-E solid state drive (SSD) line, then give yourself a cookie. And while you're at it, thank a teacher, because we both know you cheated and read the headline. We're glad you did, because PhotoFast has put something together worth salivating over. Forget about SATA 6Gpbs, the PowerDrive-LSI slides into a x8 PCI Express 2.0 slot and serves up blistering fast transfer speeds you won't get from your SATA controllers. We're talking up to 1,400MB/s reads and up to 1,500MB/s writes, putting this peppy drive ahead of most of the competition, including PhotoFast's...
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Well, hello beautiful! Suddenly, we're beginning to think that the end is near for all of those double-digit SSDs. And by that, we mean any SSD under 100GB. Just over the past few weeks, a number of mainstays in the solid state business have expanded their offerings by adding a number of high-capacity versions to the mix. OCZ Technology isn't one to lag behind, and they're doing similar today in the Vertex 2 and Agility 2 lineups. Both of these 2.5" SATA SSD families are growing, with each line now having 400GB and 480GB options. That's getting dangerously close to the limits of even the biggest 2.5" HDD, which was announced this morning by Seagate. The 750GB Momentus is the largest 7200rpm 2.5"...
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Solid state storage producers have been preaching about a few select points for years, particularly on why they're superior to traditional hard drives. Reliability and speed are the two obvious ones, but many SSD makers suggest that these Flash-based drives are more power efficient than HDDs as well. But as always, someone in the world doesn't think that existing SSDs are power efficient enough, and that's why a group over in Japan is currently attempting to develop a technology to make a NAND Flash memory module whose "drive voltage is as low as 1V and power consumption is 86% lower than existing NAND flash memories." The researchers lowered the drive voltage of a NAND Flash memory module (one...
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Fusion-io is probably one of the most important storage companies that you've never heard of. It won't be placed on Best Buy shelves beside Seagate, Western Digital or Hitachi, but in five years, it may be all the rage. Already, the start-up company (which has ties to Apple's Steve Wozniak) has delivered some of the fastest solid state storage on the planet, and it looks like the company is well on their way to doing that for some time to come.Innovation takes dollars, and thankfully for Fusion-io, their bank account just got stuffed with them. The company has just announced that they have raised another $45 million in Series C financing, led by new investor Meritech Capital Partners, as well...
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OCZ Technology's Z-Drive was obviously a pretty big hit for the company, and understandably so. It was one of the first major PCI-Express Solid State Drive options on the market, and it broke all sorts of speed records as well. Today, the California-based company announced that they would begin mass production of the Z-Drive R2 Solid State Drive (SSD) Series, the second rendition of the original Z-Drive family.The new R2 builds on the existing solution but provides greater performance and design flexibility due to the implementation of a series of optimized NAND modules. Ryan Petersen, CEO of the OCZ Technology Group, explained the announcement: "Our 4th generation PCIe SSD, the Z-Drive R2, tackles...
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Fusion-io announced TPC-H benchmark results today in a bid to raise its own visibility and promote solid-state storage as an alternative solution in the enterprise market. The company's PCI-Express-based products turned in a score of 28,772 Queries per Hour on a 100GB database, for a price/performance metric of $1.47 per database transaction. That's sufficient to rank third on TPC's price/performance list of vendors, and the company is quick to point out that it hit its performance target with just four "drives." As we discussed in our review from a few weeks ago, each Fusion ioDrive plugs into a PCIe x4 slot. Thus far, Fusion-io's products have stuck to PCI-Express 1.1, leaving each drive with...
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