Imation SSDs Available
Published by Codrut Nistor, on March 11th, 2008, in the categories: Hard Drives
The solid state drives market is still smaller than the "traditional" hard discs one, but things will change in a few years, that's no guess, it's something obvious. Anyway, until that moment comes, we'll slowly see new producers joining the crowd of SSD manufacturers, and today the time has come for Imation...
Widely known for its optical and tape storage media, announced today a few SSDs that are going to be sold under their own brand name. Imation's SSDs are build using drives of the South Korean Mtron Company, a SSD pioneer. For now, Imation's available SSD models are the MOBI 3000 for end users, and the PRO 7000 series, mainly targeted at the enterprise and corporate market.
The Imation SSD MOBI 3000 offers maximum read speeds of 100MB per second, write speeds of up to 80MB per second, while the random access time is as low as 0.1ms, making it the fastest SSD available for the consumer market.
At last, the PRO 7000 series is even faster, with read speed of up to 120MB per second, write speeds as high as 90MB/s, and random access time even lower than 0.1ms. Just as a side note, this product's MTBF is greater than 1 million hours!
Obviously, these products don't come cheap yet, since the MSRP is $699.99 and $1,159.99 respectively for a 32GB model, made in 2.5 inch form-factor, while 16GB and 64GB versions will also arrive pretty soon.
Widely known for its optical and tape storage media, announced today a few SSDs that are going to be sold under their own brand name. Imation's SSDs are build using drives of the South Korean Mtron Company, a SSD pioneer. For now, Imation's available SSD models are the MOBI 3000 for end users, and the PRO 7000 series, mainly targeted at the enterprise and corporate market.
The Imation SSD MOBI 3000 offers maximum read speeds of 100MB per second, write speeds of up to 80MB per second, while the random access time is as low as 0.1ms, making it the fastest SSD available for the consumer market.
At last, the PRO 7000 series is even faster, with read speed of up to 120MB per second, write speeds as high as 90MB/s, and random access time even lower than 0.1ms. Just as a side note, this product's MTBF is greater than 1 million hours!
Obviously, these products don't come cheap yet, since the MSRP is $699.99 and $1,159.99 respectively for a 32GB model, made in 2.5 inch form-factor, while 16GB and 64GB versions will also arrive pretty soon.
Fujitsu Announced Its First 500 GB Drive For Laptops
Published by Codrut Nistor, on February 25th, 2008, in the categories: Hard Drives
As we all know, laptop sales are going slowly up, and the market share of portable computers recently surpassed that of the desktop computers. Obviously, this tendency is not going to fade, and so hardware for portable computers gets faster and cheaper with each day...or bigger, when we talk about internal storage.
Today, we're going to note that Fujitsu just announced its first 500 GB hard drive for laptops, making it the third producer to join the "500 club", when talking about drives for laptops, because those for desktop computers have reached 1TB already...
Following Hitachi and Samsung, Fujitsu announced a 500GB capacity becoming available for portable computers, with the help of a three-platter design. The 500GB drive from Fujitsu uses 3 platters with a 170GB capacity each, and is 12.5 millimeters thick because of that (most laptop drives are 9.5 millimeters thick).
The new 2.5-inch 500GB Fujitsu drive will use the SATA interface and only 4,200 rpm, with announced seek/write times of 12/14 milliseconds. Pricing was not announced yet, since the drive will arrive in stores in May, so there's still a pretty long wait until then...
Today, we're going to note that Fujitsu just announced its first 500 GB hard drive for laptops, making it the third producer to join the "500 club", when talking about drives for laptops, because those for desktop computers have reached 1TB already...
Following Hitachi and Samsung, Fujitsu announced a 500GB capacity becoming available for portable computers, with the help of a three-platter design. The 500GB drive from Fujitsu uses 3 platters with a 170GB capacity each, and is 12.5 millimeters thick because of that (most laptop drives are 9.5 millimeters thick).
The new 2.5-inch 500GB Fujitsu drive will use the SATA interface and only 4,200 rpm, with announced seek/write times of 12/14 milliseconds. Pricing was not announced yet, since the drive will arrive in stores in May, so there's still a pretty long wait until then...
A New Generation Of HHDs From Seagate Is On Its Way
Published by Codrut Nistor, on January 23rd, 2008, in the categories: Hard Drives
Seagate is, without any doubt, the largest hard drive manufacturer on Earth. Since it's not enough to have the lead in numbers, they are also working hard in researching new technologies and trying to improve existing ones before anyone else. Since their consumer-level products are the only ones having a 5-year warranty, it's obvious their research and manufacturing teams are doing a great job, and today I just found out they are planning to improve hybrid hard disks, taking speed and reliability another few steps further.
If you didn't know about the existence of HHDs, it's pretty simple - they are the link between "old school" hard drives, and the new (and very expensive) solid state drives (SSDs). The MacBook Air is the best example of how an SSD can change the price of a product, since the price of the version using a 64GB SSD is more than $1000 higher than that of the "standard" MacBook Air.Anyway, currently the performance of HHDs over traditional hard drives doesn't justify the higher price tag, and so Seagate wants to set things straight. At this time, HHDs only feature up to 256MB of flash memory, and since regular drives already started to come with 32MB of cache memory, the improvement is not as high as expected.According to Joni Clark, senior product marketing manager at Seagate, "What the consumers came to us and said, and what the lackluster reviews told us, was that… customers want more performance out of hybrid drives. They said, go back to the hybrid technology, and give us either larger [amounts of] flash, a better use of flash, or a combination of both.", and since this is completely true, we need to see how well are they going to blend performance and competitive pricing into a single product.Unfortunately, the new drive generation from Seagate isn't something clearly shaped to anyone at this time, as Ms' Clark only said the new drive will be "focused on flash memory" and "will blow anything that's out there today out of the water" so, once again, we need to sit back and wait...
If you didn't know about the existence of HHDs, it's pretty simple - they are the link between "old school" hard drives, and the new (and very expensive) solid state drives (SSDs). The MacBook Air is the best example of how an SSD can change the price of a product, since the price of the version using a 64GB SSD is more than $1000 higher than that of the "standard" MacBook Air.Anyway, currently the performance of HHDs over traditional hard drives doesn't justify the higher price tag, and so Seagate wants to set things straight. At this time, HHDs only feature up to 256MB of flash memory, and since regular drives already started to come with 32MB of cache memory, the improvement is not as high as expected.According to Joni Clark, senior product marketing manager at Seagate, "What the consumers came to us and said, and what the lackluster reviews told us, was that… customers want more performance out of hybrid drives. They said, go back to the hybrid technology, and give us either larger [amounts of] flash, a better use of flash, or a combination of both.", and since this is completely true, we need to see how well are they going to blend performance and competitive pricing into a single product.Unfortunately, the new drive generation from Seagate isn't something clearly shaped to anyone at this time, as Ms' Clark only said the new drive will be "focused on flash memory" and "will blow anything that's out there today out of the water" so, once again, we need to sit back and wait...
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