Displaying items by tag: SSD

CES 2015, Las Vegas NV -
ADATA has had some very interesting products to show us at CES in the past and this year was no exception. Although much of what we saw was not new, it was still pretty interesting. We kicked off our guided tour with a couple of demonstrations. The first was one showing off the power loss protection on their SSDs. This is a handy little feature that helps prevent you from losing data that has not been written to “disk” in the event of a loss of power. Not really new, but still cool.

CES 2015 Las Vegas, NV Patriot Suite Bellagio
Stopping by the Patriot suite at the Bellagio we found Patriot talking about some pretty cool new items in addition to their normal memory products. We kicked off our meeting with a walk through of their flash memory products.

CES 2015 Las Vegas, NV Caesar’s Palace
One company that we always are sure to visit during CES is Kingston. Over the years they have had a number of interesting demos and products that are dropped on the world during CES. This year was no exception. David Leong was quick to get into the meat of the presentation and showed off the next generation of the Cloud gaming headset. This new headset features 53mm drivers and a power USB audio adapter to push 7.1 virtual surround sound.

As the computer market moves to smaller and smaller form factors the need to decrease the foot print of storage devices is growing. The problem that many manufacturers face is that a reduction in component size has traditionally meant a reduction in performance. This is where technologies like mSATA and M.2 SATA (or M.2 PCIe) come into play. Each of these has a benefit in terms of size and also performance. With mSATA you can maintain close to the same performance that you have with traditional SATA (with the right components), but there are limitations on which motherboards and even mobile devices support this. Now with M.2 (also called M Key) SATA and PCIe devices we are seeing a number of motherboard makers will support for them right out of the box. Because of this interest in these new devices has grown. Today we are taking a look at the first one to hit our lab: the Kingston SM22080S3/120G M.2 SATA drive.

Corsair has introduced a new series of solid state drives called Force LX , which currently consists of two models. Corsair Force LX family is made from 128GB (CSSD-F128GBLX) and 256GB (CSSD-F256GBLX) SSDs, both coming in the same classic 2.5 inch package and 7 millimeters thick. Mentioned models have data read speed of 560 MB/s, while the write speed depends as ever about the capacity of the SSD.

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.

Sandisk company unveiled its first SSD drive with capacity of up to 4 TB. It is a solid state disk Optimus Max from Optimus series. The disc is based on the 19 nanometer architecture NAND chips and is manufactured in the factory which Sandisk shares with Toshiba. Optimus Max is optimized for tasks that are oriented towards reading data such as image storage and daily provides a total of 1-3 direct data set.

This series of SSDs represents Intel's answer to Samsung and OCZ (Toshiba) and their EVO 840 and Vector model. Intel claims that both drives come with significantly improved speed controller (up to 50%) and NAND bus which achieves 20% higher speed.

New Toshiba SSDs belong to HG6 Series, have a SATA 6.0 Gbps interface and should appear on the market in March this year with yet unknown prices. During manufacture Toshiba decided to incorporate NAND chips that are created in the 19nm technology of 2nd generation. SSDs will be available in 2.5-inch mSATA and M.2 (single and double) packaging, and in capacities from 60 GB to 512 GB.

During yesterday an agreement was reached between Toshiba and CAA, by which Toshiba buys OCZ's technology related to solid state disk drives.