Mtron unveils faster flash-based disk drives
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(InfoWorld) - South Korea's Mtron Co. Ltd. is adding to its line-up of already speedy solid-state disk drives with new models that offer faster reading and writing of data. The new drives offer a maximum sustained read speed of 120M Bps (bytes per second) and a maximum write speed of 90M Bps compared to 100M Bps and 80M Bps respectively on current models, said Ahn Ji-young, a spokesman for the company. Mtron is unveiling the new models at the IFA trade show in Berlin this week. The speed jumps are important because they should directly translate to an increase in performance in the system in which they are used. When a computer needs to store or retrieve data there is often a slight delay while the information is transferred to or from the disk. By increasing the speeds the delay is shortened. SSDs are already fast compared to standard hard-disk drives. The drives use flash memory chips in place of a rotating magnetic disk to store data and that brings a significant performance increase. In previous demonstrations PCs running SSDs have been able to boot Windows in about 20 seconds compared to more than 30 seconds for hard-disk drive-based computers. Mtron is planning to begin production of the drives in late September or early October. They will be available in 16G byte, 32G byte and 64G byte capacities and in 2.5-inch and 3.5-inch form factors with Serial ATA (SATA) interfaces. The drives are plug-in replacements for existing hard-disk drives. The company offers three families of product: a basic model for consumer applications, a professional model for server applications and an industrial model for harsh environments and military applications. Mtron is planning to introduce a higher capacity 128G byte model in the fourth quarter of this year and at about the same time will introduce a 1.8-inch drive, said Ahn. The smaller drive will debut at 32G bytes and a 64G-byte version should be available in early 2008, he said. Â
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Shared research produces fast, tiny memory ideal for consumer devices.
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SUNNYVALE, Calif., Dec. 14  /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- SST (Silicon Storage Technology, Inc.), , a leader in flash memory technology, today rounded out its 1.8V low-density flash product portfolio with the announcement of a 16-Mbit Multi-Purpose Flash Plus (MPF+) device.
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Hitachi has developed a 500GB hard-disk drive for laptop computers, due to be announced Thursday. The Travelstar 5K500, which is the highest capacity drive yet developed for portable PCs, is due to begin shipping in February and should go some way towards quenching user thirst for storage space.Hitachi has managed to increase the capacity of its 2.5-inch drive by adding a third disc platter and by cramming data together more closely on those platters.The extra platter means the drive is physically larger than previous models: 12.5 millimeters thick versus 9.5mm for most current 2.5-inch drives. That means it won&#39;t fit in the drive space in many laptop computers, but Hitachi is confident that PC makers will redesign their machines to accommodate the drive because storage is a key selling point right now.&quot;The hunger from end-users for more capacity has been phenomenal,&quot; said Larry Swezey, director of marketing and strategy at Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, Hitachi&#39;s hard-disk drive subsidiary. He said the new drive is targeted at the type of consumer laptops that typically comes with a large screen and high-end audio and graphics.One PC maker has already fallen for the drive. Taiwan&#39;s&#160;Asus is due to announce Thursday its new M50 and M70 laptops&#160;that will use the drive. The latter machine will contain two of the drives to offer 1TB of storage space.With an eye on this target market Hitachi has made some modifications to the drive to improve performance, Swezey said. There are new vibration sensors that help the drive&#39;s read/write head keep on track. These are required because high-end entertainment laptops have increasingly sophisticated sound systems and larger speakers than can cause vibrations in the drive when music is being played loud. These vibrations can lead to read/write errors and a drop in performance.The 5,400-rpm drive offers a 5.5-millisecond average latency and 12-millisecond average read time. It comes with a SATA (Serial ATA) interface that supports 3Gbps&#160;data transfer although this drops to 1.5Gbps when the optical disc encryption is turned on. The drive consumers 0.95 watts at idle and 0.7 watts at low-power idle, which is only slightly more than Hitachi&#39;s previous two platter laptop drives, Swezey said.In addition to the 500GB drive, Hitachi will also offer a 400GB drive and &quot;enhanced availability&quot; versions of both drives designed for 24/7 use in products such as digital video recorders. The basic versions will be available in February and the enhanced versions about a month later. The basic 500GB model will cost about $399 and the 400GB drive will have a $349 price tag, Hitachi said.
