OCC News: Super Talent Announces SATA Solid State Disk Drives

[Nemo]

Super Talent Technology, a leading manufacturer of DRAM memory modules and flash products, today announced a full range of Solid State Disk (SSD) drives with an industry standard Serial ATA interface.

 

This new line of SATA drives is offered in industry standard 1.8-inch, 2.5-inch, and 3.5-inch form factors, making these drives 100% compatible with conventional hard disk drives. However, these products are built with only solid state Flash components. Since they contain no moving parts, SSD drives have the advantage of being far more rugged and reliable than regular hard drives, while using 85% less power. Moreover, because SSD drives are built using Flash technology, they offer sequential transfer speed comparable to magnetic drives and dramatically faster access speed. Super Talent

[ClayMeow]

I'll save my judgment for when I hear a price tag.

[jammin]

 

And some performance figures.

They are going to have to be pretty competitive on price/MB compared to regular drives to get me interested.

Edited March 14, 2007 by jammin

[gotdamojo06]

dont ssd ware down very quickly or at least quicker then regular hdd...I would defently want to see the results of many tests done by the manufacture and occ or some other 3rd party w/ no bias added before I would even consider looking at the price tag...

[Nemo]

dont ssd ware down very quickly or at least quicker then regular hdd...I would defently want to see the results of many tests done by the manufacture and occ or some other 3rd party w/ no bias added before I would even consider looking at the price tag...

SSD - MTBF 2,000,000 hrs

HDD - MTBF 300,000 - 1,200,000 hrs

 

according to SanDisk. Intel is claiming 5,000,000 hrs. MTBF for it's SSD. (posted as an OCC News item in case you missed it).

Edited March 14, 2007 by Nemo

[Verran]

SSD - MTBF 2,000,000 hrs

HDD - MTBF 300,000 - 1,200,000 hrs

 

according to SanDisk. Intel is claiming 5,000,000 hrs. MTBF for it's SSD. (posted as an OCC News item in case you missed it).

Yup, I remember reading that. Our news team is on the ball

 

As for pricing, yeah that will definitely determine my interest, but I don't look at quite like jammin. The MUCH lower power consumption, virtual silence, and lack of spin-ups is enough to sell me. I don't feel like these drives need to match current HDD price/GB marks to be competitive. From the numbers I'm seeing, it looks like a 64GB SSD will probably beat 2 striped 36GB raptors. Sure, it'll be a long time before I'm replacing "storage" drives with SSD, but I could care less about that. I'm thinking of raiding a few SATA 32GB SSDs for insta-boot

[gotdamojo06]

well it looks like pricing is what im looking for as well

[cchalogamer]

Based on the claims I would certainly consider an upgrade for my laptop, the last generation suffered VERY bad when moving around larger files/in general file copy situations, however it was near the top/the top performer when it came to things like game load times and HDD "multitasking" (import one file to a program, export another from something else at the same time) Hopefully the "twice the data throughput at half the cost per gigabyte" will help makeup for it.

 

Even if it doesnt the power consumption alone wil make it a GREAT option for small laptops and mini PCs, the limited heat, low weight, and VERY low power requirements make it great for such senarios. Check out the power levels in this review

 

Even so with origional pricing being in the $35 per GB range i thin it'll still be a hard sell for a bad sequential transfers, the old model was slapped around by a VERY slow 4200 rpm laptop drive, even high end laptop models currently cant touch desktop drives in sequetial transfer so I'm not too sure they will have ENOUGH speed boost to make a 3.5" drive close to practical @ ~$15-20 per GB, that's VERY expensive for a 128GB drive...heck a 32GB would be around the $530 mark based on the old pricing idk about you but even if the drive lasts 17x longer (an best case exageration of both the low and high figures) it's still ~100x the price today.

 

It certainly has its place, but until the tech becoms MUCH more affordable I wont be buying it, even though I want to. $5 per GB ($160 32GB drive) I would REALLY consider, but that seems to be a LONG way off. around 1yr has produced a 1/2 drop in price so maybe in 5yrs it WILL be feasable, but by then what will the PC landscape look like? We dont know technology changes and these drives may be left in the dust by a more cost effective solution.

[jammin]

Yup, I remember reading that. Our news team is on the ball

 

As for pricing, yeah that will definitely determine my interest, but I don't look at quite like jammin. The MUCH lower power consumption, virtual silence, and lack of spin-ups is enough to sell me. I don't feel like these drives need to match current HDD price/GB marks to be competitive. From the numbers I'm seeing, it looks like a 64GB SSD will probably beat 2 striped 36GB raptors. Sure, it'll be a long time before I'm replacing "storage" drives with SSD, but I could care less about that. I'm thinking of raiding a few SATA 32GB SSDs for insta-boot

 

Yeah, I didn't elaborate much on my first statement.

Competitive to me would be no more than 2 or 3 times the price per MB.

It's at that sort of level that you could look at smaller SSDs for the same price as a larger HDD and consider them for system drives and the like.

 

For laptops the advantages are multiplied due to power requirements etc.

[Waco]

Hmm...you know you could run them striped on a RAID controller to gain a boost in bandwidth that would actually be useful since their seek time is next to nil.

 

RAID 0 might actually become useful again.

[flareback]

I would love to get my hands on a 32 gig drive, put the OS on it and maybe a game.

[fire_storm]

Sounds interesting.