Popular SSD(Solid-State Drive) Brands

Why Buy Solid-State Drives?

ssdsThese solid state drives are more expensive and come in smaller data sizes. Well, for mobile users, SSD technology offers more benefits over traditional hard drives with spinning parts. These pluses come in the form of much more efficient power usage and battery life for the computer it’s being used in like laptops. Solid State Drives have no movements so they consume less power and allows SSD drives to be able to withstand large impact loads – like dropping your laptop. The US military has been using SSD technology for a while now where harsh conditions and frequent impacts are the norm.

Popular SSD Brands:

Intel® Solid-State Drives

intelThe Intel® SSD’s unique, innovative technology designs provide longer battery life, faster system responsiveness, and more durability, for a better user experience.

  • Intel® Solid-State Drive 510 Series
  • Intel® Solid-State Drive 320 Series
  • Intel® Solid-State Drive 311 Series
  • Intel® Solid-State Drive 310 Series
  • Intel® X25-E Extreme SATA Solid-State Drive
  • Intel® X25-M and X18-M Mainstream SATA Solid-State Drives
  • Intel® X25-V High Performance Value Solid-State Drive

Corsair Solid-State Drives

corsairMaximum performance for the ultimate system. The Corsair SSD product line offers the highest performance in Read/Write speeds of up to a maximum read speed of 285MB/s and write speed of 275MB/s. If speed is what you are looking for Corsair SSD’s are the perfect choice

  • Force Series GT
  • Force Series 3
  • Performance 3 Series
  • Force Series

Kingston SSDNow Solid-State Drives

kingstonWith the increasing need to stay connected, Kingston offers a new line of Solid-State drives
to improve your computer’s performance. Flash technology makes SSDNow drives faster,
more durable and reliable than standard mechanical hard disk drives.

CURRENT DRIVES

  • SSDNow S100
  • SSDNow V100
  • SSDNow V+100
  • SSDNow V+100E
  • SSDNow V+180

LEGACY DRIVES

  • SSDNow E-SERIE
  • SSSDNow M-SERIES
  • SSDNow V+ SERIES
  • SSDNow V-SERIES

OCZ Solid-State Drives

ocz

    Solid State Drivescategory, OCZ Technology Group, Inc. has built on its expertise in high-speed memory to become a dominant player in the manufacturing and distribution of solid state drives (SSDs), a disruptive, game-changing technology that is replacing traditional rotating magnetic hard disk drives (HDDs).
  • OCZ PCI-Express solid state drives
  • OCZ’s High Speed Data Link (HSDL)
  • SATA solid state drives
  • OCZ Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) Solid State Drives
  • OCZ USB 3.0 drives

Crucial Solid-State Drives

Solid-state drives are the rugged, reliable, battery-efficient alternative to traditional hard drives.

ADATA Solid-State Drives

ADATA is committed in developing cutting-edge SSD technology and offers complete SSD product lineup that brings extraordinary performance. SATA 6Gb/s,SATA 3GB/s.

Related Links:

Top 20 Most Popular Solid State Hard Drive on Amazon.com

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Useful Solid State Drive Articles

Useful Solid State Drive ArticlesSolid State Drive Buyer’s Guide
Should you consider upgrading to a solid state drive? Weigh all the pros and cons and evaluate the cost and value of doing so by reading this guide.

The Ins And Outs Of Solid State Storage
The benefits introduced by solid state drives are undeniable. However, there are a few pitfalls to consider when switching to this latest storage technology. This article provides a rundown for beginners and decision makers.

17 SSDs Rounded Up
Which SSD should you buy today? Seventeen flash-based drives battle across a benchmark suite that include throughput, I/O performance, consistency, power consumption, efficiency, and the best overall bang for the buck. The time is right to upgrade.

