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Author: simplyfree.biz

Description: New Terabyte Memory and SSD Flash Drives in Your Future by Michael Beck


Less expensive and more capable SSDs are on the horizon to begin replacing traditional HDDs in notebooks, laptops, and other mobile devices.

SanDisk Corporation (www.SanDisk.com) is a leader in the push to help develop affordable computers in the global education arena. SanDisk will provide the Classmate PC with an embedded version of the SanDisk uSSD™ 5000 solid state drive as a substitute for a hard drive in the little Intel PC that is anticipated to sell for under $250.

This was unexpected good news for reducing the cost per GB for flash drives, which has been the sticking point for what is considered to be disruptive technology in the mobile computing and wireless device market.

Excerpt from SanDisk Press Release in August 2007 / SanDisk.com

"The low-cost educational PC category is an emerging market for flash storage where low cost, ruggedness and low power consumption will be the primary factors for broad-based adoption," said Greg Rhine, senior vice president and general manager of the Consumer Products Division at SanDisk. "At 2GB, the uSSD 5000 solid state drive delivers the necessary storage capacity for low-cost PCs at significantly less cost than conventional hard drives, while meeting performance and reliability requirements for this market. We are proud to have been chosen for the Intel-powered classmate PC, a product that demonstrates how inexpensive SSDs can contribute to the worthy cause of improving education in the developing world."

When compared to conventional hard disk drives, the SanDisk's uSSD 5000 solid state drive is advantageous for many reasons:

* Cost Effectiveness - uSSD 5000 solid state drives at 2GB are significantly less expensive than even the lowest-capacity conventional hard disk drives. Future generations of flash memory will usher in higher storage capacities at the requisite price points.

* Ruggedness - With no moving parts, SanDisk's uSSD 5000 solid state drives are a perfect fit for kid's classroom wear-and-tear. The durability of uSSD 5000 solid state drives surpasses mechanical hard disk drives.

* Reliability - SanDisk's uSSD 5000 solid state drives deliver high reliability based on advanced flash management technology including powerful error detection and correction algorithms.

* Small - At 27mm x 38mm, uSSD 5000 solid state drives are about one-fourth the size of 1.8-inch hard disk drives.

* Strong Performance - uSSD 5000 solid state drives with MLC technology offer performance more than sufficient for the low cost PC market.

Should SanDisk be successful in producing millions of SSDs for niche computer markets, other manufacturers will follow, and SSDs will finally start to compete with cheaper legacy hard disk drive technology.

SanDisk expects product shipping of the uSDD 5000 the last quarter of 2007. For complete details visit the SanDisk company website. SanDisk is the only company with the worldwide rights to both manufacture and sell every major flash card format. No reported pricing yet, so stay tuned for actual costs.

HHDs May Preceed Solid State Drives

H-H-D stands for "Hybrid Hard Disk". Sometimes transitional products bridge technology gaps, thus creating a hybrid product to wean consumers off the old technology and introduce a new standard.

This may be the case with the Seagate Momentus 5400 PSD. The PSD means "Power Savings Drive" The PSD offers 160 GB of traditional disk storage with 256 MB of flash memory. This idea is to combine flash technology with the older hard drive technology for faster boot times of 20% and a 25% increase in battery life.

From the Seagate Website / www.Seagate.com

"The Seagate® Momentus® 5400 PSD Hybrid Drive combines a hard drive and flash memory into a single device. Duplicating the most commonly used hard drive data onto the non-volatile cache for instant access provides faster boot-up and performance.

Hybrid drives offer many of the benefits of solid-state drives at a fraction of the cost. Seagate® Momentus® 5400 PSD hybrid drives extend battery life, increase the longevity of your storage and improve productivity with almost instant boot up and data access."

If you are following the trends, then you know that Solid State Disks are on the way into laptop computers. It will be interesting to see if the concept of HHDs takes hold, or if they will be a passing fad.

New Standards for Speed and Stability

Compromise is not always equal to sacrifice. Compromise sometimes can mean paying more for the biggest and the best, or the smallest and the best. Top of the line right now are MTRON Flash Drives, and performance still comes with a price tag (32 GB currently for around $1500).

Here are some impressive MTRON Statistics from www.DVNation.com. SSDs are flash memory, so each sector is instantly accessible at 140 years, even if you write 50GB per day to them. Standard temperature SSDs operate in a wider temperature range than hard disks can (0 to 70C) while industrial (wide temp) models operate from -40C to 85C (-40F to 185F). SSDs run cooler and are power misers compared to HDDs.

High-performance Computing - Independent testing and reviews show that any system will run faster when operating an SSD as its primary or important data drive.

Workstations and Gaming - Faster boots and application load time. 20 seconds taken off load times of Adobe CS2, an improvement of nearly 50%. Our Flight Simulator X Demo loads 4X faster with an MTRON SSD.

Databases / Servers - Every sector is instantly accessible. Fragmentation does not affect an SSD. So this makes them great for any database application, Video On Demand, and e-mail servers. Reduce life-cycle costs with SSDs.

Military / Industrial - SSDs are a must for critical data storage whether the computer is wearable, portable, or stationary. SSDs can resist 1000 - 1500G's of operating shock, and endure severe vibration that would kill a hard disk.

Notebook / Portable Use - SSDs consume much less power than a hard disk. For higher performance choose a notebook platform that offers more than one drive bay. Use the MTRON SSD for the OS and critical apps, and a secondary hard disk for data storage.

A Universal Flash Storage Standard

There is a new standard in the making for flash card memory. It is the Universal Flash Storage standard, or UFS for short. News of the UFS standard is starting to pop up everywhere, and it has been reliably reported in stories for PC World and Top Tech News, that UFS will be available in 18 Months or Less. (www.PCWorld.com and www.TopTechNews.com)

UFS promises a Terabyte size storage capacity (1000 GBs) in the size of a normal flash card. The new standard is being developed by the JEDEC Solid State Technology Association / www.jedec.org.

Rival memory, semiconductor, and mobile device makers backing the UFS standard include Nokia, Samsung Electronics, Micron Technology, Sony Ericsson, Spansion, STMicroelectronics, and Texas Instruments.

The UFS standard is targeted to be completed in 2009. UFS is expected to be used at first in mobile phones, digital cameras, and PDAs. Supporters claim the cross-platform goal is a universal removable memory card that can be used in multiple portable, mobile and consumer electronics without the need for adapters.

Size and speed (memory capacity and processing speed) continue to be the defining forces in the design process of all computing devices. After over forty years and counting, almost every measure of digital electronics is still linked to Moore's Law.