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Micron, Intel developed a flash technology that speeds up data transfers by up to 5 times.
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EMC plans to introduce a line of solid-state drives using flash memory as an option to replace some disk drives in the company&#39;s high-end Symmetrix storage arrays, a company spokesman said Monday.EMC will offer solid-state drives with capacities of 73GB and 146GB, said Abhrajit Bhattacharjee, an EMC spokesman in Singapore. The drives, which will ship this quarter, will only be available as an option with Symmetrix storage arrays, and will not be available with other products, he said.Pricing for the solid-state drives&#160;was not immediately available, but using four 73GB solid-state drives to replace four of the 146GB hard disk drives in a Symmetrix 100-disk array would increase the cost by less than 10 percent compared to a comparable system using only hard disk drives, Bhattacharjee said.Solid-state drives use memory chips instead of magnetic platters to store information. These types of drives are generally faster and consume less power than traditional disk drives, but they are also significantly more expensive.The solid-state drives are aimed at customers willing to pay a premium for the significantly faster response times these drives offer, Bhattacharjee said.EMC plans to use single-cell flash memory in its solid-state drives, which will allow for higher performance but costs more than multicell flash memory.Single-cell flash memory stores one bit of information in each memory cell, while multicell flash memory stores two. The greater density of multicell flash makes it perfect for music players and digital cameras. But multicell flash is significantly slower, making single-cell flash more suitable for high-performance applications such as solid-state drives. Single-cell flash memory is also more durable that multicell flash. Each cell on a multicell flash chip is generally good for 10,000 write/erase cycles, while the cells on single-cell chips can last for 100,000 write/erase cycles. The durability of a flash memory chip can be increased with the use of wear leveling, a technique that writes data equally to all of the memory cells on a chip instead of using the same cells repeatedly.Drives based on magnetic platters are capable of enduring unlimited write/erase cycles, but they have moving parts which can break down. Solid-state drives do not have moving parts.STEC -- the maker of the solid-state drives that EMC plans to offer -- said its solid-state drives, which use wear leveling, last more than 2 million write/erase cycles. There was no indication of how many write/erase cycles the EMC solid-state drives will be capable of sustaining.
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(InfoWorld) - Fujitsu will soon bring the benefits of perpendicular recording technology to its family of 2.5-inch hard-disk drives. The company is planning to launch two new drives worldwide in October, an 80GB and 160GB model, aimed at consumer laptop computers that also boast a high resistance to shocks, the Tokyo company said Wednesday. The latter is the highest capacity 5,400 rpm yet announced by a drive manufacturer, according to Fujitsu. Perpendicular recording is a relatively new magnetic recording method that is being increasingly employed on many hard-disk drives. The method, like the previous longitudinal recording, relies on magnetically charged particles for data storage. However in the new method the north and south poles of the magnetic particles are arranged perpendicular to the disc rather than running parallel to the disc. The result is that each particle occupies a smaller area of the disk's surface and so more particles can be crammed onto it. At the same time the company will also begin selling versions of the drives aimed at consumer electronics products such as digital video recorders. Key features of these drives are low noise levels and low power consumption.
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Scientists have developed an alloy they say can be used to create memory chips more than 500 times as fast as todayÂs flash chips.
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Intel will speed servers by building in flash-memory drives beginning in 2008, Intel exec says: Less capacity, but faster communications.
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Enhanced midrange storage array, network hardware released.
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Samsung Electronics announced Monday that it has developed an 8GB NAND-type flash memory chip with a 60-nano design rule, paving the way for 16GB flash disks.
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New line of flash memory cards will transfer data twice as fast as current cards.
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Texas Memory Systems has introduced the flash-based RamSan-500 with a DRAM cache to make it faster.
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The company has developed a prototype 120GB drive that it says improves on the perpendicular magnetic recording technology used in the current generation of drives.
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Two new products are designed to make it easier for businesses to connect storage computers across long distances.
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SanDisk said Monday it has developed, in conjunction with Sony, a new version of the Memory Stick Pro storage format that is built to transfer data at speeds faster than the standard version.
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The two companies have collaborated on a new NAND flash memory technology which is said to speed up data transfer rates fivefold.