A look at the NAND itself. How an SSD works at the lowest levels:

http://www.lostcircuits.com/mambo/ […] 9&Itemid=1
http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/ […] hp?t=65372

Write caching, wear levelling and the importance of partition alignment:

http://www.lostcircuits.com/mambo/ […] 2&Itemid=1

A broad overview of everything SSD (including TRIM):

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3531
http://anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3631 (A follow-up of the previous Anandtech article. Touches on a few more details, but it’s more of a review of OCZ drives than a good overview of SSDs. Worth reading if your SSD has an Indillinx controller.)

More links will be added here when I find them or when somebody else points me to them.

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Solid State Drive Vs Hard Drive Vs USB Flash Drive

SSD vs USB Flash Drive vs Hard Drive Solid state drives (SSD): used in the enterprise are data storage devices that use non-moving fl ash memory technology rather than rotating magnetic disks or optical media. SSDs are compatible with traditional hard drive interfaces, such as SATA or SAS, and have a familiar hard drive form factor, such as 3.5-, 2.5- or 1.8-inch.

USB Flash Drive: consists of a flash memory data storage device integrated with a USB (Universal Serial Bus) interface. USB flash drives are typically removable and rewritable, and physically much smaller than a floppy disk. Most weigh less than 30 g (1 oz). Storage capacities in 2010 can be as large as 256 GB with steady improvements in size and price per capacity expected. Some allow 1 million write or erase cycles and have a 10-year data retention cycle.

USB flash drives are often used for the same purposes as floppy disks were. They are smaller, faster, have thousands of times more capacity, and are more durable and reliable because of their lack of moving parts. Until approximately 2005, most desktop and laptop computers were supplied with floppy disk drives, but most recent equipment has abandoned floppy disk drives in favor of USB ports.

USB Flash Drives Vs Solid State Drives
Both USB flash drives and SSDs use NAND fl ash memory. However, it’s the quality of NAND used—as well as the controller and interface involved—that separates a simple USB fl ash drive from an enterprise-class storage device, like those found in blade servers and external storage systems.

Solid State Drives Vs Hard Drives
Today’s SSDs are different from hard drives when it comes to data storage. SSDs are sophisticated storage devices that use non-moving memory chips, mostly non-volatile NAND fl ash, instead of the rotating magnetic disks found in hard drives. Hard drives can take the data directly from the host and write it to the rotating media. In contrast, SSDs can’t write a single bit of information without first erasing and then rewriting very large blocks of data at one time (also referred to as P/E).

Because SSDs and hard drives have different strengths in terms of effi ciency, they complement each other and can co-exist. SSDs deliver ultra-fast random data access (inputs-outputs per second, or IOPS, performance), low power consumption, small size and high physical resilience (due to no moving parts)— but they cost more. Hard drives provide fast sequential data access with high capacity, endurance and reliability at a much lower price.

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Seagate And Samsung Announce Agreement To Jointly Develop Controller Technology For SSDs

seagate samsung ssd August 12, 2010 – Seagate Technology and Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., announced that they have entered into a joint development and licensing agreement.

Under the agreement, the two companies will jointly develop and cross-license related controller technologies for solid state drive (“SSD“) storage devices to attain the high levels of performance, reliability and endurance demanded by enterprise storage applications.

The joint development effort builds on the existing SSD capabilities of each company while combining Seagate’s leadership in enterprise storage technology with Samsung’s flash memory technology specific to 30 nanometer-class MLC NAND. The jointly developed controller will be utilized in Seagate’s enterprise-class SSDs.

“Seagate has long recognized that solid state technology has an important role to play in the comprehensive solutions the storage industry will deliver today and in the future, particularly in the enterprise market, today’s agreement with Samsung will help us bring a compelling set of SSD innovations to the enterprise storage market, with benefits that range from enhanced performance, endurance and reliability to cost and capacity improvements. Overall, this agreement with Samsung strengthens our SSD solutions strategy, and positions Seagate well as global demand for storage continues on its strong growth path.” – said Steve Luczo, Seagate chairman, president and CEO.

