TDK intros SATA-compatible industrial SSD drives

It's far from the first SATA-compatible SSD drive, but TDK seems to think its new GBDisk RS1 series drives will be just the ticket for some very particular users (though not likely you or us). Apparently designed specifically for industrial use, the drive uses single level cell NAND flash memory (as opposed to multi-level cell) and a GBDriver RS1 SATA controller, which TDK says will together help it maintain data reliability while standing up to frequent, high-speed data writing. You will have to make do with some fairly small storage capacities even by SSD standards, however, with the drives topping out at 16GB, all of which come in 2.5-inch drive enclosures. No word on prices just yet, but you can look for them to start rolling out this June.

[Blaine Oliver @ May 12th 2008 12:04PM]

I will brain anyone who says first!

I am really interested in getting a SSD, but i dont have more money than sense so will have to wait till they get to mainstream.

[helloUser @ May 12th 2008 12:29PM]

Are these any faster than Western Digital Raptor Drives?

[steve @ May 12th 2008 12:46PM]

Typically flash SSDs are faster at accessing the data, but slightly slower at sustained transfer. I think SSDs are also slower at writing than they are reading

There are exceptions to this, with some SSDs having very fast sustained transfer.

Sorry i can't be more help, but IMO your better of with raptors.

[Kurian @ May 12th 2008 12:57PM]

Seriously, as of now the best alternative is to get like 5 HDDs and put them in Raid 5 with a good hardware PCIe RAID controller.

You get good reliability, and blazing speeds over 400MBps read & write.
I've had 2 drive failures after getting my RAID card, I'm forever indebted to it for saving my precious por.. data.

[Mile @ May 12th 2008 12:58PM]

Good to see some 16GB drives coming back. I'm tired of having to buy 300GB drives and higher.

[Andrew Pollack @ May 12th 2008 1:20PM]

There may be a very good market for these relatively low capacity high speed SSD units that can handle heave write access over a long term.

Consider its use for a swap partition, database circular transaction log container, or indexing temp space.

[jojo @ Aug 6th 2008 8:50PM]

Seriously, I just picked up a 16GB SDHC card for $70. hdparm shows its write speed at 13MB/s. run 4 of these in parallel and you have a 64GB ssd that can do better than 45MB/s write for under $300. Every real 64g SSD is over $1000 at this point. Where's the disconnect? You could even throw a few more in for redundancy (which would increase read speeds) and be nowhere near the price point of the "real" SSDs. What's the deal?