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Tag: ssd

  • SanDisk CEO Harari Bullish About Flash Memory


    SanDisk CEO Eli Harari believes that at $2/GB SSDs aren’t competitive yet with hard drives.

    But he is bullish about the technology’s prospects and believes it offers an ideal storage solution for netbooks.

    In an interview with Tech Trader Daily, he said that you can buy an 80 GB HDD for USD $30-$35.

    SanDisk CEO Eli Harari

    However, that same USD $30 would only get you 15 GB of flash. He suggests that 32 GB of storage is probably enough for many netbook applications.

    But to be competitive with hard drives, Harari said the flash industry will have to be able to sell at USD $1/GB while maintaining profitability.

    He said that wasn’t possible at the current 42-43 nm process technology now used for manufacturing flash.

    But he believes it should be possible at 24 nm, or two generations ahead of the current technology.

    Harari told Tech Traders usage of SSDs will start to pick up in this year’s second half and hit the mainstream in a big way in 2011.

  • Toshiba Launches First PC With 512GB SSD


    Toshiba has launched what it claims is the first PC integrating 512GB SSD (Solid State Drive).

    The top-of-the-range Portege R600-ST4203 (known as dynabook SS RX2/WAJ in Japan) is a notebook PC employing a 2-bit-per-cell multi-level NAND flash memory.

    The company says this is the largest capacity SSD, with four times the density of SSD integrated into currently available products.

    A new controller allows high-speed parallel processing with the multi-level NAND flash memory, boosting data access speeds by approximately 230 per cent for read (max. 230MB per sec) and 450 per cent for write (max.180MB per sec), compared with SSD integrated into current PCs.

    The Portege also boosts data access speed by approximately 300 per cent for read and 250 per cent for write, compared to a hard disk drive (HDD).

    The Portege R600-ST4203 is powered by an Intel Core 2 Duo ULV SU9400 processor, 3GB RAM, and integrated GMA 4500MHD graphics.

    It comes with a 12.1-inch 1280×800 LCD display with LED-backlit, a DVD SuperMulti burner, WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity.

    Obviously all this comes at a price – the Portege R600-ST4203 is now available for pre-order for USD $2,999.00.

    Other features of the Portege include:

    • weight approx.1,095g
    • thickness 19.5mm to 25.5mm
    • long-time battery operation (12 hours) helped by ultra-low voltage CPU, a transreflective LCD that uses natural sunlight to make screen images more visible even without switching on the backlight

  • Verbatim Launches Encrypted Products at Infosecurity


    Verbatim has introduced its new range of hardware encrypted USB drives, solid state drives (SSD) portable drives and software encrypted DVD discs at this year’s Infosecurity Show.

    The storage media specialist said its new products will be aimed at anyone carrying sensitive material since the encryption prevents unauthorised accessing of the contents of the storage device.

    Hans Christoph Kaiser, business development manager for Flash Memory, Verbatim EUMEA, said: "There have been many embarrassing instances in recent years of USB drives or other storage products being mislaid or lost, and the confidential data contained within them compromised."

    "It is crucial that confidential information remains confidential, especially if it falls into the wrong hands.

    "Encrypted storage devices have become an essential part of life to huge numbers of people who need to keep their sensitive data private, this includes government officials, hospital staff and lawyers to name just a few.

    "Verbatim offers a comprehensive range that provides a solution to any storage problem requiring confidentiality."

    The new range includes:

    • Executive Secure USB Drive – with a 256-bit AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) hardware encryption coupled with integrated password protection
    • ExpressCard SSD Secure – Verbatim is launching a range of Secure SSD ExpressCards that guarantee the safety of the stored data if accidentally lost or mislaid
    • Encrypted Hard Disk Drive – Verbatim’s 128-bit hardware encrypted 2.5" hard disk drive offers real-time full disk encrypted storage without performance loss during data transfer
    • SecureSaveDVD – protects files for up to 100 years using AES 256-bit encryption

  • Samsung Launches "Industry First" Self-encrypting SSDs


    Samsung Electronics has unveiled what it claims are the first hardware-based self-encrypting solid-state drives.

    To be available in 256-, 128- and 64-GB versions, the SSDs provide full-disk encryption using Wave Systems’ technology, which activates and manages the encryption.

    Dell has already said that it will use the drives in its next laptops.

    Despite the improved security, Samsung maintains the SSDs’ performance is not affacted.

    It says the encryption provides better security than the software alternative, because encryption keys and access credentials are generated and stored within the drive hardware, making it more difficult to hack.

    Each Samsung self-encrypting SSD will come bundled with Wave’s EMBASSY Trusted Drive Manager, which provides pre-boot authentication to the drive and enrolling drive administrators and users.

    Jim Elliott, memory vice president, Samsung Semiconductor, said the SSD drives offered business users the best of performance and security in a single drive.

    "Samsung has combined the tremendous performance advantages of solid state technology with integrated hardware encryption for drives designed especially for today’s ‘road warrior’ professionals," he said.