“We are pleased to be jointly developing a high-performance SSD controller with Seagate for the enterprise storage market, our green memory solution is designed to enable more energy-efficient server applications, which is expected to increase the use of NAND-based SSD storage in enterprise applications.” – said Dr. Changhyun Kim, senior vice president and Samsung Fellow, Memory product planning & application engineering, Semiconductor Business, Samsung Electronics.

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Pulsar – Seagate Introduces Its First Solid State Drive (SSD)

Seagate Pulsar SSD

The Seagate® Pulsar™ solid state drive (SSD) is the first SSD product in the new Pulsar solid state drive family from Seagate. The Pulsar SSD is designed to meet OEM performance, power, size and reliability requirements for enterprise blade and general server applications.

December 7, 2009 – Seagate introduced the Seagate® Pulsar™ drive, the first product in its new enterprise solid state drive (SSD) family. Designed for enterprise blade and general server applications, the Pulsar drive uses single-level cell (SLC) technology, delivers up to 200GB capacity, and is built in a 2.5-inch small form factor with a SATA interface. The Pulsar drive leverages Seagate’s 30 years of leadership in meeting large enterprise customer needs in product development, qualification, and support.

“Seagate is optimistic about the enterprise SSD opportunity and views the product category as enabling expansion of the overall storage market for both SSDs and HDDs, Our strategy is to provide our customers with the exact storage device they need for any application, regardless of the component technology used. We are delivering on that strategy with the Pulsar™ drive, and you can expect additional products in the future from Seagate using a variety of solid state and rotating media components.” – said Dave Mosley, Seagate executive vice president, Sales, Marketing, and Product Line Management.

The Pulsar SSD delivers the necessary performance, reliability, and endurance to match the application environments of enterprise blade and general servers. It achieves a peak performance of up to 30,000 read IOPS and 25,000 write IOPS, 240MB/s sequential read and 200 MB/s sequential write. Its SLC-based design optimizes reliability and endurance and helps provide a .44% AFR rating with a 5-year limited warranty. As an additional safeguard, the Pulsar drive leverages Seagate’s enterprise storage expertise to protect against data loss in the event of power failure.

Seagate began shipping Pulsar units to select OEMs for revenue in September 2009. With Seagate’s enterprise knowledge and expertise, OEMs have peace of mind knowing that Seagate has the global enterprise systems, people and processes in place to support their largest requirements.

“To deliver and serve the enterprise SSD marketplace effectively, it is critical for suppliers to understand the needs of their storage system customers with respect to design, manufacturing, supply chain delivery, and support,” With its well-established OEM and eco-system relationships and a long history of serving global storage OEMs, Seagate is in a unique position to fortify its leading enterprise storage position with its entry into the enterprise solid state storage market.” – said Dave Reinsel, IDC group vice president.

As the worldwide market leader in enterprise storage and the first enterprise HDD vendor to deliver an enterprise-class SSD solution, Seagate brings credibility, experience and leadership to this new market segment.

“The enterprise SSD market is now primed and well-positioned for growth from both a revenue and unit perspective, with Gartner estimating unit growth to double and sales to reach $1 billion for calendar year 2010,” Superior enterprise SSDs provide transformational capabilities when optimized in storage and server environments.” – said Joseph Unsworth, research director at Gartner.

The Seagate Pulsar SSD is available to OEM customers for qualification.

Key Advantages

  • Single-level cell (SLC) technology optimizes SSD reliability and endurance
  • 0.44 percent AFR for high reliability and endurance
  • Up to 200GB capacity in a 2.5-inch form factor and 7mm z-height
  • Power loss data protection to ensure against data loss upon power failure
  • 5-Year Limited Warranty
  • SATA 3Gb/s interface to support current blade server chipsets
  • Leveraging industry-leading, global enterprise support
  • Industry-leading SSS and SSD standards development through JEDEC and SNIA

More information can be found at Seagate Pulsar SSD

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Solid-State Hard Drive

What is Solid-State Hard Drive?

A solid-state hard drive (SSD) is a data storage device that uses solid-state memory to store persistent data. An SSD emulates a hard disk drive interface, thus easily replacing it in most applications. An SSD using SRAM or DRAM (instead of flash memory) is often called a RAM-drive, not to be confused with a RAM disk.

