ssd

Kingston Digital, Inc., the Flash memory affiliate of Kingston Technology Company, Inc., the independent world leader in memory products, today announced the HyperX 3K SSD, a high-performance, lower priced solid-state drive enabling users to experience ultra-responsive gaming, multitasking and multimedia computing power. Powered by the second-generation SandForce SF-2281 processor and based on SATA Rev. 3.0 (6 Gb/s) interface, Kingston HyperX 3K SSD is the ideal high-performance upgrade solution for budget-minded gamers, enthusiasts, multitaskers, overclockers and system builders.

OCZ Technology Group, Inc., a leading provider of high-performance solid-state drives (SSDs) for computing devices and systems, today introduced the Vertex 4 SATA III SSD series featuring the company's advanced Indilinx Everest 2 controller platform.

There is no doubt that Intel’s mainstream family SSD drive scheduled to come in Q1 2013 will cost an arm or leg, especially in its top 1.6TB version. We are talking about 2.5 inch SATA 6Gb/s drive that is currently codenamed as Wolfsville.

We don’t know much about it but we do know that it’s based on 20nm MLC chips and that it comes in Q1 2013. The new drive should end up branded as 500 series starts at modest 60GB and it looks like it should replace the 520 series.

While Vertex 3 is OCZ's flagship SATA 6 Gb/s SSD based on the SandForce SF-2281 processor, Agility 3 is its performance-mainstream variant that uses the same SF-2281, but with async NAND flash memory. Reviews have found the drive to offer high price-performance. OCZ has traditionally kept Agility 3 reserved for lower capacities, reserving higher capacities for its other product families., however two new variants hit the radar in the Japanese markets today, the 180 GB (AGT3-25SAT3-180G), which is not even listed on OCZ's global site, and a 360 GB variant (AGT3-25SAT3-360G).

A graduate student speaking at the 10th Usenix Conference on File and Storage Technologies this week, said that as NAND flash densities increase, so do issues such as read and write latency and data errors. This is something we've known about for some time, but it appears that that many did not. Researchers tested 45 different NAND flash chips that ranged in size from 72 nanometer (nm) circuitry to 25nm technology. The chips came from six vendors and they found that program speed (write speed) for pages in a flash block suffered dramatic and predictable variations in latency.