A new range of solid state hard drives were recently unveiled in the laptop-friendly 2.5-inch form factor. Top capacity? 160GB, and not a single spinning platter in sight.
 96GB solid state drive from Adtron: The 160GB one refused to be seen in public. |
Storage firm Adtron recently unveiled its new range of solid state hard drives, for both IDE and SATA, in the laptop-friendly 2.5-inch form factor. Top capacity? 160GB.
Earlier this year we reported on the fast growing support for solid state hard drives, and large ones at that.
Way
back then, 128GB was the unheard-of holy grail. This month, Adtron ups the ante another 32GB.
Basically, it's on.
This adds yet another solid state HDD manufacturer to the high capacity consumer war-of-mostly-words, despite the fact that actual retail product is still a rarity in shops.
According to Adtron's tech chief, Alan Fitzgerald, these new drives "... greatly expand the applications among our historic flash disk customers in the industrial and defense markets," (a hint perhaps that these drives will still be aimed squarely at those equipped with disgusting amounts of money.)
He continues "... as well as addressing bandwidth intensive server and storage acceleration applications in a much broader emerging market previously the domain of HDD products," which is all wonderfully vague because Adtron's probably more keen on the bottomless wallets of the two actual markets Fitzgerald had just previously mentioned.
In terms of performance, the drives "... deliver sustained read/write performance in the 70MB/sec range, delivering the solid state industry's best performance," declares Fitzgerald.
What this actually means is the IDE drives read up to 70MB/s, writing at up to 60MB/s. Interestingly, the IDE drive is faster, as the SATA alternative peaks at 5MB/s less on both read and write.
Security on the drives, we're told, is top notch -- at least when deleting files. It says they address "... the most stringent Military and Intelligence Standards defined."
Adtron fails to mention what the drives use, however, so we'll put it down to an inherent flash function -- once you've deleted something on a standard flash drive, it Really Isn't Coming Back(TM).
What if you're after a solid state drive right now? Well, you could have a poke around with one of Gigabyte's i-RAM units.
Although they're still not quite cheap, if you have some old sticks of DDR (first generation) memory lying around -- or you can afford a bunch -- you can plug them in and create for yourself an instant solid state hard drive. A drive on which your data is safe, that is, so long as the onboard battery is up or your machine is at least plugged into a live electric socket. If the power goes out, your data is gone.
Adtron doesn't supply any pricing information whatsoever, so don't soon expect its 160GB play thing to fall into your lap. Presumably the price is a tad out of reach for the average Joe Consumer.
Nonetheless, the more of these drive units that come about, the closer we move to seeing the final mechanical hard drive kick its comparatively noisy bucket.
Considering its ever spiralling price per GB, though, the fiend of spinning data platters has plenty of kicks left in it.