Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

"We all know solid-state drives take a bit of care, so if you want to keep track of how your SSD is faring health-wise, [the] free utility SSDLife will let you know.... [H]ow many times your drive has been powered on, written to... and even...an estimated lifespan."

If you own a Solid State Drive - or are thinking about purchasing one - Lifehacker's brief article on the SSDLife utility is worth a visit, as it contains several useful links for other SSD tools, as well SSDLife itself. Note that SSDLife is available in both a Free and a $20 Professional Version. Per a comparison on the vendors website, the Professional version offers S.M.A.R.T. attributes and a "SmartCheck" feature, which polls SSD status on a given schedule, in addition to the general health and technical drive information provided by the freeware version of the utility. If you own one or more SSDs, will this utility make your tool kit? Or do you even bother with any special tools or care techniques?

"We take stock of today's SSDs-what they have to offer, how they've progressed, and which should have dominion in your PC. At the end of our November 2008 solid-state-drive roundup, we concluded that those NAND-flash-based drives just weren't ready for prime time, thanks to astronomically high prices, small capacities, and flaky first-gen controllers."

Maximum PC did a round up test in November 2008 of Solid State drives and how they performed. Their conclusion at the end of it was that SSD's were just not quite ready yet. They have now revisted the SSD market and tested the drives again to see if they are now ready to become the main drives in our PC's. The conclusion is a definite yes. I find SSD's are still not at a price v capacity level that I am ready to pay for yet, but I can't deny the speed improvements they bring if you have the cash to buy one.

"Intel Corporation is moving to a more advanced, 34- nanometer (nm) manufacturing process for its leading NAND flash-based Solid State Drive (SSD) products, which are an alternative to a computer's hard drive. The move to 34nm will help lower prices of the SSDs up to 60 percent for PC and laptop makers and consumers who buy them due to the reduced die size and advanced engineering design."

Good news all around - Intel, who makes some of the top-performing soild-state drives on the market today, is moving to a smaller manufacturing process. This has the effect of increasing yields, and thus prices drop. Capacities are still the same at 80 GB and 160 GB - I really thought we'd see a bump to 240 GB by now - but these new drives will have a 25 reduction in latency; an amazing 65 microseconds versus the 4000 microseconds on a typical hard drive. Better yet, write performance has increased twofold - and the last-gen drives had a blistering 250 MB/s read speed, so these should push 500 MB/s for read speeds. That's mind-blowing performance!

The price drop Intel quotes of 60% is a little far-fetched though - the price on NewEgg for the 160 GB X-25M is $629 USD, and Intel is quoting the price in a 1000-unit lot as $440 USD; that's a difference of 30%, so while it's a nice price drop, it's not quite as good as Intel is quoting.