This is the sort of English up with which I shall not put - Winston Churchill
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Transcend refreshes SSD line
FLASH memory and SSD vendor Transcend has released shedloads of new drives one of which includes a MLC external drive with an eSATA interface.
The new interface allows them to hit much higher speeds than a USB and, while they have been seen in the business market they have not been seen in the consumer sector yet.
Punters are apparently starting to get miffed that external SSDs are not really worth the extra cash as the USB connection is too slow for them to see any added advatange.
While an external SSD is more robust than its standard predecessors, there is little to make punters to want to splash out on something which is technology for its own sake.
What surprises me is that Transcend is releasing new IDE models as it is difficult to imagine anyone shelling out $350 for an SLC SSD and then want to plug it into an IDE drive.
As far as the SATA models are concerned, they are all pretty much the same as others on the market and little to get excited about.
Transcend recently told Ars Technica it had cracked the JMicron controller problem which has plagued SSD drives.
However they are not the only one that has made this claim. Intel said something similar about the X25-M SSD. This is the drive which is at the centre of a row about whether SSD's downgrade overtime thanks to Chipzilla's write levelling and sector remapping algorithms. µ
L'INQ
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Heck, I've been trolling for a decent 128GB IDE SSD for my older laptop for the past year. Sure the laptop is getting close to 5 years old now, but it's now the only 32 bit machine left in my test environment. Aside from the disk it's still decently fast, an SSD is all it needs...
Transcend makes a lot of products for industrial applications, there is plenty of high end equipment out there that uses an IDE interface and would benefit durability of SSD. It the same reason there is still a market for laptops with serial ports, you don't replace multi million dollar production or testing equipement every three years like you do you office PCs, you buy PC hardware that's compatible with it instead.
"What surprises me is that Transcend is releasing new IDE models..."
This doesn't really surprise me. Transcend have spotted a niche market, providing a performance upgrade to older, non-SATA laptops.
As long as they don't take the piss on pricing, I suspect they're onto a winner.