Samsung Announce 256GB SSD

Solid State Drives are increasingly being looked at as the future of portable data storage, and Samsung have just raised the stakes by announcing a 256GB SSD. The NAND Flash memory based MLC 256GB SSD drive is a 2.5in SATA II drive that's only 9.5mm thick. It looks like the battle for the thinnest large capacity SSD in on. The Drive is also very fast, with a purported data read rate of up to 200MB per second, and all this whilst consuming only 0.9Watts in active mode. Samsung will start mass producing it by the end of this year.

I Spoke Too Soon ... NAND superdrives

No sooner do I post about a 120GB NAND drive from Stealth Imaging, then along comes SimpleTech with their announcement of 512GB and 256GB NAND based SSD drives. SimpleTech announced the Zeus-IOPS SSD 512GB and 256GB Drives, both of which offer flash drive capacities which would make any tech head, green with envy. The drives are available in a 3.5-inch enclosure. The 256GB is available now witht he 512GB model dues in Q3. No prizes for guessing they'll be expensive.

Stealth Imaging unveil 120 GB PCMCIA NAND Drive

Talk about perfomance, the development of these NAND Drives is outpacing our ability to forcast the next capacity jump. Stealth Imaging announced at NAB 2007, that it would be offering NAND solid-state hard disc drives of up to 120GB in capacity, and in the form of a CardBus Type II adapter. The drive will reportedly be capable of sustaining 132Mbps read / write rates, and support random seek times of under 50-nanoseconds, all whilst using less than a third of the power used by standard HDD.

Samsung Unveil 64GB SSD Drive

Samsungs new 1.8-inch 64GB SSD doubles the capacity of their current SLC NAND-based 32GB SSD, indications are that it's up to 60% faster too. Mass production of this 1.8-inch replacement for hard disks is expected to begin in Q2. Thanks to Engadget for this bit of news...

Intel March Into The NAND Memory Game

Intel announced the Z-U130 Value Solid-State Drive, citing that it's performance makes it a challenge to other hardware vendors. Intel's claim of read rates of 28 MB/sec, and write speeds of 20 MB/sec, make this drive a serious contender for smaller devices like PocketPCs, SmartPhones and portable media devices. The current capacities of 1GB to 8GB, make them unlikely to be used for anything larger. Intel are also claiming impressive reliability figures, saying that the "Z-U130 has an average mean time between failure of 5 million hours compared with SanDisk, which touts an MTBF of 2 million hours."

Samsung Debut New HDD Drives

Samsung have begun shipping their new NAND/HDD drives. These drives are purportedly five times more rugged than regular drives, and come with 128- to 256-MB NAND RAM to allow for faster start ups, faster application access and resume from sleep. The 2.5in drives come in 80GB, 120GB and 160GB capacities and should make many users happy.