solid-state drive

Though solid-state drives are in vogue, market forces and technical issues are giving the venerable hard-disk drive new life.

DRAMexchange, a Taipei-based market intelligence firm, said last week that the adoption of solid-state drives by computer vendors has slowed as the price of the NAND chips--the raw material of solid-state drives--has increased. The firm also said that computer makers have been cautious about using solid-state drives because current Windows operating systems are not fully optimized for SSDs.

And the popularity of flash storage is waning in Netbooks. These tiny laptops at one time used solid-state drives almost exclusively. But Acer, Hewlett-Packard, Dell and others are moving en masse to configurations with large hard-disk drives in lieu of smaller-capacity solid-state drives.

SSDs typically offer higher performance--often much higher performance--than hard-disk drives and are more durable since they have no moving parts.

While those merits still apply, lingering doubts about the long-term retention of the data in a solid-state drive is making the hard disk look not quite so pass?. Ed Doller, the chief technical officer of Numonyx, a flash memory chip maker which was spun off from Intel and STMicroelectronics last year, addressed this issue in a recent phone interview. Numonyx makes two kinds of flash: NOR, used for storing computer programs, and NAND, used widely as a data storage medium in digital cameras, media players, smartphones, and solid-state drives.

"It's if versus when. With a hard drive it's if it's going to fail. With an SSD, it's when is it going to fail," Doller said, who critiques NAND only because his company is looking for a new storage medium--such as phase change memory--that can overcome some of NAND's inherent limitations.

Doller spoke about an epiphany he had after booting up a 20-year-old IBM AT. "I fired that thing up and it actually booted from the hard drive. If that same computer had been built with a solid-state drive, I can almost guarantee you that would not have worked. It would have lost its information over that period of time," Doller said.… Read more

Updated at 3:45 p.m. PDT with additional information throughout.

Intel released a fix for its solid-state drives Monday, addressing an issue first reported back in February.

"We are releasing an end-user firmware update for our X-25M and X-18M SSD drives today," Intel said Monday.

Intel said this addresses a problem first introduced by technology Web site PC Perspective in February. "This update implements several continuous improvements and optimizations to the drive algorithms including a resolution for a performance issue first reported by the PC Perspective," Intel said.

The PC Perspective review, titled "Long-term … Read more

Fusion-io, the company that boasts Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak as its chief scientist, says it has achieved extremely high data transfer speeds on servers from Hewlett-Packard.

Solid-state drives are generally faster than hard-disk drives, particularly at reading data, and have no moving parts, unlike hard disk drives.

Working together in HP's ProLiant engineering labs in Houston, HP and Fusion-io built a system using five 320GB ioDrive Duos (see photo) and six 160GB ioDrives in a single HP ProLiant DL785 G5 server, running with four Quad-Core Opteron processors from Advanced Micro Devices, Fusion-io said.

This configuration allowed the engineers to … Read more

Samsung expects solid-state drives to reach price parity with hard-disk drives within the next few years amid steep annual price declines in flash memory chips.

Solid-state drives, which use flash memory chips as the storage medium, typically offer much better performance than hard-disk drives. But they cost more. Currently, opting for an SSD instead of a hard-disk drive will add anywhere between $100 and $600 to the cost of a laptop, depending on the capacity of the SSD.

In a phone interview, Brian Beard, flash marketing manager for Samsung Semiconductor, said reaching price parity with hard-disk drives is just a … Read more

Fusion-io on Wednesday announced the IoDrive Duo, which the company claims is the fastest to date. Fusion-io also claims Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak as its chief scientist.

Targeted primarily at business applications such as database servers, capacities range from 160 gigabytes to 640 gigabytes. And by the second half of this year, this will increase to 1.28 terabytes.

The boards are based on PCI Express data bus and can sustain up to 20 gigabits per second of raw throughput--many times the rate of fast hard-disk drives. Sustained read bandwidth is 1,500 megabytes per second, while sustained write bandwidth … Read more

What does Steve Wozniak know about solid-state drives that we don't? David Flynn, the chief technology officer of SSD start-up Fusion-io, provides some insight into why the Apple co-founder is joining the company as chief scientist.

I talked with Flynn on the phone about what the Salt Lake City start-up, founded in 2006, does and what attracted Wozniak.

Enterprise solid-state drives typically offer much better performance than even the fastest hard-disk drives. Fusion-io claims that its IoDrive improves storage performance by as much as 1,000 times over traditional disk arrays while operating at a fraction of the power … Read more

After a technology review site claimed Intel solid-state drives slow considerably after extended use, Intel said it has not been able to duplicate the results.

SSDs have been gaining in popularity because independent testing done to date has typically shown that SSDs--especially the newest generation of drives--outpeform hard disk drives.

A review, however, entitled "Long-term performance analysis of Intel Mainstream SSDs" on technology Web site PC Perspectives claimed, among other things, that the Intel X25-M solid-state drive may degrade in performance as a result of "internal fragmentation" and that "a 'used' X25-M will always perform … Read more

SanDisk is disclosing at a San Francisco technology conference Tuesday that it will begin mass production of memory chips that will allow consumers to store up to 64GB of data on tiny flash cards.

The Milpitas, Calif., company's X4 technology will pack four bits of data into each memory cell. To date, flash memory chipmakers typically stored one bit or two bits per cell.

SanDisk--the largest supplier of retail flash cards--is making the disclosure jointly with Toshiba at the 2009 International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC). The two companies will use 43-nanometer manufacturing process technology to make the chips. … Read more

Intel has slashed solid-state drive prices, but probably not enough to sway many consumers.

Intel's mainstream, and currently most widely available, 80GB X18-M was cut to $390 from $595--about a 34 percent drop in price. But paying almost $400 for an 80GB drive may still be too much to ask of consumers when, for example, a 160GB, 7,200-rpm laptop hard-disk drive from Toshiba can be had for less than $100 on Amazon.

Solid-state drives, particularly the newest generation of SSDs, typically offer much better performance than hard-disk drives.

Hewlett-Packard, one of the largest users of Intel solid-state drives … Read more