Displaying items by tag: Solid State Drive

A team of Japanese researchers from Chuo University in Tokyo said they have solved one of the biggest problems that still limits the development of solid-state drives. Specifically, with currently available SSD technology it is not possible to directly write the data to the NAND chips over other data. Instead, data is written to the free part of the SSD drive, while old data is formatted. This way of operation eventually leads to fragmentation of data and reduces the performance and life-cycle of SSD drive.

Just as we published an article about Micron releasing cheaper SSDs in 120, 240, 480 and 960GB versions, one company has decided to go even further. The company, Foremay, has announced SSDs with a capacity of 2 terabytes in a standard 2.5 inch format and only 9.5 millimeters thick. Foremay will offer these SSDs within their TC166 series for mass market and SC199 for industrial and commercial users.

Last week Mosaid showed off a prototype of their new solid state drive which boasts a massive 2TB capacity. The new Solid-State Drive (SSD) is able to do what conventional solid state drives are able to do only in a more cost effective way. Mosiad has managed to reduce the number of controllers and channels per drive while increasing the capacity and throughput of the drives. If they are able to push this out into the market it will be a big hit in many high-performance systems and no we are not talking about your gaming box.

Solid State drives are what the enthusiast market wants for storage. This has been the case since the first SSDs hit the market a few years ago. However, the drives were too expensive for most and ended up being available to very few. In the last year or so the price per Gigabyte has dropped to almost $1 making the SSD a more viable option for not only the enthusiast but also for the regular consumer market. Additionally with the introduction of high-performance, low cost SATA 3.0 Controllers for SSDs the performance of these drives has made them almost too good to pass up. As far as completion and variety the SSD market is also better now than the traditional magnetic media market. There are simply more companies making SSDs than there are making HDD. We have already taken a look at a few of these in the past and are now working into the new line of SATA 3.0 drives complete with the SandForce 2281 SATA 3.0 controller. Today we have one from Patriot Memory, the PyroSE 120GB solid state drive. Let’s see just how fast it is.

After our first run through with the Kingston HyperX SH100S3B 120GB SSD we had more than a few comments stating that 120GB was just not enough to work with. Although your typical 120GB drive is intended to be used as a boot drive with some basic applications installed on this drive it is not meant to be the only drive. Well people still did not want to hear about that so we managed to arrange to take a peek at Kingston’s next upgrade kit, the HyperX 3K 240GB upgrade kit which comes with a HyperX SH103S3 240GB SSD drive along with pretty much the same goodies you saw in the 120GB kit. So let’s take a quick look at what you have and then dive straight into performance.

Here at DecryptedTech we have always had covered a very wide range of products (as well as technologies). However, there is one item that we have never really gotten too deep into. This is direct attached storage and in particular Solid State Drives (SSDs). It is true that we do show you their performance in almost every motherboard review that we do here on the site, but we have never reviewed any SSDs exclusively. We have had many reasons for this not the last of which is there is still debate on how to properly test an SSD or HDD. While some feel that IOPs (Input Output Operations per Second) are key others want to know exactly how fast their data moves into and out of the drive. We sat down and have come up with what we hope is a good balance of synthetic and real world tests that will give you the best idea of how an SSD performs. So with that in mind we are going to dive into Kingston’s HyperX SH100S3B/120G 120GB Solid Sate Drive Upgrade Kit.