  • HealthNet's New Venture Venyu Targets SMB Storage and Security


    Amerivault and Network Technology Group Inc data storage providers are to join forces to create Venyu Inc.

    The new venture will provide commercial grade, customizable solutions for data storage with disaster recovery, writes Samantha Sai for storage-biz.news.

    Both Amerivault and NTG are owned by HealthNet Services Inc (PHNS).

    The two entities joining forces were purchased by HealthNet Services for a combined USD $167 million.

    Venyu will be based out of Baton Range and will be a wholly owned subsidiary of PHNS.

    It will provide data backup, disaster recovery and managed data center services to small and medium sized businesses.

    Its progressive portfolio also includes online data backup, physical and virtualized recovery solutions, managed hosting, SaaS, and co-location services.

    Scott Thompson, CEO of Venyu, said it would address client concerns about security and privacy, including focusing on providing solutions and progressive ways to safeguard mission critical data against disaster.

    He said the company aimed to provide secure, reliable and scalable backup and storage solutions that require minimal maintenance, leaving clients free to pursue their business.

    "We’re focused on virtual disaster recovery," he said. "If you have five servers, we will take a snapshot of the data residing on them and keep a virtual instance of them in our own facility."

    Thompson said Venyu is also focused on handling increasing volumes of customer data and is looking for ways to service customer needs in this arena.

    "We’re not really as far along as we need to be storage-wise, I think. SSD [solid-state drive] is coming along, but I want to know what is the next fundamental thing that we’re going to do in the storage arena to help this problem, because the volumes of data that we’re talking about – tape can’t do this.

    "You can’t get this done on tape. I don’t care how large the jukebox is. The exponential growth of data that we’re talking about is not going to be able to be managed on tape. We have to do this through disk of some kind whether solid state or rotational."

  • WD Enters Solid-State Drive Market With Acquisition Of SiliconSystems


    Western Digital has completed a USD $65 million cash acquisition of leading solid-state drives supplier, SiliconSystems.

    SiliconSystems’ product portfolio includes solid-state drives with SATA, EIDE, PC Card, USB and CF interfaces in 2.5-inch, 1.8-inch, CF and other form factors.

    Since its inception in 2002, SiliconSystems has sold millions of SiliconDrive products to the network-communications, industrial, embedded-computing, medical, military and aerospace markets.

    These markets accounted for approximately one third of worldwide solid-state drive revenues in 2008.

    John Coyne, president and CEO of WD, said its worldwide infrastructure and technical and financial resources will enable further growth in SiliconSystems’ existing markets and customer relationships.

    He said SiliconSystems’ intellectual property and technical expertise will provide additional building blocks for future products to address emerging opportunities in WD’s existing markets.

    "The combination will be modestly accretive to revenue and margins as a result of SiliconSystems’ existing position as a trusted supplier to the well-established USD $400 million market for embedded solid-state drives," he said.

    "SiliconSystems’ intellectual property and technical expertise will significantly accelerate WD’s solid-state drive development programs for the netbook, client and enterprise markets, providing greater choice for our customers to satisfy all their storage requirements."

    Integration into WD begins immediately, with SiliconSystems now becoming known as the WD Solid-State Storage business unit, complementing WD’s existing Branded Products, Client Storage, Consumer Storage and Enterprise Storage business units.

  • FLASH SSD: More Viable in Enterprise Storage Market


    Until recently, the idea of using solid-state disk (SSD) flash drives in an enterprise storage subsystem would have been deemed ludicrous.

    Ray Lucchesi, president of Silverton Consulting, however, says that recent trends in NAND technology have made SSDs more viable in the enterprise storage market.

    In 2009 the flash SSD storage market will see even faster products appearing on the shelves, writes Samantha Sai for storage.biz-news.

    That prediction is based on the additive factors that are at work in the storage market—architecture and semiconductor process technology.

    Historically manufacturers did not see any point in integrating very fast architectural features in to flash SSDs as they were expensive and the market for the product was small.

    The improvement in architectural technologies for speeding up performance and IOPS has since been developed by OEMs for specific marketable products and their potential is clearly exploitable in the Flash SSD design.

    The SSD market has also reached a critical mass.

    Lucchesi said the technology has now become economical enough to favorably compare to traditional disk drives — at least in a price-performance context.

    In addition, he said many seemingly insurmountable shortcomings have been resolved.

    The architectural features that would come into play in the construction of Flash SSDs would be:

    • parallelization of the internal media arrays
    • improved media management technology
    • faster media controllers
    • faster host interface controllers
    • hypbridizing on board memory technologies

    The scale up of the technologies would require significant investment in IP. A lot of trial and error will become visible as OEMs throw products at the market.

    In this context it is interesting to note that it is expected that a single 3.5" form factor flash SSD will be able to deliver speeds of 2000 MBs of sustainable reads and writes.

    The Flash SSD through put and IOPS performance is predicted to be a multiple of the performance for a single disk, based on the proven scalability of the SSD RAID arrays.

    Expectation is also high that the asymmetry of sustained read to write IOPs will improve from 10 to 1. (However, there is apprehension that it will never achieve parity.)