The original usage of the term solid-state (from solid-state physics) refers to the use of semiconductor devices rather than electron tubes, but in this context, has been adopted to distinguish solid-state electronics from electromechanical devices as well. With no moving parts, solid-state drives are less fragile than hard disks and are also silent (unless a cooling fan is used); as there are no mechanical delays, they usually enjoy low access time and latency.

Features

A solid-state hard drive (SSD) is a drive that has no moving parts and is therefore virtually silent in operation. SSDs can achieve this by using semiconductors to store memory instead of a magnetic surface like traditional hard drives. Although commonly recognizable as thumb drives or travel drives, there are also larger-capacity SSDs that can be used as main boot drives. Solid-state drives also allow for accelerated access to files and applications, allowing for increased overall performance for a computer.

Comparison to Hard Disk Drives

Hard disk drives (HDD) are bulkier and slower than SSDs. This is because the HDDs have moving parts that need to start spinning to access information. Although the time it takes for access may not be long at all, a SSD provides nearly instant data access. The time difference can be especially notable during startup.
Hard disk drives are more prone to failure than SSDs. Dust can get into the drive, or the spinning part can become faulty. Because SSDs can be designed to be airtight and because there are no moving parts, SSDs are not prone to these problems.
As of 2009, the cost of solid-state drives was high. HDDs with 10 times the capacity of solid-state drives could be purchased for a fraction of the cost.

Benefits to Laptops

One of the main benefits for SSDs is its application in laptops. The physical size of SSDs is smaller than HDDs. Also, the SSD’s faster memory access means faster overall performance. The result is a more portable, compact laptop that does not necessarily sacrifice performance.

Misconceptions

Because of the SSD’s nearly instant data access, there is a conception that the drive would cause the computer to be more efficient not only in terms of data access, but also in terms of energy consumption. Although the drive itself may be more efficient than a hard disk drive, the bottleneck that a computer experiences when pulling or writing to a HDD is removed with a SSD. The result is that the computer is able to process information quicker, causing other components such as the processor to be more active. Thus, although drive efficiency may improve in the future, in 2009, there is not a clear result as to whether the drives produce energy savings.

Speculation

Although in 2009 solid-state drives are expensive and limited by capacity, as with other drives, that will change. Hard disk drives used to be about $1 for every gigabyte of capacity. Currently, there are some 1 terabyte drives for less than $100. In the same way, as production costs drop and sales rise, the cost of a SSD will start to fall. Likewise, as manufacturers make better drives, capacity will increase. In the future, most computers may be using SSDs.

How Do Solid-State Hard Drives Work?

  1. Unlike magnetic hard drives, solid state hard drives have no moving parts and do not rely on magnetic fields to store data. Because they use electrical current, rather than motors and magnets, to store data, they can access data noiselessly and with less power consumption. Solid state drives are also not subject to the same physical damage from impacts or large magnetic forces, making them suitable for mobile computers.
  2. Solid state hard drives use a series of transistors, pieces of silicone and semiconductors to transfer the electrical current. Each piece is microscopic and can be affected by the transfer of a few electrons. Like all data storage, solid state drives use binary, a series of 1s and 0s, to represent data. A 0 is represented by a transistor that cannot accept an electrical current, while a 1 is represented by one that allows the flow of electricity.
  3. A blank drive, or a blank section of the drive, is denoted by all 1s. All transistors in this section will allow the free flow of current. When data is recorded, voltage is applied to one piece of silicone, known as the control gate. This process transfers electrons to another piece, the floating gate. When the floating gate is filled with electrons, current will not pass through it and the drive reads it as a 0.
  4. As you write or delete data from the drive, the information is converted by the program to binary data. This is sent to the drive’s writing center, where it is converted to electrical currents and used to realign the transistors. To read data, the read center of the drive sends a current through the portion that holds the data to be read and returns the sequence of 1s and 0s. This sequence is sent to the program and presented as information you can read.
  5. The writing process of solid state drives offers several benefits, such as the ability to use the drive while in motion, but the technology is subject to limitations. Most notably, each transistor can only be written to a certain number of times before it will no longer function. Each drive employs advanced methods, known as wear leveling, to prevent a particular section of the drive from premature wear. Even with wear leveling, solid state drives eventually need to be replaced as sections become unwritable.
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Samsung Develops SSD with SATA Mini-card Design for Netbooks

