solid-state drive

Samsung on Wednesday night said it has begun mass-producing 256GB solid-state drives. This size tops the largest-capacity SSDs found in laptops today.

Samsung currently offers 64GB and 128GB SSDs for laptops.

The new 256GB drives are faster too, the company claims, more than doubling the performance rate of Samsung 64GB and 128GB SSDs.

The drives combine sequential read rates of 220 megabytes per second, with sequential write rates of 200MBps. "This sharply narrows the performance gap between read and write operations to only 10 percent, compared to a read-write speed difference of between 20 (percent) and 70 percent for … Read more

Intel's next-generation microarchitecture has arrived. Officially.

Intel made the debut of the Core i7 processor official on Monday afternoon, launching the processor at an event in San Francisco. PC makers, including Dell and Gateway, quickly followed suit with announcements.

"The Core i7 processor speeds video editing (and) immersive games...by up to 40 percent without increasing power consumption," the Intel said in a statement.

Combining the i7 with super-fast solid state drives will lead to significant jumps in performance, according to Pat Gelsinger, senior vice president and general manager of Intel's Digital Enterprise Group. "When … Read more

LOS ANGELES--Technology introduced at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference by SanDisk could boost solid-state drive performance in Windows Vista by 100 times.

The largest supplier of flash memory cards unveiled an advanced flash file system for solid-state drives that "has the potential" to accelerate random write speeds by up to 100 times over existing systems.

Despite being generally faster than hard-disk drives (particularly at reading data), solid-state drives fall short of hard disks when they randomly write data. Random writes are generally considered to be the Achilles heel of solid-state drives.

To maximize random write performance, SanDisk developed … Read more

I'm not sure this will help stop the downturn in the NAND flash memory market, but Transcend on Tuesday joined the league of solid-state-drive makers and introduced its new 128GB high-speed 2.5-inch drive.

The new drive features the SATA-II interface and Transcend's Multi-level cell flash memory chip. This combination allows it to offer sustained read/write speeds of up to 145MB/92MB per second, about 40 percent faster than high-speed regular 2.5-inch SATA hard drives.

Like other SSDs, the new SSD from Transcend has very low 0.2ms latency that would potentially increase the performance of … Read more

Updated at 3:40 p.m.with additional comments and clarifications about solid state drives and ATA commands.

Will solid-state drives thrive on Windows 7? Microsoft is set to address that question at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference this week.

Microsoft will speak to both overall support for solid-state drives and Windows 7 support for Netbooks in Los Angeles at WinHEC 2008, which kicks off Wednesday.

In a conference abstract titled "Windows 7 Enhancements for Solid-State Drives," Microsoft states that "PC systems that have solid-state drives are shipping in increasing volumes" and that it is planning &… Read more

Intel said Tuesday that solid-state drives can extend battery life up to 30 minutes compared to hard disk drives.

Add the speed advantage of solid state drives and that's two strikes against hard disks. Price parity--strike three--is still a ways off, however. That--and the fact that hard drives offer much larger capacities--will keep hard drives competitive next year.

For now, Intel is evangelizing the benefits of speed and power efficiency.

Most independent benchmarks show that solid state drives perform better than hard disk drives. In some cases, a lot better. That's a given now. One area, however, that … Read more

In the wake of a big loss posted this week by SanDisk, layoffs appear to be in the offing.

On Monday, SanDisk said in prepared remarks that as part of its efforts to reduce operating expenses, "actions will be implemented in the current quarter" and will include "canceling or exiting a number of products and marketing activities, and will result in employee reduction in R&D, Sales & Marketing, G&A, and Operations."

And on Monday during SanDisk's third-quarter earnings conference call, CFO Judy Bruner spoke about more restructuring to come. In response … Read more

Will 2009 be the year that solid-state drives take off? Maybe not. The speedy drives are catching on, but wider acceptance will take time--and the bad economy isn't helping.

Costs are still high for these drives, which typically outdo--and in some cases blow away--hard disks in performance. "2010-2011...that's when we think the price points for the SSD market get attractive enough to really drive stronger growth," Sanjay Mehrotra, president and chief operating officer of SanDisk, said this week during SanDisk's third-quarter earnings conference call.

Indeed, there is still a wide price gap between hard-disk … Read more

Updated at 11:40 p.m. with SanDisk response to Samsung letter.

Samsung on Tuesday withdrew its $5.85 billion bid for SanDisk, citing an increasing "risk profile."

This follows a new manufacturing agreement between SanDisk and Toshiba disclosed Monday and a stiff rejection by SanDisk last month of the Samsung offer.

"After nearly six months of efforts to pursue a transaction with no meaningful progress, we are withdrawing our proposal to acquire SanDisk," Yoon Woo Lee, vice chairman and CEO at Samsung Electronics, said in a letter that Samsung released Wednesday in Seoul.

"I … Read more