SanDisk Corporation has announced the uSSD 5000 solid state drive (SSD). It can be used as an economical substitute for hard disk drives in sub-$250 PCs, such as Intel-powered classmate PCs, according to manufacturer.
“SanDisk’s uSSD 5000 solid state drive is a USB module designed to be embedded directly onto the motherboard of low-cost PCs as a hard disk replacement. The uSSD 5000 solid state drive supports a variety of operating systems, including Microsoft’s Windows XP Professional, Windows XP Embedded, Windows Embedded for Point of Service and Windows CE, as well as Linux. The uSSD 5000 solid state drive is expected to be available in capacities from 2GB to 8GB,” the company’s press release says.
The uSSD 5000 solid state drives are only about one-fourth the size of 1.8-inch hard disk drives accordingly.
These SSDs are expected to be available for customer sampling in 30 days, with volume availability expected in the fourth quarter, in capacities ranging from 1 to 8 gigabytes. Currently, there is no information on pricing, but SanDisk claims the uSSD 5000 model with 2GB of storage space is significantly less expensive than even the lowest-capacity conventional hard drive.
Source: laptoping.com
A Japanese company called DTS has launched a range of high-end hard drives with 1GB of cache memory. The so called MCell drives aren’t quite what they first appear to be though.
First of all, inside the 3.5in sized drive, DTS has fitted a 2.5in hard drive and this has been combined with a special chip from DTS as well as 1GB of RAM memory as a local cache. The drive sizes range from 80 to 160GB.
This will allow for very high prestanda during repetitive read and write operations, as long you’re not writing more than 1GB at a time.
The drives use SATA interface and the company claims transfer rate for random reads and writes of data between 64KB and 512MB reaches above 110MB/s.
Samsung Electronics announced today the hard drive model with 160 gigabyte of storage in company’s Spinpoint N2 1.8-inch HDD series.
The 160GB Spinpoint N2, with the industry’s largest capacity for a 1.8-inch form factor, spins at 4200rpm, according to the press release.
“The 1.8inch HDD market will grow at a tremendous pace with annual sales expected to increase up to 65% by 2010 as consumers demand smaller, more compact technology devices,” states Andrew Higginbotham, director of hard drive sales and marketing, Samsung Semiconductor Inc.
The 1.8-inch hard drives are commonly used in mobile consumer devices, as well as in select ultraportable notebooks and in ultra-mobile PCs (UMPCs).
Currently, there is no information on availability date and pricing of the 160GB Spinpoint N2.
Source: laptoping.com
With the advances in Perpendicular Magnetic Resonancing (PMR), hard disk manufacturers are hard at work building high capacity models that notebook/laptop users have been waiting for. While 2.5” form factor hard drives that were used primary in notebook/laptop computers reached the 120GB size some time ago, it seems that until the PMR breakthrough sizes to rival desktop hard drives had been all but stalled.
While 1TB hard dives are all the rage on the desktop side of the house, Toshiba is bound to make some serious noise today with their announcement of a new 320GB 2.5” SATA hard drive based on a 2 platter design that will feature 8MB of cache with a 5400 RPM operating speed.
The new 320GB model belongs to Toshiba’s MKxx53GSX series which already offers sizes of 250GB, 160GB, 120GB, and 80GB in the line up. Toshiba claims that the new 320GB drive is resistant up to 900G of shock, which is exceptional for a drive of this type. The performance should be in line with other models with a 12ms access time and 895.9 Mbps transfer rate. The drives in this series will carry the standard 3-year Toshiba hard drive warranty.
Toshiba indicates that the new drives will enter production in the 4th quarter of this year, but no specific release timeline or date was given for the 320GB model.
Fujitsu keeps pumping out the hard drive innovation — this time the company is planning to ship a 1.2TB 2.5-inch hard drive by 2010. The company is planning on leveraging a new perpendicular recording method that allows researchers to create “ideally ‘ordered’ alumina nanohole patterns for isolated bit-by-bit recording on a large disk area” to accomplish the feat, which sounds pretty intense to us. Of course, by 2010 we’ll all probably be rocking at least a petabyte or two of desktop storage, but it’s still fun to dream.
Source: www.engadget.com
Fujitsu Korea unveiled its latest 2.5-inch 300GB external hard disk named Calmee Moon 300GB which features one touch backup function and 1.8mm-thick aluminum enclosure. The Calmee Moon also comes in 80GB, 100GB, 120GB, 160GB, 200GB and 250GB versions. Fujitsu hasn’t released info on price and availability.
Source: www.techpowerup.com
Western Digital has announced that all models in its My Book dual drive storage solutions are now available in capacities up to 2TB.
The new 2TB capacity is available on WD’s My Book World Edition II, My Book Pro Edition II, My Book Premium Edition II models. These external storage solutions can be set to reserve half of the capacity for mirroring user’s data, also known as RAID 1 setting.
WD’s My Book solutions with up to 2TB are available at retail stores, online retailers, and the estimated price should be from $749 USD to $799 USD depending on the model.
Alienware revealed today that for the first time, three of its notebook lines the m5550, m9700, and m9750 now have the option of a 64GB solid-state hard drive, giving them the better load times, extra battery life, and absolute shockproofing of flash memory. The 17-inch m9700 and m9750 models are also the first anywhere to ship with the option of dual flash drives in a RAID stripe that offers the same 64GB space but at an even faster speed. Customers can also establish the best of both worlds with a dual-drive configuration that includes a 32GB flash drive for the OS and a 200GB, 7200RPM conventional hard disk for games and other media. Choosing the 64GB RAID will add 1100$ to the normal price of the m9750 while the dual-drive option shall increase the price by another 800$ reaching the incredible amount of 4000$. Dell also offers a similar 32GB solid state drive in its Mobile Precision line of laptops without much of a speed gain.
Source: www.techpowerup.com
Seagate gossips that that it’s the end of the road for IDE hard drives. Or files, as IBM ludicrously continued to call them for years. Nearly all top end drives are likely to go the serial ATA (S-ATA) route by the end of the year. Parallel ATA has had a long run but will soon follow eight inch floppy drives, 5.25-inch drives and 3.5-inch floppies on the road to nowhere. Channel sources said Seagate roadmaps show IDE is at the end of the, er, road.
So soon vast libraries of information will be stored on drives and become as incomprehensible to future generations as Etruscan is to us.
On a brighter note, it looks like there will be a heck of lot of activity on the P-ATA front until the end of the year. And where Seagate goes, the others are sure to follow. Although no doubt as IBM’s successor on the hard drive front, Hitachi Data Systems will beg to differ.
Source: www.guru3d.com
Western Digital has announced that it will be shipping its WD RE2 (RAID Edition) 750 GB hard drive later this month.
The company promises up to a data transfer rate of up to 3.0Gb/s, WD RE2 hard drives also feature Native Command Queuing (NCQ), pack 16 MB of cache and the MTTF is 1.2 million hours. The new drives will also feature WD’s SecurePark,StableTrac and IntelliSeek technologies.
