Archive for the ‘storage’ Category

JKK kicks off his ‘SSD-Week’ with a highly recommended 18-minute video introducing solid state disks (SSD), their advantages, the difference between MLC and SLC, explaining wear-levelling and the different connectors available. He gives some recommendations about read and write speeds to look for, talks about SSD life and gives some nice demos. He also teases us about some new device that he has lined up for later in the week.

View the video over at JKKMobile.com

You’ve read the theory, now hear the reality about how SSDs work together with modern netbooks and UMPCs.

JKK has a bunch of SSD articles lined up this week in his sites ‘SSD Week.’ Testing, Q&A and from what I’ve heard, maybe a new product or two!

SSD Week, all this week and JKKMobile.

John Hill, the CEO of Allegiance Tablet PC Experts has blogged a nice list of things to think about when looking at the choice between hard drive and SSD.

I have the Raon Digital Everun note 24GB SSD version in front of me right now for a hands-on article I’m writing on and its interesting to read and think about some of the points he’s made while I do my testing. Take this one for example.

When failures occur, they tend to occur either ‘on write’, or ‘on erase’, rather than ‘on read’. With traditional HDDs, failure tends to occur ‘on read’. If the drive detects failure on write, data can be written to a new cell without data loss occurring. If a drive fails on read, then data is usually lost permanently.

I disagree that all SSDs will have "Extremely fast write" but that’s probably because I see a lot of cheap drives!

Thanks Jon, for a good list.

Forget the low cost PC market Samsung, there’s a million people out there that could benefit from a bit of SSD love on their daily compute.

"We’ve refined our manufacturing techniques and redesigned our low-density SSDs to get what the @low-priced PC market is looking for in the way of improved cost"

What I suspect is happening here is that Samsung have designed a product that can be made in the millions for direct sale to netbook OEMs. You might find these on Ebay at some point but don’t expect them to be easy to get hold of for the average punter.

"Samsung’s new MLC-based SSD at 32GB capacity will read data (sequentially) at 90MB/s and write it (sequentially) at 70MB/s – performance levels much greater than low-density SSDs on the market today. The 16GB reads at 90MB/s and writes at 45MB/s, while the 8GB reads at 90MB/s and writes at 25MB/s."

VIA GottabeMobile. Source AkihabaraNews.

Intel have launched their 4GB and 8GB SSD modules (these aren’t drop-in drive replacements) at 1000-piece prices of $25 and $45 respectively. Although the read-speed is a usable 35MB/s, with a write speed of just 7MB/s, they’re not ideal for the pro user.

Sandisk’s offering seems to be slightly better with a ’streaming’ write speed of 17MB/s

TDK also introduced a new SSD drive. Fantastic capacity and performance but huge cost.

I’ll stick to my CF card mod for the time being.