Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

"SanDisk has just announced that its 60GB and 120GB G3 solid state drives are headed out to retailers as we speak. Both North America and Europe are getting served simultaneously, with the drives promising sequential performance of up to 220MB/sec on the read side and up to 120MB/sec on the write side."

Prices are $229.99 and $399.99 respectively. Load your OS and applications on this and put all of your data on a secondary standard drive and you should get a nice performance increase.

"SSDs haven't found their way into the mass market yet, but a team of Japanese researchers is already trying to make them more worthwhile. The team claims it has developed a technology that helps to shrink the size of SSDs by no less than 90%, makes them cheaper and boosts energy efficiency by 70%."

I'm always a little wary of announcements that claim massive breakthroughs - and SSDs that are 90% smaller and 70% more power efficient certainly qualify for the "massive breakthrough" moniker - but this seems like it's based on an adjustment to the way the current chips are laid out, rather than a re-work of the chips themselves. Anything that can drive down the costs of SSDs is welcome in my book, and hopefully this technology will be part of accomplishing that.

"You know, making that jump from HDD to SSD still costs an arm and a leg, so how about somewhere in between that gap? That's what Lenovo's offering as an option for the IdeaPad Y460 and Y560 coming in March. The idea with this RapidDrive technology is that you can have a 32GB or 64GB PCI-E SSD installed alongside your regular HDD (up to 500GB option), and the two drives will effectively be combined into one."

I was just complaining about the cost of SSDs today on Twitter, so this news is welcome - assuming that it's something that other manufacturers do with their laptops and it's not some sort of Lenovo exclusive. Let's hope we see this technology everywhere in 2010!

"SSDs are usually used in expensive computers like the Ars God Box and the MacBook Air, but SSD vendor RunCore's CES display points out that they can revitalize older computers as well. Several older computers were demoed sporting shiny new SSDs and running Windows 7 like champions. And maybe, some time this decade, that upgrade strategy might become cost-effective."

While I can certainly see the utility in recycling your old hardware and giving it a bright new future, I have to wonder if, even at a reduced cost, the upgrade of an SSD into an aging laptop is worth it. Yes, a SSD will greatly improve the performance of ancient devices like Pentium M based laptops. However, assuming you have not donated your antique to the museum, it probably does not have enough computing power to display the flash heavy websites we come across in the modern world, and their batteries are probably on their last legs. The end result is a big, bulky computing device that can manage light web surfing if you are near a power outlet. Not quite the great march of progress in technology.

"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.

"WD has announced its SiliconDrive III product range based on SiliconSystems' technology and targeted pretty much at the same networks: communications, industrial, embedded computing, data centre, aero-space, military and OEM medical markets, which prize reliability and data integrity highly. These are products with SATA, EIDE, PC Card, USB and CF interfaces, not SAS or Fibre Channel or PCIe."

While this does not mean you can waltz down to your nearest Circuit City CompUSA local computer store to pick up a slick new Western Digital SSD, Western Digital's entry does mean that you will be able to soon. Of course, where Western Digital treads, Seagate will not be far behind, which can only mean the two big HDD manufacturers will duke it out, sooner, rather than later, in the SSD space, and we can only benefit with cheap SSDs! I just hope that they will not make too many compromises in the upcoming battle. That and cheaper SSDs soon!

"The market is flooded with flash-based solid state drives (SSD) right now, all of which claim to deliver impressive throughput at power consumption levels low enough to save the world. So much for the theory, though—the reality is rather different. A few select products are truly impressive, but the bulk of these are just expensive offerings that do not deliver on their promises. Two new drives by Samsung and Solidata found their way into our test labs, and they are as different as they can be."

SSD Manufacturers are working hard to improve the performance of their product and bring them more into the mainstream. Of course, it almost seems as if everyone and their mom is making SSDs now. Solidata and Samsung have their latest babies wrung through the testing labs of Tom's Hardware and the results demonstrate that time does not always see improvements in technology. Of course, I welcome the extra competition, but the results that Tom's Hardware produces still leaves me a bit wanting and thinking that I may still stick with good old HDDs for the next year, maybe two. Sure, HDDs are a fairly mature product, but they've stood with me through the test of time. At least I'm not waxing poetic about 3.5" floppies, the Parallel Port or trying to convince people that VESA Local Bus really is better than ISA.

"If you look at the SSD market today, you’d assume that it’s very different from what it was just six months ago when the X25-M launched. People are worried that the Intel drive has issues with degrading performance over time. Some vendors are now shipping “revised” JMicron drives with multiple controllers, supposedly fixing all of the problems I talked about last year."

AnandTech writes up an interesting article that takes a peek into the underlying issues of the whole SSD performance drop over time brouhaha and how newer generation SSDs are working to resolve it. The unfortunate reality is owing to the way in which SSDs work, the performance drop is a fact of life and cannot be avoided, though it can be mitigated to an extent. Even with several manufacturers working hard on the issue, Intel still remains top dog, commanding top prices, but the other brands do provide value, as long as you're willing to wait a few more seconds for that game/application/picture you wouldn't want your mom to see load.

"Hard drive maker Western Digital has announced that its acquisition of SSD manufacturer SiliconSystems has been completed. The acquisition cost Western Digital $65 million in cash. SiliconSystems is a leading supplier of SSDs for the embedded systems market."

I have to say that the writing has been on the wall that SSDs are going to replace hard disk drives for quite some time. This is why I find it surprising that Western Digital has taken so long to get involved. Sure, solid state is still quite expensive but prices are coming down, capacity is going up. Several companies have already have built up a good reputation for SSDs and now Western Digital has an uphill battle. Still, it is good to see another major manufacturer enter the market since it should mean that prices will continue to drop. I've yet to jump on the bandwagon but I've seen the performance difference it can make. The future of Solid State is now just that much closer.

