A-DATA goes SSD crazy, shows off 128GB 2.5-incher

Friends, the age of SSD is upon is, and there's no better evidence than the upcoming 128GB 2.5-inch drive from A-DATA, which hooks up via SATA II, totally schools PQI's offering, and makes all your wildest dreams come true. A-DATA was showing this drive off at CES behind closed doors, along with a 64GB 1.8-incher and a most impressive 32GB ExpressCard. Mass production and availability is due for late Q1 and early Q2, and while there's no word on price just yet, with the way flash drives have been trending lately, we're hoping for good news when these hit the streets.

[Via gizmag]

[kev @ Jan 17th 2007 11:33AM]

The bell rings for motorized hard drives. Samsung, where was that prediction again?

[kev @ Jan 17th 2007 11:34AM]

tolls, rather

[Steven Hu @ Jan 17th 2007 11:34AM]

upon is? do you mean "upon us"?

[Chris Anderson @ Jan 17th 2007 11:38AM]

This is outstanding!!! I can't wait to see how quickly things escalate once every manufacturer jumps on the SSD bandwagon...

[John Stracke @ Jan 17th 2007 11:47AM]

Ooh--that'd be big enough to replace my laptop's HD.

[Revels @ Jan 17th 2007 11:48AM]

This is more like it. Double that capacity and I'm sold!

[Brad @ Jan 17th 2007 11:53AM]

Despite the obvious implications for laptops, think about HTPCs! One of the biggest problems with having a computer next to your TV is noise. Until now, the only real way to rid the system of HDD noise was to have the PC be a network boot machine sans hard drive. That entails having a backroom server... something most wallets don't enjoy. 128GB is pretty much the optimal point to start recording HD content and more than enough to record SD content.

[kev @ Jan 17th 2007 11:54AM]

Don't forget the power savings---no need to use those magnets and motor anymore.

[eerdepeer @ Jan 17th 2007 11:55AM]

"MINE, MINE, MINE, MINE..." ;-)

[Chris @ Jan 17th 2007 12:13PM]

What I have been trying to figure out is, do you see a change in the layout of memory on laptops and computers. My point being, why have any separate RAM at all if your hard drive is all solid state. If you are tying up 5GB of your 33GB SSD, why not assign the remaining 28GBs to work as RAM....? Isn't this the way "on board" video cards work?

[ac @ Jan 17th 2007 12:52PM]

What I have been trying to figure out is, do you see a change in the layout of memory on laptops and computers. My point being, why have any separate RAM at all if your hard drive is all solid state.
--------
1) solid state is slow compared to volatile ram and 2)bandwidth: this drive hooks up via a drive interface, which has nowhere near the bandwidth of onboard RAM.

That said,

[Gil @ Jan 17th 2007 12:36PM]

Nah onboard video steals from the RAM.

What you described is how virtual memory works. It's already implemented in windows and other multitasking enviroments. The thing is with these SDDs and a little tweaking it would become freakishly fast.

The only thing that could do better would be MRAM but they're not rolling it out fast enough to be a viable solution.

[Jonathan Sundy @ Jan 17th 2007 1:01PM]

I don't know by how much anymore, but I know that flash ram has slower access than the main memmory in your laptop. Plus having them together would slow down access to both, probably create quite the bottleneck.


And in regards to this spelling the end of magnetic harddrives, you are kidding yourself. 1 company has announced a 128gb SSD, where the other 2 or 3 announced were 64 or 32gb. And we're talking $600 here for the middle of the pack ones. Flash may still be a few years away from reaching $ per GB equality with the most expensive hard drives, at a fraction of the total storage (ie it'll still be awhile before a 64gb SSD costs the same per GB as a 1TB HD). Magnetic storage will continue to expand on it's own path.

The amount of storage space people need is only getting bigger, the last projections for harddrives are putting us at what 50TB per square inch in 2012?? SSD's are absolutely amazing, and will do wonders for laptop's, and may eventually trash raptors for operating system drives (and probably would be great in certain server applications), but they are not going to replace the hard drive in any manner. The capacity just isn't there, and I doubt it'll reach parity anytime soon if ever.

Keep them coming though, my laptop could use an extra hour of battery life.

[D @ Jan 17th 2007 12:16PM]

What are the spec's for the number of write/rewrite time before failure (MTBF)?

[jerrt @ Jan 17th 2007 12:18PM]

Any word yet on if any of these might fit into a ps3?

[Sqube @ Jan 17th 2007 12:24PM]

Double the capacity one more time, give it to me in that luscious 3.5" size, and get rid of all the longevity issues that will probably crop up in the first generation of SSDs for full-grown PCs, and I'm sold.

Hell, I'll probably be sold three or four times over. Get working, hard drive manufacturers... this is your future.

[S11D336B @ Jan 17th 2007 1:38PM]

There is a reason computers have RAM, cache, and hard drive space as all separate entities. The simple explanation is expense. At our current level of technology it would be impractical (and incredibly expensive) to have all storage at cache level. So, computer engineers created several different levels of memory to reduce expense and increase practicality. Cache (on the order of 4mb) is to work on data immediately when a processor needs it. RAM (on the order of 1-2GB) is to store larger quantities of data temporarily. Hard drive storage (on the order of 120 – 500GB) is to store data permanently. N.B.: the coloration between increase in size and decrease in speed of each successive level. I don't think we'll be seeing flash memory replacing RAM for at least 10 - 15 years. Flash simply isn't fast enough and probably won't be for some time. Sorry, I didn’t mean to write a lecture ;-).

