Samsung has announced volume availability of the 128 GB solid state drive. 256 GB drives should be coming out before the year is out. This is getting really interesting. Looks like these multilevel or the MLC flash chips are going to provide the higher capacities fairly quickly. The SLC or the singkle level chip flash technology seemed to slow down around the 60 GB capacities some time back. While HDD have already reached a terabyte capacity with vertical recording technology stuff, the SSDs are not too far behind now. It'll be interesting to watch the race! These 128 GB devices are available in 1.8 and 2.5 inch form factors.

Solid State Drives Are Going To Take Over The World!

The world of drives that is! That's what you'd expect with a large blob of solid state memory mimicking the lumbering HDDs with their rotational latencies and seek time and so on ! That's what many an expert would lead you to believe too. But here are two opinions, actually a hands on test and a studied opinion that says that ain't so!

First, some testing results. Bill O'Brien does some testing and is not impressed at all by the performance to two SSD against two old world hard drives. He took 32 GB drives from Advanced Media Inc and Crucial Technologies .

So drive1 was Crucial's internal 2.5" SSD
drive 2 was RiData's 2.5 " SSD
drive 3 was Seagate's Barracuda 3.5" HDD
drive 4 was Seagate's Momentus 2.5 "

Test results came up as follows.

Dr1 Dr2 Dr3 Dr4

Burst Speed 137.3 71.2 135 214.3 MB/sec
Boot Speed 40 32 40 40 Sec
Restart time 78.6 54.8 59.9 55.6 Sec
Data copying 243 264.5 185 185 Sec*

* for 4666 files totaling 8.05 GB of data, copied to/fro. because at the end of the day the SSD drive data may have to be sync'ed to the main system. Conclusion: no significant gain in any department.

On the other hand the HDD's keep growing in size. 1 TB or a 1000 GB drives are mainstream. That's quite a lead over the SSD's of 60 GB may be! I am sure both are going to be in use for a long time to come!

UMPCs Are Growing !

Looks like more companies are coming out with these ultra mobile stuff. Latest announcement comes from Everex. But that's not the musings here about. I notice dome trends happening with these new fangled devices.

First and foremost of course is the price. Whatever devices are for sell almost all cost upwards of $300. There's something interesting here. People are ready to pay higher for a smaller and most often less capable device. Popularity of Asus Eee PC is an indicator to that. Also there's this constant push for bigger display real estate that sees 20", 27" or even bigger displays on the desktop and sizes like 17" coming over on laptops, here's device that does with a lot less. Displays on these devices are around 8"diagonal.

Other major thing is that solid state drives are finally here. These SSD devices of useful size is likely to become the sole drive on such notebooks first, looks like.