There’s a big hype with Solid State Drives (SSD) these days and Super Talent is trying to take the lead. The company announced a 2.5-inch, SATA II 128GB SSD dubbed “MasterDrive LX”and the most interesting thing is the price. Only $299 which translates into $2.33 / GB. If the 128 GB model is not close to your price range then Super Talent have prepared a 64GB SSD (same specs) that will be sold for just $179 (that’s $2.79 / GB).

The model is a Super Talent FTM28GO25H model and the specs say that it supports 100 MB reads and 40 MB writes. Are we in the point of no return for the SSD going mainstream on the market?

If you can afford these prices, can you think of a reason why you wouldn’t buy one with such a good dollar-to-gigabyte ratio? I can’t! – via JkOnTheRun

Good news for you travelers! Hewlett-Packard has presented the first laptop computer which has passed the 24-hour battery life barrier. The model tested by HP operated continuously for 24 hours on a single battery charge.

The HP EliteBook 6930p has achieved an impressive performance by incorporating high-end technology. The test laptop uses SSD (solid state drive) memory, a mercury-free LED display and an ultra-capacity battery. The components mentioned here can increase it overall battery life up to several hours. The LED display alone gives up to for hours of juice, while the SDD boost the battery life with a 7 percent rate.

To create this high-tech notebook, HP uses the new Intel X25-M and X18-M Mainstream SATA SSDs. The solid state drives offer faster system responsiveness, as well as a low energy consumption while operating.

There is a laptop version that has a starting price of $1,199.00, but it doesn’t include the high-performance features listed above.

via Crave

Who would have expected Intel’s X25-M 80GB SSD to be available this week? Uh wait, we all waited for something from them, so that could have been just the one. It’s a 80GB SSD that goes on sale this week and will start selling for $595. Optimized to boost speed and apparently to save you energy this is a 2.5-inch solid state (SSD) drive, but the company also announced a 3.5-inch version.

But wait coz that’s not all. Apparently Intel thinks this is the “top performing storage solution”. Do you disagree guys? I think it’s a lot to say about it, but we’ll see after the world gets it. – via Cnet

Bill Watkins, CEO of Seagate, says they are gradually planning a turnaround of its solid-state drives (SSDs). The company will build solid-state drives by 2009 initially for enterprise-class consumers, who most likely need very high-speed storage disks no matter what the price is. Seagate is also planning a 2TB hard drive next year.

However, Watkins considers that a big portion of the market is not ready for solid-state drives, yet. Moreover, as a new product, SSDs may have to face the question of reliability. Pricing won’t be reasonable for a lot of users for the next few years. As solid-state drives eventually lose the capability to write to each storage cell, many users may need to replace the drive sooner than expected.

Enterprise clients may want to use traditional hard disks instead of SSDs for long-term storage use and leave the SSDs for speed-focused tasks only. Seagate is considered comparatively tardy to embracing SSDs, because Samsung, Toshiba, SanDisk, and many other storage companies have already promoted their technologies.

Source

Samsung is going to release a 256GB SSD. It’s supposed to be uber-fast because the MLC-flash SATA II drive has speeds of 200MBps read and 160MBps sequential write which is awesome. There is no certain thing that we will afford it but there’s time till September when the 1.8-inch version should be available. It may be a good idea to wait until the half a terrabyte SSDs will be available, don’t you think?

via Engadget

Samsung is going to push hard to bring the 250GB SSD by the end of 2008, said flash memory marketing chief Michael Yang. They are already producing the 128GB version that should start shipping in the third quarter of the year while the 64GB SSD is already packed ultra-thin notebooks such as Lenovo ThinkPad X300 or Apple’s MacBook Air.

The new drive is going to use MLC technology (multi level cell) which is slower than the SLC (simple level cell) drive but reduces cost because it stacks more data on the same cell. However, there is no official word on using Parallel ATA like we have in the MacBook Air or they will upgrade to Serial ATA connectors.

Yang also mentioned the fact that they may start working on new dimensions (smaller of course) to make even thinner laptops. So far companies developed on the 1.8 or 2.5-inch platforms.

via CNET

The Koreans from Mtron announced today that they’ve managed to develop a new 1.8-inch hard drive in their SSD line. They are proudly telling us that a faster 128GB SSD is in the works using the Single Level Cell (SLC) technology instead of the denser but slower Multi Level Cell (MLC) technology.

The new Mtron 128GB SSD is supposed to be able to read at 120MBps and write at 100MBps. Since it’s a SSD which means it has less moving parts power consumption is cut in half. Al-Gore fans, that’s a good thing, right?

I can only find one problem here. What if your desktop computer is not fast enough to keep up with it, because this baby is able to write six times faster than a normal HDD! We’ll find out more about it in April, when it’s going to be released. So far I have no price for it, but it should be expensive.

Electronista

I anticipated that SSD prices will go down sooner or later. Until they do, BiTMICRO just announced the largest flash drive we’ve seen so far. It’s a 1.6TB Ultra320 SCSI SSD that can do 230 MBps transfer rates.

Though no price have been disclosed yet, I’m pretty confident I should work a few years to pay for it. Ubergizmo thinks you could buy a car with the money, what about you? Would it be THAT expensive?