ssd

We all know that It’s only a matter of time before the last mechanical hard drive whirs its way into a landfill mound, right next to a Tandy cassette drive and a giant pile of Zip disks. But we’re all waiting impatiently, because SSDs still cost too much and store too little.

Update: We now have in-depth tests of the OCZ Core Series.

A couple of weeks ago, OCZ announced its Core Series, a family of low-cost, high-performance SSDs that is intended to make solid -state storage affordable for the masses. The Core Series is expected to retail for $169 (32GB), $259 (64GB), and $479 (128GB) while offering read transfer rates well over 100MBps and seek under 1ms. In a world where high-performance SSDs typically cost hundreds of dollars more — the 64GB Samsung SATA II we’ve been testing retails for well over $800 — OCZ’s advertised numbers are impressive.

Today, an attractive package arrived in our office, containing an OCZ Core Series 64GB. We immediately installed the highly-anticipated hard drive in our current testbed, a Gateway T6828 with 3GB of RAM and Vista Home Premium.

While we’re still running a variety of additional tests on the drive, we’ve seen enough to say that this drive has a lot of potential. But, without further exposition, let’s go to the tests.

Read the rest of this entry »

As you may recall, a couple of weeks ago, Tom’s Hardware posted a controversial article which claimed that SSDs actually use more power than traditional hard drives. Our own observations contradicted Tom’s original claim so we set out to do our own SSD battery life tests and posted our results, showing a modest improvement in battery life with the two SSDs we tested.

Now, Tom’s Hardware has published a new article with an apology. They claim, as many users noted at the time, that their original test method was flawed, because it caused the SSD drives in their roundup to work harder than their HDD counterparts. The results of Tom’s new test still show some SSDs eating more power than HDDs, but other SSDs, most notably the SanDisk SATA 5000 we also tested and an OCZ SATA II, using considerably less power.

Of course, Tom’s Hardware continues to use power meters for their tests to and while this yields very interesting results, we plan to continue our real-world testing with battery rundowns. We’re getting in a slew of new drives soon and plan a performance shootout.

A few days ago, we published a story about how much better our Eee PC 1000H performed when we swapped the system’s 5,400rpm Seagate Momentus hard drive out for a Samsung SATA II SSD drive. Not only did the system boot faster and all apps load faster, but we got 20 more minutes of battery life with the SSD.

However, when we posted our story, we heard from users that Tom’s Hardware, a site we admire a great deal, recently published an article which claims that SSDs use more power than traditional hard drives. The Tom’s Hardware story got some major attention from sites like Engadget and even got a responses from SSD-makers Super Talent and Micron, who both claim that the drives used in the Tom’s test are “early generation” and therefore more power hungry than newer models.

Is Tom’s Hardware right? We don’t think so.

Read the rest of this entry »

When memory-manufacturer OCZ announced its new “Core Series” line of low-cost, high performance solid-state drives, our resident storage nuts went bonkers with the prospect of securing wallet-friendly SSDs. Naturally, our inquisitive minds began to wonder how OCZ could crank out 32GB, 64GB, and 128GB solid-state drives for $169, $259, and $479, respectively, while maintaining read/write speeds of at least 120MBps/80MBps.

So we spoke with OCZ CEO Ryan Petersen about these potentially game-changing SSDs.  In our interview, Peterson confirmed that the drives are made Multi-Level Cell (MLC) flash,  and that they will be available for purchase July 12th or shortly thereafter.

Because MLC flash memory has a reputation for being less reliable than SLC, we asked OCZ a follow-up question about estimated number of write cycles to failure, and we’re still waiting for an answer beyond the 1.5 million hour MBTF number quoted in their specs. Our interview is below.

How did you manage to get the prices so low on the Core Series?
The biggest barrier to SSD adoption has been price, and we have been exploring ways to bring down the price without sacrifices in performance. With the Core Series SSD drives are able to take advantage of lower cost multi-level cell technology in a multiple channel configuration and when coupled with new proprietary firmware we can maximize the speed while simultaneously lowering the cost. The previous issues with using MLC technology in SSD limited the write speeds, reducing the overall performance to that below current high speed HDDs, with the core series this is no longer an issue.

Does OCZ manufacture its own flash memory chips? If not, who is the supplier?
OCZ, while not a foundry, is able to leverage our existing relationships with partners, in this case Samsung to bin flash ICs for the highest possible write and read speeds.

Read the rest of this entry »

Today, memory-maker OCZ announced the release of a new line of low-cost, high-performance SSDs. Dubbed the OCZ Core series, the drives will be available in 32GB, 64GB, and 128GB capacities at groundbreakingly low MSRPs of $169, $259, and $479 respectively. OCZ also promises the drives will provide read speeds of 120-143MBs and write speeds of 80-93MBs, along with a seek time of 0.35ms. (via Engadget)

All of these rates, if accurate, would make the Core drives as fast as or faster than industry-leading drives like the the Samsung SATA II SSD (100MBs Read / 80MBs Write) , the Mtron MSP 7000 series (rated at 120MBs read / 90MBs write), or the Memoright MR25 (120MBs Read / 120 MBs Write). It would even share the read, but not the write speed of the Mtron MSP 7500 (130MBs read / 120MBs write), which is widely considered the fastest SSD on the market today, but is intended for servers and costs well above $1,000 at even the 32GB size.

If the price and performance of the OCZ Core Series live up to expectations, the entire hard drive market is in for some earthshaking changes.

Read the rest of this entry »

A few weeks ago, we took the 5,400 rpm Western Digital Scorpio hard drive out of the MSI Wind and replaced it with a SanDisk SATA 5000 SSD. We hoped the boot time would be better and that applications would load more quickly, but in a day or two of anecdotal use with the SanDisk SSD, we didn’t notice any performance improvement. At the time, we noted that the SanDisk SATA 5000 is not a very fast SSD and that we regretted we had not had time to do any firm testing before we had to return our review model Wind to MSI.

This week, when our friends at DV Nation lent us a blazing-fast 64GB Samsung SATA II SSD, we couldn’t wait to install it in our Eee PC 1000H and this time run a complete battery of real-world tests to see how much a difference a high speed SSD can make in a mini-notebook.

With the easily accessible upgrade panel on the Eee PC 1000H, we were able to swap out the system’s default 5,400 rpm hard drive, a Seagate Momentus, with the Samsung SATA II in minutes. After installing a fresh copy of Windows XP Home SP2 with all the ASUS drivers and utilities, we were ready to put the system through some tests.

Read the rest of this entry »

Today, Toshiba took the wraps off its R500-S5007V, a 2.4-pound, 12.1-inch (1280 x 800) machine that pushes the flash storage barrier with its spacious 128GB solid-state drive. Also under the hood is a 1.3-GHz Intel U7700 Core 2 Duo processor, 2GB of RAM, Bluetooth 2.0+ EDR, an 8X SuperMulti Drive, 802.11a/g/n Wi-Fi, Intel GMA 950 graphics, Toshiba’s EasyGuard protection, and Windows Vista Business. The price for all of this goodness? A rather pricey $2,999.

We know that all SSDs aren’t created equal, so we’ll hold out on the excitement until we can get our hands on a unit and see how well the drive performs.