Samsung has today started production of it’s 64GB solid state drive. (How long until we see that in an iPod hack?…) These 1.8″ flash hard drives would be a welcome addition to any portable device, provided you keep regular backups. At least if the drives do fail you won’t have to put up with the heart wrenching click of death. (but good luck trying to desolder and then resolder all those chips in an ill-fated and expensive data recovery attempt.)
Archive for the ‘Engadget’ Category
Samsung Start Manufacture of 64GB 1.8" SSDs
Monday, June 25th, 2007Samsung & Seagate Announce Terabyte Drives
Tuesday, June 19th, 2007Playing a game of catch up, Samsung and Seagate have gone head to head with Hitachi’s big boy by each announcing their version of a terabyte drive. Both drives feature the SATA 3Gps interface. The Samsung offering has only 3 platters opposed to Hitachi’s 5 and Seagate’s 4 which would suggest that it is not only more reliable but may be the forerunner of a future 1.5TB drive (with all that extra space for platters!).
Hitachi Travelstar 5K250 Drive Hits 250GB
Tuesday, June 5th, 2007News of the Hitachi 5K250 drive was today posted to Engadget. This 5,400rpm drive now boasts capacity up to 250GB and has started shipping in volume. Coming in both SATA 3Gbps & 1.5Gbps interfaces. The drive also features Hitachi’s Bulk Data Encryption for protection if you were to lose you laptop (Or have it stolen!)
PNY unveils SSDs for laptops, iPods and more
Tuesday, June 5th, 2007Engadget today posted news of the new solid state disks from PNY. In 1.8″ and 2.5″ flavours they feature 66MBps read and 55MBps write speeds with standard ZIF, Micro SATA, 44-pin IDE and SATA interfaces. These drives will be simple replacements for the likes of laptops and will eventually (by the end of the year) be shipping 1.8″ and 2.5″ drives up to 128GB capacity. Finally my whole music collection can follow me to the gym without fear of trashing the 1.8″ drive and it’s glass platters! It is now more important than ever that people start to put a decent backup routine in place because with solid state storage there is not much a data recovery company can do to resurrect them when they fail.
Samsung Predicts That Hard Drives Are here To Stay
Wednesday, April 25th, 2007An article on Engadget today predicts that the cost of flash drives (or SSDs) are not going to overtake Hard Drives in cost per gigabyte for many years to come. It gives a nice chart that shows that with the fall in SSD prices, Hard drives costs will continue to fall.