    If this expectation is fulfilled, flash SSD arrays will become a viable choice for many Enterprise speed-up applications.

    While the latency in Flash SSDs is not expected to scale in the same way as throughput, the read access times are expected to improve.

    This is attributed to the fact that flash SSDs have not yet been optimized for latency. However, in the future the Flash SSD may increase in density and a read write cycle may become more complicated on chip process.

    Calibration, error correction and address translation may be done by controllers between the memory arrays and the host interface controller or card data bus.

    The flash may still evolve as a separate species that looks completely different from the typical RAM.

    On the whole, the improvement will be revolutionary and evolutionary and by 2013 flash SSD would have reached a point where architecture of an ideal SSD will be well established.

  • Intel's X25-M SSD Judged Insufficient For "Heavy Use"


    Intel’s much-hyped X25-M SSD is being marketed as a quicker and much more energy-efficient option for laptops than the traditional hard disk drives, but a review site finds it slower under heavy use, writes M Asim for storage-biz.news.

    According to PC Perspective, this solid-state drive has problems in the sector relating to wear leveling algorithms and remapping that are considered relatively effective to boost performance.

    PC Perspective says that they it does the opposite and becomes fragmented when used heavily.

    The problem becomes even worse with usual defragmentation programs.

    "If a laptop user places light workloads on its X-25 M, it may not find such issues",the review says.

    "But there are some users who are opting for SS drive for the OS partitions, and these drives can be fragmented by a standard power user workload."

    Intel responded by saying that its labs couldn’t duplicate the reviewers’ tests results.

    "We have contacted PC Perspective’s reviewers to find out about their method to duplicate and scrutinize the data," an Intel spokesman said.

    "We think that the imitative workloads they have tested do not represent real world use."

    According to the chip maker, almost every storage device can prove a fiasco if tested for anything other than normal use.

    PC Perspective’s reviewers, meanwhile, say that this performance problem can be fixed with a firmware update from the chip maker.

    Intel unveiled the X25-M last December and has already lowered its price.

  • Texas Memory Systems Introduces Highest Capacity PCI-Express Solid State Disk


    Texas Memory Systems has announced its latest PCI-Express Solid State Disk aimed at mainstream businesses and applications.

    The RamSan-20 offers 450GB of usable grade Flash – which the company claims makes it the highest capacity enterprise class PCIe Flash card on the market.

    Described as a complete storage system on a PCIe card, the SSD accelerates server-resident applications that require large, fast buffer areas and those that are random access intensive.

    Texas lists databases, video editing, financial modeling, data acquisition, scientific computing, and web content as examples of applications likely to benefit from the RamSan-20.

    Woody Hutsell, president at Texas Memory SystemsAs a PCIe Flash card, said the RamSan-20 minimizes latency between the server’s processor and storage and is easily installed in minutes.

    He said users are increasingly looking to SSD as they demand greater application performance.

    "Beyond the Enterprise data center, the technology and cost improvements in Flash are stimulating demand," he said.

    "These factors, coupled with a growing desire to reduce space and power requirements with greener storage, led us to develop the RamSan-20."

    He said that to maximise performance and reliability, the RamSan-20 utilizes Single Level Cell (SLC) Flash.

    It delivers 120,000 I/Os per second (IOPS) for random read operations – and Texas claims it transfers data faster than other Flash drives and "hundreds of times" faster than traditional mechanical hard drives.

    A comprehensive on-board management suite ensures the RamSan-20 does not impact host resources, yet Hutsell said it delivers extreme reliability and durability, ensuring data preservation even in the event of a server crash or power outage.

    The RamSan-20 is scheduled for general availability in early Q2 2009. No pricing information was available.

  • A-DATA Launches Highest Capacity SSD For Laptops and Netbooks












    The race to drive up flash memory storage capacity has a new champion in the form of A-DATA Technology.

    The Taiwanese company has just announced the highest capacity of SSD in the industry at CeBIT 2009 – the 512GB XPG 2.5" SSD.

    Designed for notebook and PC enthusiasts, the memory module maker says it is aimed at users seeking both a fast transfer rate and high capacity SSD.

    With a fast transfer rate up to 230MB/s and 160MB/s read and write, the 512GB XPG 2.5" SSD certainly delivers.

    It has an adopted standard high speed SATA II interface and comes equipped with a tough but lightweight case.

    Although the world’s second largest vendor of memory modules, it is normally overshadowed by companies such as Samsung, Toshiba, SanDisk and Western Digital in the flash memory capacity stakes.

    512GB XPG 2.5" SSD’s features include:
    1. Read up to 230MB/s Write up to 160 MB/s
    2. Interface: SATA I/II
    3. Operating Temp.: -10°C~70°C
    4. Shock Resistance: 1500G/0.5ms
    5. MTBF: 1,500,000 hrs.
    6. Dashing, durable, lightweight Aluminum casing

    Specification:
    1. Dimension: 100.0*70.1*9.2 mm (LxWxH)
    2. Weight: 85+/