I don't know about where your computer is positioned, but one of mine (my media editing workstation) is on a shelf slightly above and about 18 inches in front of my head. So when the hard drives start grinding away, they're easy to hear. Windows Vista's indexing is great from a user perspective, but it does have to scan content on a regular basis so grind, grind, grind is what I hear. Also, working with photos and videos creates quite a bit of heavy hard drive usage. I usually have music playing, but music is less satisfying when there's a constant grinding going on in the background. But there's hope...

I have yet to purchase a solid state drive (SSD) but watching prices fall, and capacity/performance increase, I can comfortably say that 2009 will be the last year I'll be using hard drives as the primary drive in my two main daily-use computers - and I'm eargerly looking forward to the sound of silence that change will entail. The primary hard drives in my two main computers are 150 GB 10,000 RPM Western Digital RaptorX drives, so that's the performance and size benchmark that SSD drives have to beat. I keep my music collection, videos, and other big files on my Windows Home Server, so the only thing I need on my primary drive are my documents, pictures, and applications.

Looking at the SSD drives out there today, some have hit that mark, and the rest are moving toward it quite rapidly. I'm hoping that by the end of this year, I'll see high-performance 256 GB SSD drives for around the $250 USD mark. 128 GB SSD drives would be a little too tight on space (I'm outgrowing my 150 GB drives) so 256 GB would give me room to grow, and as long as the performance was quick, I don't think I'd miss my Raptor drives. I long for the sweet sound of silence...

"Asus plans to offer fewer storage options for users of its Eee PC netbook range, a company representative said on Monday. The manufacturer's spokesperson told ZDNet UK that, while Eee PC models are currently available in each country with a choice of hard-disk drive (HDD) or solid-state drive (SSD), the company will from August offer only one version per model in any given country."

I don't think this is a big surprise given the level to which the netbook market has gone mainstream. I know a number of netbook owners who had no idea whether they had a HDD or SSD. I enlightened them after they commented how they liked their netbook except for the really small disk drive (which was SSD of course). My first netbook had an SSD but our two current ones both have HDD, and frankly I prefer more space (surprise, surprise). Given the costs differences, this is the exact reason I see a move to HDD's for netbooks targeted at mainstream users.

"In the past, the raw throughput gained by moving from one hard drive standard to another has been relatively unimportant. An announcement that theoretical drive bandwidth had doubled from 1.5Gbps (SATA) to 3Gbps (SATA2) makes for great copy, but anyone familiar with the mechanics of a hard drive knows that standard HDD throughput typically couldn't saturate SATA, much less SATA2. The real benefit of new drive standards has typically come from those features that take second billing—thinner cables, smaller connectors, hot swappability, Native Command Queuing (NCQ), and improved power management. The advent of SSDs, however, changes everything."

If you try and plan ahead with your computer purchases to help future-proof them, you might want to start considering including SATA3 on your shopping list. Since it sounds like an SSD drive might be all but required in order to get the maximum performance benefit, you might as well add that to your list as well.

"Intel has announced a series of price cuts on its lineup of SLC (Single Level Cell) and MLC (Multi Level Cell) Solid State Drives. Their NAND flash is produced by IM Flash Technologies, an Intel joint venture with Micron Technologies. Lower sales due to the global economic slump are a key reason for the price cuts. However, declining NAND flash prices are lowering production costs for Intel's competitors, many of which are entering the market with a new generation of products. Intel launched their 160GB X-25M for $945 just under two months ago."

This is the kind of competition I like to see: a bunch of compeditors fighting for a new market, each trying to release the best product at the lowest price, all competing with each other. I don't own any device with an SSD yet, but I'm pretty sure that by the end of the year, I'll have slapped an SSD into something I own - the temptation is too great, though what's keeping me away is the poor price/storage ratio. As that improves, SSDs will become impossible to resist...

"Where might you expect to find the world’s fastest PC? In the air-conditioned server room of a Silicon Valley tech company, perhaps, or cobbled together by boffins at a university? The reality is different: in the showroom of an electronics store off the Tottenham Court Road in central London sits a glowing black monolithic machine, the YoYotech Fi7epower MLK1610. This desktop supercomputer, built by a small British company, is nearly twice as fast as the next most powerful PC in the world. "

This is one of the new Intel Core i7 supercomputers, showing just how fast the i7 quad core chips are (even without water cooling). The feature I find most intriguing on this computer is the use of an 80GB solid state drive as the boot device. It claims a boot time of mere seconds, using an optimized version of Windows Vista 64. I do question the terrible name, though. Try searching the web for that Fi7epower!

"Flash-based solid state drives (SSDs) are considered to be the future of performance hard drives, and everyone seems to be jumping on the bandwagon. We are no exception, as we have been publishing many articles on flash-based SSDs during the last few months, emphasizing the performance gains and the potential power savings brought by flash memory. And there is nothing wrong with this, since SLC flash SSDs easily outperform conventional hard drives today (SLC = single level cell). However, we have discovered that the power savings aren't there: in fact, battery runtimes actually decrease if you use a flash SSD."



Raise your hand if you thought Flash Hard Drives improved the battery life of your laptop. I fell for the same myth and am slightly disappointed, but Tom's Hardware has run a few SSD (solid-state drives) through the paces, and their results show that, even though these drives don't have moving parts, the battery life isn't any better compared to old-fashioned spinning hard drives. Their review is extremely thorough, so if you're wanting to get the low-down on SSD performance and battery life, check out the linked article!