We had heard talk about Samsung’s 256GB solid state drive back in May and it appears that today the talk has finally come true. Samsung has announced they are now officially manufacturing the large Flash-based drive, and we can tell you it’s fast. What we can’t tell you yet is how much it costs.

The speed of the 256GB drive is double that of Samsung’s 64GB and 128GB drives in what Samsung is calling “…disruptive performance”, with sequential read rates of 220MB/s and write rates of 200 MB/s. Applications can launch as much as 10 times faster than a 7200rpm notebook HDD with speeds that would be similar to a 15,000rpm drive.

Early this month OCZ announced its Core Series SSDs that brought pricing for SSD drives to significantly lower levels. Granted the SSDs in the Core series are still more than standard hard drives, but the savings compared to other SSDs on the market is very significant.

Laptop Magazine got its hands on a 64GB Core Series SSD and ran some tests to see how well the cut price SSD stacks up to more expensive SSDs and normal hard drives. The average read rate for the Core SSD was 112.4MBps and it had an average seek time of 1ms on Sisoft Sandra tests. HD Tach showed that the drive had an average read score of 89.5MBps and a seek time of 0.5ms.

Solid State Drives may well be the future of data storage in the computer industry, but with the high price of flash memory at this time SSDs are not seeing much adaption in the consumer market. So poor is the uptake by consumers for SSDs that Seagate will not even target the consumer market with its SSD line launching in 2009.

Somehow OCZ has got around the cost issue normally associated with SSDs with its latest offering called the Core Series SATA II Solid State Drive. OCZ says that the Core series are the first truly affordable SSDs and that the retail price of 50% less than competing products on the market.

Samsung has announced the world’s fastest MLC-based 256GB SATA solid state drive which boasts some amazingly fast read speeds of 200 mps and 160 mps write speeds. It’s also the thinnest and largest capacity drive with a SATA II interface. Salivating yet?

It measures just 9.5mm thick. No pricing info is available yet, but expect it to be expensive. Should you be able to afford one, they’ll be available this September, with a 1.8-inch version coming in Q4.

SSDs promise to give computer users faster data access, faster boot times, better power consumption and more. The catch is that to get all the benefits of a SSD you have to be willing to spend lots more money compared to a traditional HDD and give up significantly on storage space.

Super Talent has a new video of a demonstration it did to show exactly how well its SSD is able to stand up to vibration. One of the MasterDrive 120GB SSDs that retails for about $670 was strapped to a paint shaker and shook around like crazy.

I am still patiently waiting for the day when NAND flash gets cheap enough that we can stop using normal hard drives and go for SSD drives in our notebooks. I could certainly use all of the battery life I can get and faster boot speeds are great too.

Super Talent announced a new line of SSD drives today that are direct replacements for normal 2.5-inch hard drives and use the SATA-II interface. The drives are called MasterDrive SSD and use a proprietary algorithm to extend the life of the drives.

Sure SSD drives sound cool in theory with the promise of faster boot times and faster data access while being more shock resistant and dead silent. However, the high price of the typical SSD drive and the small storage space compared to typical normal hard drives makes the SSD pill hard to swallow for most.

Super Talent has announced a new SSD that it claims to be the world’s thinnest SSD drive. Sorry, but I hardly think making the drive thinner will get mortal geeks to pony up the extra loot. Since Super Talent is mostly looking at OEM suppliers for the drive, perhaps it will pop up in the next generation of super thin notebooks similar to the MacBook Air.

Samsung is trying to dispel some concerns consumers are having about using flash-based solid-state drives in their computers, saying they are more reliable that a lot of people think. Sure, having a 64GB SSD in your notebook at first sounds like a pretty good idea. Faster boot times, no moving parts to wear out, but then the price hits you. Adding that SSD can increase the overall price of the computer by as much as $900. Also, in terms of computing, a maximum 100,000 write cycles just doesn’t seem like that much.

