Solid state drives, a critical component in many thin, high storage-density mobile devices, could see dramatic price drops in the coming months due to a burgeoning price war among the major SSD suppliers. According to DigiTimes, industry sourcesin Taiwan are indicating that large suppliers are preparing to drop prices on SSDs precipitously.
Memory card maker Lexar has added a new capacity to its Professional 400x series CF cards, with the industry's first 256GB example. It will write at 60MBps at a minimum and is compatible with UDMA 7 devices. It's said to be ideal for those who capture large amounts of 1080p video.
Crucial and Lexar together put out a pair of high-speed storage options ahead of CES. Topping the two is a special 50GB Adrenaline version of Crucial's m4 SSD intended as a cache for an existing drive. While it doesn't have to be used that way, the combination of a 2.5-to-3.5-inch adapter bracket and special software turns the SATA drive into a buffer for frequently accessed files on a larger hard drive, speeding up the OS and apps without having to sacrifice space.
Lexar Media announced that its Crucial brand m4 solid-state drives are now available worldwide. The high performance SSDs come in 64GB, 128GB, 256GB, and 512GB capacities. The drives use Micron's 25-nanometer NAND flash technology and a serial ATA six gigabit-per-second interface. They feature read speed of up to 415MB per second and write speed up to 260MB per second. The drives have a 2.5-inch form factor.
Crucial this morning acted on its promise and shipped its M225 solid-state drives. They make up only the second line of SSDs at the memory producer and target the high-end notebook or server space with maximum read and write speeds of 250MB and 200MB per second. All of the drives attach through SATA and SATA II interfaces and support the company's own SK01 drive kit, which carries both a 3.5-inch bay adapter to use the SSDs with desktops and a USB external enclosure.
Crucial this afternoon said it should have a major update to its solid-state drive line later this month. The 2.5-inch M225 series will use more up to date multi-level cell (MLC) storage and a new memory controller that significantly improves speed. Estimates put the peak performance of the fastest, 256GB drive at 250MB per second for data reads and 200MB per second for writes.
People contemplating SSD versions of computers like the MacBook Air -- which costs approximately $1,300 more than the HDD edition -- may not find the performance difference worthwhile, writes Computerworld. The magazine has conducted a test of 32GB SSDs by Crucial and Ridata, in comparison to two 7200rpm hard drives by Seagate. All four drives used cloned copies of Vista Home Premium, and were benchmarked by software called HD Tach.
Crucial has announced itself as the first major memory producer to offer DDR3 RAM for notebook computers, opening the door to systems based on Intel's upcoming Centrino 2 platform. The 204-pin memory holds its advantage over DDR2 by running both at a higher clock speed and offering more overall bandwidth. Its 1,066MHz rate matches the system bus of faster upcoming Core 2 Duo and Extreme processors while also offering 10.6GB per second of headroom through improvements made to DDR3 itself. The combination doubles the practical data rate of 800MHz DDR2 memory, Crucial estimates.
Lexar Media today unveiled fully buffered Crucial 800MHz memory modules for the Mac Pro, available in 2GB, 4GB, and 8GB paired kits. The memory includes heat dissipation fins to balance the temperature, and feature a lifetime warranty. The new Mac Pro is capable of holding 32GB of memory, and Apple states that each increase to the system memory enhances the machine's performance due to the nature of the RAM pairings. Lexar did not unveil pricing, but said the modules are currently shipping.
Crucial today became the latest storage producer to explore solid-state hard drives with a new take on the formula. Simply titled the Crucial SSD, the 2.5-inch disk holds either 32GB or 64GB of memory and is meant as a faster, more durable drop-in replacement for conventional rotating hard drives. Like most of its kind, the SSD has no moving parts and is almost completely skip proof; without the need to spin, it also has an access time of under 1 ms and often performs faster than the old technology, Crucial says. Unlike most such drives, however, the new disk is not limited to the inside of a computer. A new external kit converts the device into a USB drive for easily removable storage.
