TDK's 32GB Solid State Disk joins the party

Samsung's been hogging the Solid State Disk limelight for months with their 32GB SSD first peeped at CeBIT. So it does our invisible hand some good to hear TDK launch their version of the 32GB SSD, albeit in sample quantities only for the time being. TDK's unit connects to a standard IDE connector yet measures in at 80 percent the size of standard 2.5-inch laptop drive. And like the Sammy SSD, we expect to see some blazin' reads and writes with better protection against shock, faster OS boots and sleep recovery times, longer battery life and reduced weight when TDK gets around to mass production. So for now, all we really want to say is welcome to the party TDK. Now how 'bout driving down that premium pricing, mkay?

[lucifix @ Sep 18th 2006 9:16AM]

Awesome!

Soon in the next few years there would be the new gen. of hdd, all flash based... 1TB Flash memory..

instant power on.. yummy..

[Sebastian @ Sep 18th 2006 9:28AM]

Ipoooooooooooooood pleaseeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.........

[Me @ Sep 18th 2006 9:30AM]

It won't be instant power on. It will just be a lot more secure and faster. Can't wait till next year.

[EmEhRKay @ Sep 18th 2006 9:31AM]

yeah but how long will it last

[Tony Rayo @ Sep 18th 2006 10:03AM]

An undefective SSD would last a whole lot longer than a 1-inch HD (or even a regular HD). I've read reports that claim 100-year of use (aka most likely will work longer than you will be alive) although some people have suggested a much more conservative 15 - 20 years (although I still have a 200mb HD that's been working for almost such as long, hehe I keep it around for my 286 gameplay [f0rk emulation when you can have the real thing]). I would love one of these in a nano-pc server or some other portable/tiny unit.

- Tony R.

[Simon @ Sep 18th 2006 10:44AM]

Yeah, I'm itching for this too. 32GB! That's good enough for WinXP, a whole lot of apps and most importantly WoW :)

[Dennis Groom @ Sep 18th 2006 10:03AM]

If it lasts 3 years, i'd take it in a second;)

[EmEhRKay @ Sep 18th 2006 10:06AM]

cool, im glad to hear that. umpc's stock would soar with these guys in it.

whatever happened to oqo?

[PEZ @ Sep 18th 2006 11:48AM]

This would be pisser for in-car computing. Gimme. I am sure the first big ass customer would be Apple, within 2 years. IT only makes sense. Of course, it needs to get smaller, or re-packaged for the ipod - providing the ipods orientation stays the same.

Though, in two years, I would guess the ipod would have migrated itself into a full fledged wirelsss PDA or some sort, or an iphone itself.

[Larry @ Sep 18th 2006 11:11AM]

These will be good for boot drives but too small for daily work and applications. Hopefully machines that use these will have some kind of secondary bigger storage like hard drives.

Of course eventually local storage should go away as everything goes wireless and we access our 10TB home servers from afar!

[SpyderMS @ Sep 19th 2006 4:03AM]

32GB too small for daily work and applications? What do you have installed that takes up more than 32GB? Honestly most of your files (mp3s, videos, etc) can reside on a secondary internal or external drive, while the apps that really need the speed increase can sit on the flash drive. I imagine very few people would need more than 32GB at this point, and from what we've been seeing, 64GB should be right around the corner anyways.

[Darren @ Sep 18th 2006 11:14AM]

Will Vista even fit on it??

[Deadturtle @ Sep 18th 2006 11:17AM]

So does this mean they fixed the read/write count on these things? I know traditional media 'burns' at like 100,000 to 1,000,000 read/write cycles. With traditional applications like MP3's and cameras this might take a while, but in an OS (page file anyone?) it wouldnt take long at all to reach that life expectancy. So hopefully they've fixed that and I failed to hear the news, or they are 'prototypes' and are 'working on it' and we wont really see these things in laptops until a few years down the road.

[crzyjamaican46 @ Sep 18th 2006 11:35AM]

Solid state drives are similar but necessarily the same as flash drives. some are based on ram with an internal battery and backup storage and I believe here is a new type of ssd that is not flash or ram based that also is not constrained by a read/write limit. I'm not sure wich technology thi disk is based on.

[NicleT @ Sep 18th 2006 12:42PM]

More competition, hope this will help the prices to drop.

[that kid from the Simpsons. @ Sep 18th 2006 12:53PM]

Yeah, I can't wait for a 250 gig solid state, true video ipod.

[charlie @ Sep 18th 2006 1:06PM]

whatever happened to the hybrid disks that would be normal 3.5" or 2.5" drives, but also had a solid state element for faster boot times and caching data for use? I thought that those were being sold, first in laptops mainly for the power advantage, and then everywhere for the performance advantage... no?

[macserv @ Sep 22nd 2006 9:09PM]

zzz... zzz... *snort*

Huh? MRAM? Is it-- no? Oh, well.

zzz...

[Marc Brooks @ Sep 18th 2006 3:36PM]

How about releasing this in a microdrive (e.g. 1.8") form-factor so I can replace the HD in my Karma with something that will 'never' skip.

[XGM @ Sep 18th 2006 6:38PM]

Id expected this to be SATA since the memory would be able to handle all of that bandwidth and speed. But its still going to be very fast.

Tho the Gigabyte i-RAM card is similar this will have so much more space :D

[blackout @ Sep 18th 2006 8:18PM]

wow

i'd love to see the boot time on that

[@ Sep 19th 2006 2:04AM]

Blackout, enjoy. it should be similar as the Solid State Disk, 13 sec flat for booting. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-51784544344753709&q=Gigabyte+i-ramhttp://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-51784544344753709&q=Gigabyte+i-ram

[nikr @ Sep 19th 2006 12:39AM]

the HDD companies [not to mention the HD recovery thieves!] must be hating this. Can't WAIT to get rid of my old slow heavy power sucking HDD's!

[Dan @ Sep 23rd 2006 5:05PM]

How about that laptop with no moving parts? Very nice, assuming that it doesn't burst into flames! Oh wait that says Samsung, not Sony...

[Slaphead Media LLC @ Jan 15th 2007 5:43PM]

Colossal Storage will kick Flash and everything else out for good in the next gen, bring on 1pb portable devices.......... yes ok the iPod.

[Yousef Reda @ Jan 22nd 2007 8:17PM]

This is certainly something. It's still going to cost an arm and a leg, +/- a first born.

[David W. Bolt @ May 13th 2007 3:06AM]

I have had mine for about a week and really enjoy using it. I had a external 40gig micro hd already and use it for any extra programs needed for the UX390N and mine came with Vista Business already installed.


Great pc!

[RuiSvensson @ Nov 16th 2007 2:38PM]

The great goal will hit, when an array with this SSD for mount a great virtual HD, filling the empty space inside the CPU. With enough refrigeration (a dedicated cooler, please!) it will surely substitute these old HD, which can be damaged with any little beat.
So, could be finally mounted a PC inside the clothes: a keyboard acoplated in the arm (with two bangles), a flexible monitor (the technology already exists!), and we could walk and surf the web. I want, you do not ?