Samsung SATA SSD Samsung Announced that it is now sampling a SATA-interface mini-card solid state drive (SSD) with some of its customers, for use in the expanding netbook marketplace. The Samsung SATA mini-card SSD expands the use of SSDs from not only being a primary storage medium, but also as a complementary drive to boost the performance of PCs with dual drive capabilities.

Samsung’s new mini-card form factor, with a highly robust interface, makes an already rugged SSD even less susceptible to damage from jarring, jostling and dropping.

Featuring a mini-PCI Express (PCIe) form factor with a SATA 3.0Gb/s interface, the highly cost-efficient mini-card SSD is nearly 80 percent smaller than the conventional 2.5-inch hard disk drive, making it ideal for the tighter constraints of most netbooks. In addition, it can be used in printers and various handheld terminals including ruggedized mobile devices.

Moreover, the SATA mini-card SSD form factor can be used in a combination comprised of the SSD as main memory and HDD as supporting storage space. This new approach is expected to increase the adoption of SSDs in a broader range of applications.

Samsung is working to standardize the new mechanical form factor and its pin layout specifications at JEDEC (Joint Electron Device Engineering Council). With possible revisions by OEM manufacturers, standardization could be expected as early as the third quarter of this year.

Available in 16GB, 32GB and 64GB densities, the new SSD drive will be produced using 40-nanometer-class process technology. The SATA mini-card SSD provides strong performance levels with a sequential read rate of 200MB/s (megabytes per second) and writes data sequentially at 100MB/s.

Samsung’s mini-card SSD is only 30 millimeters (mm) wide and 51mm high. The drive weighs up to 8.5g and measures up to 3.75 millimeters thick. Also offering a high degree of energy efficiency, the new drive consumes 0.3 watts of power.

Samsung’s new netbook-targeted SSD is available with optional full disk encryption to thwart theft or any unwanted access to a netbook or other device.

“The market is beginning to embrace a smaller SSD for the nascent netbook sector, The cost-efficiency and reliability of lower-density, highly compact Samsung SSDs are perfectly suited as the storage medium for the rapidly growing netbook marketplace,” said Jim Elliott, vice president, memory marketing, Samsung Semiconductor, Inc.

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IBM pushes solid state drives to Power servers

IBM SSDIBM has announced new solid state drive (SSD) products, designed to help firms reduce costs and improve memory response times across its Power hardware platforms.

The firm said that, based on its own testing, it expected to see huge performance boosts in user systems, while the drives would also have a dramatic impact on the physical footprint of storage facilities.

Advertisement”The new offerings can improve performance by up to 800 per cent, while also reducing the physical footprint of the amount of storage needed by approximately 80 per cent, and energy consumption by up to 90 per cent,” IBM said in a statement.

“As it has no moving parts, or spinning disks, such as used in traditional storage, solid-state storage technology can conduct up to 20,000 transfers per second compared to one hard drive disk at approximately 200 data transfers per second.

“IBM is unveiling a more targeted approach than other SSD hardware vendors to implement Flash technology by leveraging and integrating IBM’s hardware, software and research expertise.”

As well as giving users the option to run SSDs on Power systems, the vendor announced software management tools for the technology. These included the IBM Data Facility Storage Management Subsystem and SSD Data Balancer, which it said would let administrators back up and save data to drives on IBM zSeries and DS8000 servers with ease.

IBM said it does not expect SSDs to completely replace other more conventional storage methods, adding that customers would favour hybrid environments using both SSDs and traditional disks.

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