- Tuesday, 17 November 2009
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War settles nothing. To win a war is as disastrous as to lose one - Agatha Christie
Toshiba to make 128GB solid state drive
TOSHIBA SAID that it will mass produce solid state drives ranging in sizes of between 32 gigabytes to 128 gigabytes next year.
The 1.8-inch and 2.5-inch drives will be launched in May as part of a cunning plan to push solid state drives and force the current technology into signing its UB40.
Solid state drivers are fast, quiet and currently extremely expensive. So far they have only been seen in portable devices like tablet and Ultra-Mobile PCs and even then only in small sizes.
Currently, Samsung Electronics and Sandisk already make solid-state drives but the sizes of drives being talked about by Toshiba is new.
According to Reuters, Micron also has plans to enter the solid state drive market, with mass production early next year.
More here. µ
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WOO HOO! Competition means cheaper prices!

I wish they would get theire act together and build one that can actually hammer the WD raptor in ALL benchmarks though.
There is one that will hammer the Raptor in all tests but it does also hammer a whole the size of the ozone in your wallet! Mtron SSD 32Gbs but thats $1,500 worth of flash! http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/11/21/mtron_ssd_32_gb/
I'm glad to see more companies jumping on this route. However, even tho SSD devices like the MTRON are finally geting close to the performance of a WD Raptor, they aren't anywhere close to where it needs to be to really compell enthusiasts to take the jump. I want 500MB+/sec out of an SSD. I'm just not excited yet.

I'm keeping my hopes up for the IO Drive which claims 600MB/sec at $30/GB. Since they are using Micron Technologies flash, rumor has it they will break the $10/GB price in 2009.

Chris there is one that does what you say.. Fusion-io ioDrive 640 Gb with PCIe interface and mainly used as RAM.. it will surley smoke the Raptors.. sustained Reads 700 MB/s, sustained Writes 600 MB/s
the downside is its price $19.000.

128 Gb is kind of small.. but prices go down all the time.. the problem is harddrives get bigger all the time so when will this tech catch up ?
Well, as for me, until the issue of limited write life is resolved, I see these as limited in use. Certainly, using one for a system drive with Windows is NOT a good idea. I would rather see a solid, non-volatile memory technology that could be used for both execution memory (RAM) and storage memory, then go to a single level memory architecture, a la the old IBM System 38, and the AS-400.
Every time a conversation comes around about SSDs everyone freaks out because they have a "limited" number of writes. Yes I agree it sounds like a load of crap, but hey your current drive can only spin around so many times before the final ka-put. 

Has anyone done their research on these drives, so you all seriously think that so much money is being poured into SSDs because they suck? No, now it is not a total resolution to the problem but manufacturers are generating algorithms to distribute the write loads evenly over the entire drive to greatly increase the life cycle of these drives (incredible short but sweet).

Now is it seriously that bad? And aren’t the read speeds on these things incredible! Also because I myself am a skeptic I would install my OS on a traditional HDD and use the SSD for a data - non-system drive. Peace!
Limited writes are more a problem than the cost, especially for boot drives. Addressing that really needs to start with the OS and applications. I dread to think how long my home WS2003 server would last on a flash drive, it's fairly lightweight but still writes the boot drive (logs, temp files, registry, databases, etc) every couple of seconds.