[Taz @ Jan 17th 2007 1:07PM]

I haven't been keeping up with flash technology, so it may no longer be an issue... but - how do these solid state drives deal with the finite number of writes that can be made before it becomes unuseable?

[chris @ Jan 17th 2007 1:11PM]

128gig sata SSD drives, and 1TB sata drives, HELL YAZ now wheres my frigging 1TB Sata2 Hybrid ReadyDrive ?????

[Mark @ Jan 17th 2007 1:39PM]

Also, are SSD disks a lot more expensive than normal Hard Disk drives?

[Karl @ Jan 17th 2007 2:35PM]

Am I the only one who sees this as a negative development?

Flash drives have a limited number of erase-write cycles, which means that after you factor in paging and other high frequency disk operations, you have storage which will lose it's capacity to store new data after time. I personally find this disturbing, and so I welcome the thought that fash is a gap-filling technology until we invent a more reliable storage mechanism.

Developments like this fuel the market for this gap-filling technology, which is something I see as hurting the market. I'd prefer companies spend more money in to R&D of new storage mechanisms over standardised interfaces rather than boosting the capacities of gap-filling technologies like flash.

[Jonathan Sundy @ Jan 17th 2007 3:49PM]

This was one of my points when SSDs were first being mentioned, and the response I've heard is that the write limit has been greatly increased with quality control and the maturing of the technology. I'll have to look around but I recall seeing the Samsung SSD with a very respectable MTBF. I know for certain it was addressed in their drives, just gotta find what little mention I saw.

[roman.kim @ Jan 17th 2007 3:23PM]

Wow, at this rate, we should see a 256GB drive in like 2 weeks.

[Jonathan Sundy @ Jan 17th 2007 3:56PM]

lol this site is quoting the 64gb drives at 10grand, they have other prices as well ($2200 for the 32gb sata drives).

http://www.dvnation.com/nand-flash-ssd.html

And not the article I originally read, but the info sounds the same

http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS7676844023.html
"The SSD's most appealing advantage over traditional rotating magnetic storage, however, is probably reliability. Without moving parts, SSD ATA drives should prove to be more rugged. SanDisk claims that the SSD's MTBF (mean time between failure) to be two million hours -- or about 228.3 years. This, by the way, represents a substantial improvement over early flash media performance, an improvement that can be attributed to exotic wear-leveling and other reliability-enhancing algorithms implemented by the company's TFFS firmware. (Flash memory cells support a limited number of re-write cycles.)"
This is in regards to the SanDisk drives.

[cseabrooks @ Jan 17th 2007 10:58PM]

You nay-sayers are killing me! You sound just like the guy who said no one would ever need more than like 8 bytes of RAM or some small amount! Well their is a law for computer memory that is similar to Moore's Law for processors. SSD WILL come down in price, Economics 101 tells us that. SSD will also Go larger. The very examples that Mr. Sundy list are the same reason that SSD have to grow! We start off with 32 GB that is G-B people not M-B and we are already at 128 GB within 1 month of the first announcement! That's growth. Here is the Wikipedia article on SSD: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_state_disk.

[Lonnie McClure @ Jan 18th 2007 2:06AM]

Yes, SSD will come down in price, but at the same time, the storage capacity of standard hard drives will continue to increase, with the price per gigabyte remaining about the same.

By the time a 128MB SSD becomes as inexpensive as a 120GB standard hard drive is today, you'll likely be able to buy a hard drive whose capacity is measured in terabytes for the same price.

You'll certainly see SSD's replace conventional hard drives in some applications, more as the price comes down, but don't expect to see conventional hard drives relegated to the graveyard during your lifetime. What you may very well see during that time is hard drives being relegated to near-offline storage. In other words, you'll probably see hard drives used more like tape libraries are used in large corporate computing centers.

Of course, by that time, another memory technology may have come along that is even less expensive and faster than flash memory; perhaps fast enough to serve as main system memory.

[Matt @ Jan 18th 2007 3:31AM]

Im quite positive over this one... I'm hoping a-data will claim the same (or better) specs as the sandisk one.. who are claiming a 2 million hour MTBF, sustained read rate of 62-megabyte/sec, a random read rate of 7000 IOPS for a 512-byte transfer and an average file access rate of 0.12 milliseconds.

With this speed of development SSD is becoming a good option for HD-Recorders (err SSD-Recorders) in the near future, and for consoles since they are quiet... Also i would love one to boot my OS from. And a big plus of course is that they have less then half the power consumption of a normal HDD.

[Lazarus Dark @ Jan 18th 2007 8:33PM]

wow. the 80gb hdd in my laptop has never been filled half way.I'll take the 64gb as it looks like prices may come down sooner than we expected if all the competition jumps in.

[taylor @ Feb 11th 2007 3:44PM]

HP tx1000+this hd+me= :)

1. super fast
2. super battery life
3. super stable
4. super capacity

very nice now lets hope for super price

[dungeon @ Feb 22nd 2007 3:13AM]

Capacity is great, but I can't wait till they come down in price enough to get rid of optical discs. No more smudges & scratches. Go to the dvd (ssd?) store and hire a movie. Slot it straight into your system and go.

[Aeleas08 @ Oct 13th 2007 8:43PM]

Here's how I'd use it. Use the SSD as my primary drive for the OS and hardware intensive games, and a pair of TB HDDs for storage. Speed and capacity in perfect balance.