The State Of Solid-State
With the prices of traditional hard drives continuing to drop faster than a lead balloon, manufacturers are seeking technologies that not only can surpass those drives in performance and flexibility, but that can also deliver a higher financial return. On both counts, the SSD, or solidstate drive, appears to be the technology of choice.
In December, Intel unveiled its Z-P140 PATA (Parallel Advanced Technology Attachment) SSD line of tiny drives with relatively tiny (2GB and 4GB) capacities. Although the drives are smaller than a penny, their application is limited to small mobile devices and likely expensive ones, at that. But the company has indicated that it soon plans to ship SATA (Serial ATA)-II SSDs in 1.8- and 2.5-inch sizes in capacities up to 160GB. Intel also said these drives will boast better read speeds than a competing drive from Samsung and that SSDs will see price drops of 50% in 2009 and another 50% in 2010.
OCZ also is entering the SSD arena, offering drives with capacities of 32GB and 64GB and impressive read speeds of 120MB per second and write speeds of 100MB per second. Like other SSDs, the OCZ entries have no moving parts, feature low power consumption, and have high shock resistance.
Tags: hard disk