Solid state drives (SSD) are slowly making their way on the market and a recent Dell announcement brings them closers to the consumers. In a press release, the hardware giant announced it will start including the SanDisk 1.8″ 32 GB flash based drives on selected notebooks.

Clients can choose to use the SSD on Latitude D420 ultra-mobile and D620 ATG semi-rugged notebooks as an alternative to regular magnetic storage hard disk drives. With only the price as a disadvantage the SSD will certainly replace HDD as they offer faster response times, need less power and are more reliable.

“This represents an important milestone in the evolution of personal computers with the arrival of solid state flash memory as a durable, efficient alternative to the hard drive,” said Eli Harari, SanDisk’s founder and CEO

Already available in America the SSD will soon hit the Asian and Europena markets. However the $549 (US price) may not appeal to customers yet. - Marius TRUSCULESCU -

Samsung Electronics announced yesterday that the company is the first to produce the 16GB NAND Flash, which is the highest capacity memory chip available now. Samsung will use the ultimate technology in mass production for the 16GB NAND. The devices will be fabricated in 51 nanometers (nm).

The new chip uses the multi-level cell (MLC) structure and can offer 16GB of memory in a single card. In addition, using the new technology the speeds for writing and reading increased. You can see a comparison in the table below.

The NAND flash memory cards uses the data units called “pages”. The old chips worked with 2KB pages, while the new ones process the data in 4 KB pages. Samsung will provide software and firmware updates for MP3 players and phones to support the 4KB data pages. The production of the 16GB NAND flash cards will boost very soon as the demand of high-density data storage is increasing everyday. -MIHNEA BOIANGIU

[via Samsung]

Flash based memory cards are becoming increasingly used and portable media manufacturers are already including these devices as ways of upgrading the built-in memory.

Even if 4 GB is the maximum available storage of the new device, smaller capacity (1 GB and 2 GB) are also available for the card. In addition to the Memory Stick Pro Duo compatibility, Sony’s new card can be used with notebooks too with little help from the ExpressCard adapter.

Offered at a price of about $150, the 4GB capacity MS-EX4G card will be available starting August together with the 1 GB ($60), 2 GB ($90) and the MSAC-EX1 Memory Stick Duo Express Card adapter ($80). - Marius TRUSCULESCU

I’ve been thinking that my 2 years old laptop (it’s a good one, don’t laugh at it) could use a new hard drive because I am going to buy myself the new Sony H9 when it releases, and those pictures are going to be pretty big.

The CF-to-SATA adapter is the perfect solution. Just heard about it on Engadget and I think it rocks. You get to use any type of compact flash into the CF-to-SATA hard drive adapter and then connect it to your laptop just like a normal 2.5-inch SATA hard drive. The compact flash is seen like an ordinary drive and you can make it bootable if you need to install your system on, be it Windows, OS X or Linux.

Two more things I need to say. It supports DMA and Ultra DMA modes and only costs $35.99 if you think that a CompactFlash media is shock resistant and a low power consumer. I might buy one just now to test it and post the review here. - ALEX ION

No it’s not a web store from Acer where you can buy your products, it’s the real thing for small business and consumers regarding network storage. Acer Altos easyStore is not just a bunch of HDDs but an “intelligent” storage solution with up to 2TB on 4 high cap disk drives that can be configured in RAID to prevent data loss and a very good security.

If your home network or business network uses mixed operating systems, Acer Altos easySTore is what you can use to keep them safe. For the price of £849 plus VAT (around $2000 including taxes) you will get a very smart solution that is able to do automatic backups to recover data when disk failure, accidental deletion or file corruption. - ALEX ION
[ACER via TechDigest]

New products from A-Data have recently been themed after Disney’s latest episode in the successful “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie series. Customers can now have a custom flash memory stick or a SD Duo memory card with images from the famous action movie.

“Especially designed for die-hard Pirates of the Caribbean movie fans, the “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End” preview is included in the flash drive as an exclusive collectible for those using “Pirates” flash dives!“

As this is a limited edition you may want to hurry to get your Johnny Depp, Orlando Bloom or Keira Knightley storage device.

Two weeks ago we were showing you the new ExpressCard/34 SSD (Solid State Drive) from Transcend. Apparently the market is still fresh and Transcend decided to add another product in the SSD series.

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