Displaying items by tag: SSD

OCZ decided to make certain changes in their Vertex 3 series SSDs, which should make these products come at a more affordable price. These modified devices are branded Vertex 3.20, and as the specifications are concerned they are equal to standard SSD's with the exception of NAND type of memory and come in a 2.5” format.

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.

Micron has introduced the M500 line of Solid State Drives with which they intend to offer customers a high capacity and high performance Solid State Drive at a cheaper price. The company will sell the SSDs on the market under the brand Crucial, while versions for OEM customers wear the market name Micron.

Las Vegas, NV, CES 2013 – One of our must see companies at CES is Kingston. We have been partnered with Kingston since early 2006 and they are truly one of our favorite companies not only for the things they do, but also for the people that are behind the PR. Yesterday we stopped by their showroom (they had a half ballroom at Caesar’s Palace to see what they had going on. When we walked we saw quite a few displays that contained the history of Kingston Memory and storage products. These cases were quite full considering the fact that Kingston is 20 years old and their HyperX line of memory products is 10 (their first HyperX memory module was DDR… just DDR). However they have come a long way and are now one of (if not the) leading memory and flash storage company in the world.

SilverStone launched two very interesting and practical additions for owners of portable computers. It is a reservoir for SSD disks named SilverStone Treasure TS08 and TS09, which are intended to be incorporated into the space reserved for the optical drive. The TS08 comes in white, with net weight of 27 grams, while the TS09 is for black notebooks, and since it supports a larger drive bay thickness it is a bit heavier, but still very light at only 40 grams.

As SSD drives are becoming a standard parts of every PC today, consumers are getting used to high performance and high quality storage devices. Therefore Kingmax is launching a SATA III Client Pro SSD – SMU32 and SMU 35 to please users’ desires. Helped by a SandForce controller and high-speed synchrounous Flash memory it has read/write speeds of up to 550MBs, 520MBs, and 4KB random write speed up to 85,000 IOPS (input/output operations per second). These high performance numbers will be enough for every user, whether it is used for gaming, multimedia or multitasking.

In the world of computer enclosures things can get boring pretty fast; after all how much can you do with a box? For too many companies the way to differentiate their products is to put in a window and extra LEDs and call it a day. There is little that is new to be perfectly honest with you. However, every now and then something comes out that does stand out from the crowd. We have seen it before with some very unique designs and concepts. One company that has done a fairly good job at keeping things interesting is Cooler Master and in particular their CMStorm line. While at CES this year (2012) we were shown a case that caught our eye and imagination. It was the CMStorm Stryker. We called it the Storm Trooper, not only for its connections to the CMStorm Trooper, but also because it reminded me of the Strom Troopers from Star Wars.  We have one of these in our lab now and well… let’s dive in to see what you get and how well it performs.

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.

With all of the security related news flying around we have received word from Kingston about an issue that affects the encryption feature in their SSDNow V+200 and KC100 lines. The issue is with the level of encryption that the SF-2000 is presenting. According to LSI (Pronounce that SandForce) the SF-2000 should be encrypting your data with 256-bit AES encryption. The problem is that it is not providing that and is instead only hitting 128-Bit AES Encryption.

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.