Imation reveals 'fastest' solid-state drive
updated 09:45 am EST, Fri January 4, 2008
Imation at CES
Imation today unveiled its CES lineup and announced its intention to launch into the rapidly expanding solid-state drive business. Signing an agreement with Mtron, Imation says it has co-developed a new line of flash-based hard drives it says will be the world's fastest of its type. The SSD MOBI 3000 reads at an already quick 100 megabytes per second but is said to be more impressive with its 80 megabyte per second write speed. This performance is not just better than most flash drives but also bests fast traditional drives in many key areas such as OS boot time and tasks where constant disk access is important, such as working with large videos, Imation argues.
A special enterprise version, the SSD PRO 7000, is even faster with 120MB/sec read and 90MB/sec write speeds but is optimized for the typical tasks handled by servers and other large-scale work computers. All versions of the technology also bring with them an inherently skip-proof design and a quieter, cooler drive ideal for notebooks and similar portables.
Imation has not mentioned the capacity of the drives but says these details along with prices will appear in the run-up to the official product launch, which is expected to ship in the first quarter of this year.
The storage company has provided early details of several of its future devices that will be on show at CES, including its Memorex iWake, a clock radio speaker system for the iPhone and iPod; a new Pivot Plus flash drive and a remake of the original Pivot (pictured); and new storage options, including mini Blu-ray recordable discs and colored Lightscribe DVDs. No release dates or prices have been announced for these upcoming products.
lingo...
01/04, 10:26am reply
"and tasks where constant disk access is important such as working with large videos, Imation argues."
who is arguing with them?!?
why do all these manufacturers note a "skip-proof design"? this is lingo that comes from the portable CD player era and was noted in early iPod designs. but with respect to traditional hard drives (which these products are being compared to), i don't think any hard drive i've ever had has ever "skipped".
friggin marketing dweebs!
scottnichol
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Joined: Oct 1999
RE: lingo...
01/04, 11:32am reply
What they are referring to with the "skip-poof design" lingo is that solid-state drives are inherently skip-proof. Portable CD players and hard drives are not "solid-state" and require a buffer to constantly read ahead a ways and store it in a temporary memory which technically isn't "skip-proof."
Quark108
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Joined: Feb 2005
re: lingo...
01/04, 11:46am reply
They must mean "'fastest' solid-state drive" for laptops because I thought the fastest solid-state drive was the ioDrive from Fusion-io.
Shungo
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Joined: Jan 2008
What's the interface?
01/04, 12:22pm reply
You ain't gonna get no 80, 90, 100, 120 MB/s over USB2. You might get to 100 MB/s over FireWire 800.
So what's the interface?
Haywire
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Joined: Nov 2001
re: interface
01/04, 02:22pm reply
"You might get to 100 MB/s over FireWire 800."
Theoretically, yes (800 MBit/sec = 100 MByte/sec). In practice, even with FW 800 it's highly unlikely.
So I'd file this under "overenthusiastic PR bullshit".
Jeronimo2000
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Clearspring Mobile Widget
01/04, 02:58pm reply
Love the addition of YouTube and Widgets. I use a lot of mobile widgets from http://www.clearspring.com/ and the ability to put them on my phone would be simply fantastic!
jblade
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esata
01/04, 04:14pm reply
Could achieve that speed via Sata, but the current implementation of eSATA (look at picture, looks like thumbdrive) does not power the device over the eSata connector, so would need power.
It's most likely an internal SATA or SATAII interface. Their graphics department just have no idea what an internal drive looks like.
dliup
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