Showing that patience can be a virtue, the impressive Samsung 256 GB SSD that was first unveiled back in May has finally entered mass-production, but now with even faster performance. Originally stated to have sequential read and write speeds of 200 MB/s and 160 MB/s, Samsung has since been able to boost the drive’s write speed up to 200 MB/s and read speed up to 220 MB/s.

This high-capacity SSD is claimed by Samsung to be capable of saving 25 high-definition movies (10 GB each) in just 21 minutes, which apparently takes a 7,200 RPM HDD about 70 minutes to accomplish. Another aspect of the SSD’s performance is deletion speed, with the new SSD being capable of permanently deleting 256 GB of data in about 2.5-minutes. If being able to quickly wipe a drive clean is of importance to you, you might also like to know that the SSD is available with full disk encryption.

As for power consumption, the new SSD is rated at 1.1-watts, slightly higher than the 0.9-watts the drive was originally stated to have. For comparison, a new ’green’ 500 GB 5,400 HDD from Toshiba this week had a rating of 0.6-watts, with its power consumption reaching 1.7-watts during seek mode and 1.4-watts during read/write mode.

The new Samsung SSD takes a 2.5-inch form-factor, has a thickness of 9.5 mm and weighs just 81-grams. Pricing is still unknown, but expect it to be steep. With Samsung expected to introduce a 512 GB SSD in 2009 though, we hope to see the price come down rather quickly.

The new OCZ Solid Series of SSDs are available in capacities of 30 GB, 60 GB and 120 GB, with read and write speeds hitting up to 155 MB/s and 90 MB/s, respectively. Designed and optimized for modern notebooks, the Solid Series of SSDs are available in a 2.5-inch form factor and are not recommended for use in laptops purchased prior to 2007. It is a curious recommendation for OCZ to make, but it may be partially due to the SATA II interface that these new SSDs use, which older notebooks may not have.

The new Solid Series drives also have a mini-USB port on them, which apparently can be used “to update the Solid Series’ firmware should new versions become available, to further enhance compatibility or performance with future platforms.”

Seek times on the new drives are less than 0.35 ms, with operating temperatures ranging from -10 C to +70 C and power consumption ranging from 4.5 V to 5.5 V. The Solid Series supports RAID, has a mean time before failure of 1.5 million hours, are shock resistant and are backed by a two year warranty. OCZ claims these new drives use 50-percent less power than the best performing 2.5-inch HDDs on the market and offer seek times that are 10-times as fast. While likely not among the fastest SSDs currently available, the Solid Series’ rated speeds indicate that performance levels should still be quite good.

Part numbers for the new drives are OCZSSD2-1SLD30G, OCZSSD2-1SLD60G and OCZSSD2-1SLD120G, for the 30 GB, 60 GB and 120 GB models, respectively. According to early pricing found at online retailers, the 30 GB model is selling for $89, the 60 GB model is selling for $159 and the 120 GB model is selling for $299. Although the offered capacities are rather small, the Solid Series would seem to offer great value. For notebook users tempted by the benefits of a solid state drive, upgrading to a new 60 GB OCZ Solid Series SSD from an old 80 GB 5400 RPM hard drive could be well worth it.

Source: Tom`s Hardware

A few months back Seagate revealed that they would start selling enterprise based Solid-State Drives (SSD) some time in 2009.

Some industry experts believe that selling the Solid-State idea to industry IT managers will be difficult because there is currently no clear and cut way to describe endurance or life expectancy of SSD’s. Seagate is currently working on this problem with JEDEC standards body.

Rich Vignes, senior manager of market development believes, “As companies like Seagate start to demonstrate field-proven reliability and endurance in enterprise applications, we’ll overcome those (solid-state drive) endurance fears.”

With time, SSDs will catch on since they offer much better mean time between failures (MTBF) than standard

 mechanical based hard drives, they generate much less heat, require much less power, and can also be compacted into a smaller form factor as well. This presents many attractive key qualities for SSDs – the trick now is to deploy and convince the industry to make the move.

Quoting Gregory Wong, an industry analyst at Forward Insights, said, “IT managers tend to be 

conservative, so the qualification time will be quite long—nine months to a year, and early adopters will be Web 2.0 companies such as Google and Facebook.”

As it currently stands, consumers won’t be going mainstream with SSD any time soon at all. Prices may continue to trickle on the downward slope, but don’t expect leaps and bounds just yet. Let the enterprise market play out first.

Source: www.tomshardware.com