Hitachi and Intel are making waves this week, with one company debuting speedy solid state drives and the other making pre-holiday price cuts. And both moves bode well for green computing, in both the enterprise and consumer realms. Hitachi debuted a new line of 2.5-inch, enterprise-grade SSDs called Ultrastar SSD400S, which was developed in conjunction […]
Hybrid hard drives: This time it’s for real
…or so claims market research firm Objective Analysis, a research firm specializing in the semiconductor space. According to Objective Analysis‘ Jim Handy, the hybrid drive market will double every year and reach an impressive 600 million units by 2016. Ultimately, hybrid drives will become the dominant PC storage technology, displacing traditional hard drives. Hybrid drives […]
Green storage: Does the SSD tipping point draw near?
The price per gigabyte ratio keeps swinging in favor of improved solid-state drive (SSD) adoption, but not faster than prices keep tumbling on traditional hard drives. Apart from high-performance servers, storage arrays, a smattering of portables, and of course, PC enthusiasts that spend top dollar for the fastest components, SSDs are still having a tough […]
Intel: No 25nm SSDs until early 2011
Here’s some disappointing news in the green storage world. G3 solid-state drives featuring 25-nanometer (nm) flash chips developed by Intel and Micron under a joint venture called IM Flash Technologies, won’t ship until February 2011, according to this post at Tom’s Hardware. The company originally planned to ship the more energy efficient and cheaper-to-manufacture SSDs […]
Will new SSD standards help fuel wide-spread adoption?
Solid-state drives (SSDs) face two significant barriers to wide-scale adoption. Price and reliability. Prices continue to drop, thankfully, but longevity continues to be a concern. JEDEC to the rescue! You see, the flash memory in SSDs have a limited number of re-writes, and even with wear-leveling technology, eventually, the drive will give out. And while […]
Pliant goes MLC for enterprise drives
Are cheaper solid-0state storage arrays finally here? Pliant Technologies says yes. The company is currently shipping its 2.5-inch, Serial Attached SCSI, MLC-based Lightning LB 200M (200 GB) and Lightning LB 400M (400 GB) enterprise solid-state drives (SSD) to OEMs for evaluation purposes. General availability is scheduled for October 2010. Pliant figures that energy-conscious IT shops […]
WhipTail: SSDs for effective and efficient VDI
Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) makes a lot of sense on paper. Centralize management and maintenance by servers handle the brunt of the heavy lifting and let your employees interact with technologically lean, energy-efficient thin clients. In reality — and despite the claims of VDI vendors — companies have a couple of concerns, performance being chief […]
Fusio-io expands product line, signs Dell as OEM
Fusion-io has added new hardware to its PCI Express based storage card lineup, giving servers a lot more high-performance solid-state storage to make short work of all those transactions. The company’s new ioMemory Module doubles the storage capacity of their existing PCIe card lineup, up to 1.28TB and boosting sustained IOPS to 285,000. Not too […]
SSD bargains spell good news for Green IT
For all of their energy saving and performance-boosting benefits, solid-state drives’ (SSD) lofty per-gigabyte cost make the storage technology it a tough sell when compared to trusty old platter-based hard drives. Put simply, few are going to pay a premium for data storage, especially (sorry to sound cliché) in this economy. Recently, though, there’s been […]
Free Utility Speeds SSDs for XP
In light of the well-received Windows 7, it’s hard to ignore that XP is getting on in years. Nonetheless, it’s still pretty prevalent in netbooks. Part of the problem for netbook owners is that XP is an OS developed well…