Michael Yang, flash marketing manager at Samsung, is assuring us that 100,000 write cycles is actually quite a bit. He states that the SSD can write 100,000 times to each and every memory cell, and the drive controller evens out the cells that get written to with “wear leveling”. As an example, Yang says that a 64GB SSD could be fully erased and filled again with data every hour and it would still last years before failing. He also said the failure would then likely come from the controller, not the memory cells. He also expects the price of SSDs to drop around 40 percent each year, making this alternative more affordable.

HP unveiled today a new energy efficient business focused desktop computer it says is the industry’s first to offer a solid state hard drive. It’s called the HP Compaq dc7800 Ultra-slim Desktop PC and pricing begins at around $1,260.

The HP Compaq dc7800 Ultra-slim Desktop PC features a solid state hard drive as part of its configuration options. This drive provides quicker access to data and has no moving parts, eliminating quick wear out. This desktop computer is also designed to meet EPAT Gold environmental requirements.

Mitron, a South Korean developer of Solid State Drive (SSD) products, announced today the introduction of a new SSD for the consumer market. It is called the Mtron SSD MOBI and it will price at around $650.

The Mtron SSD MOBI is geared towards the likes of high end gamers and video graphic artists. It delivers 32GB of storage, a maximum reading speed of 100 MB per second, maximum writing speed of 80 MB per second and random access time of 0.1 ms. The 2.5-inch body which hosts all of this is outfitted with a Serial ATA interface for replacing that hard drive in your laptop or desktop computer.

Samsung Electronics is marching on with its solid state drives (SSD) today by announcing 64GB models are now shipping. These are reportedly immediately available in Dell and Alienware consumer notebooks.

Samsung said “Alienware will provide a 128GB SSD configuration, by offering dual 64GB SSD drives in a RAID 0 array, as well as a single 64GB SSD combined with a large capacity 200GB 7200RPM drive, available on the powerful Area-51 m9750 gaming notebook. Dell is offering the SSD drive on its premium XPS M1330 ultra-portable notebook, and expects to make it available across additional XPS systems, as well as Latitude corporate notebooks and Dell Precision mobile workstations later this year.”

Today Alienware announced that they will start selling notebooks that utilize Solid State Drives (SSD) to improve performance through the drives faster read and write speeds. The SSD drives will be offered in the Area-51 m9750, Aurora m9700 and Area-51 m5550 notebooks.

In addition to getting your notebook with the fast flashed-based storage, two of the notebooks will also offer dual 64GB SSD drives in a RAID 0 configuration. The company is even offering a dual drive configuration that combines a 32GB SSD drive for faster booting and running applications along with a 200GB standard hard drive for general storage, which really gives you the best of both worlds in one (likely heavy) notebook.

Notebooks running with flash-based storage are starting to become more commonplace not only due to the increased speed but also because they’re able to run quieter with no moving …

Buffalo has a new solid state drive out pushing the SSD storage capacity to as large as 56GB. This drive keeps small in stature however with dimensions of only 57mm x 89mm x 14mm and a weight of only 60 grams. It’s ready for the real world with shock resistance and is small enough to fit in your pocket giving you 56GB of easy-access storage on the go.

The Buffalo SHD-UH comes in different capacities ranging from 16GB up to the 56GB version and getting SSD in this capacity apparently is still not coming cheap. What the size and capacity does for its competitiveness, the price almost takes away as the 56GB version will run as much as ¥100000, or about $820.

Source: AkihabaraNews

We’ve seen some solid state drives announced but today Samsung is the company that was able to bring a 1.8″ 64GB solid state drive into mass production. The SSD is intended for use in UMPC’s, notebooks and other portable devices as a smaller, faster, lightweight replacement to traditional hard drives.

Drives using Flash-based memory promises to provide faster boot times to be quicker at pulling up applications since it can access the data faster. It also boasts a lower battery consumption compared to devices with spinning hard drives.

Samsung didn’t provide any pricing in their press release today, but did predict a 270% increase in SSD use over the next three years. For now though the 64GB flash based drive will likely be an upgrade option on portable devices, and not sold directly to consumers.