Six New Solid State Drives Tested

Tom's Hardware recently tested six new flash-based solid state drives (SSDs) from Chaintech, Memory Corp, Silicon Power, Soliware, and Super Talent.

SSDs Tested:

• Chaintech Apogee SSD, 64 GB
• Memory Corp F4 MLC SSD, 32 GB
• Memory Corp F4 SLC SSD, 32 GB
• Silicon Power 64 GB SLC, 64 GB
• Soliware SSD S100, 64 GB
• Super Talent SATA 2.5" SSD, MasterDrive OX, 64 GB

"The Soliware SSD was the only drive to show strong write performance and great I/O performance as well. The results still aren't good enough to beat the professional SSDs by Memoright, Mtron, and Intel's X25-M. However, Soliware's built-in 128 MB cache memory helped to boost write performance to a level that is only matched by Memoright and Mtron. ... In the end, none of the new drives was really impressive. They all have significant weaknesses: usually either low I/O performance, poor write throughput or inacceptable power consumption. The best consumer drive still is Intel's X25-M flash SSD, and if you're looking for maximum efficiency, you still have to go for the Samsung or OCZ's SATA II performance series. Some of the drives here may be alternatives for specific applications, but at this point we still recommend being careful with low-cost drives, as they may not live up to expectations." [Tom's Hardware | Six New SSDs: Can Intel Be Dethroned?]

From the tests made by Tom's Hardware, the Soliware SSD S100 64 GB was the best of the six. The Intel X25-M flash SSD is still 'king of the heap', and if you're looking for efficiency in an SSD, the Samsung or OCZ's SATA II performance series are the ones to look for.

IceRocket : flash, soliware, ssd

Samsung 64GB SATA-2 Solid State Drive Reviewed

The Samsung 64GB SATA-2 FlashSSD (US$790) is a Solid State Drive (SSD) that features:

• 64GB capacity
• NAND Flash
• 100MB/sec Rated Sequential Read
• 80M/sec Rated Sequential Write
• 1W Operational Power requirement

"Samsung has clearly tried to optimize its new SSD drive for better streaming performance, both read and write. The results show up in the benchmarks. This is one of the most balanced performers we've seen in the still far-from-mature SSD market. ... The new Samsung FlashSSD catches up with the competition in both price and performance-but it's still not mainstream yet. " [ExtremeTech | Samsung 64GB SATA-2 SSD Drives Review]

Maybe when SSDs are already priced more "competitively" against the HDDs, it will gain more popularity among manufacturers, resulting to more users opting for an SSD. Until then, I still prefer hard drives, mainly due to their "more bytes per buck" prices.

Technorati : 64gb, drive, flash, flashssd, samsung, sata, sata-2, solid, ssd, state

Solid State, DDR i-RAM, and Hard Disk Drives Compared

Solid State Drives (SSDs) are data storage devices much like Hard Disk Drives (HDDs), but uses solid-state flash memory to store data. The Gigabyte i-RAM is sort of like SSD, but instead uses RAM; more specifically, DDR RAM.

X-bit Labs tested the following:

• 32GB Samsung (MCAQE32G5APP-0XA) SSD with UDMA66 interface
• 64GB Samsung (MCAQE32G5APP-0XA) SSD with SATA interface
• Gigabyte i-RAM with SATA interface
• 200GB 2.5" Hitachi 7K200 HDD with SATA interface
• 1000GB 3.5" Samsung SpinPoint F1 HDD with SATA interface
• 300GB 3.5" Fujitsu MBA3300RC HDD with SCSI interface

"In real-life applications SSDs are going to be faster than 2.5" HDDs with a spindle rotation speed of 5400rpm unless the manufacturer installs very slow chips of flash memory into them. ... SSDs are also considerably faster than 3.5" HDDs in terms of random reading but slower at sequential reading. ... So, hard disk drives still remain the best choice in terms of price, capacity and speed combined when it comes to the disk subsystem of a workstation, file server and write operations-oriented server." [X-bit Labs | SSD, i-RAM and Traditional Hard Disk Drives]

The i-RAM does perform well, but its limited capacity (4GB), and its temporary retention of data (data is lost when its battery backup gets depleted) is not yet a legitimate contender against the hard disk drive.

As it turns out, SSDs are fast drives, and require less power than conventional hard drives. And users will definitely appreciate the silent operation of SSDs. The somewhat high price of SSDs is probably the real reason why it is not (yet) the mainstream storage device.

Technorati : HDD, SSD, ddr, drive, flash, hard disk, iRAM, ram, solid-state