pureSilicon introduces world's first 1TB 2.5-inch SSD

Pretec may have laid claim to the title of world's fastest SATA SSD, but it looks like pureSilicon has a feather of its own to put in its cap, with it announcing what appears to be the world's first 1TB 2.5-inch SSD drive. You may want to think twice about holding out for one of these in your next laptop, however, as pureSilicon is apparently specifically pitching it as a more energy-efficient solution for servers, datacenters, and supercomputers, with four of the drives able to deliver 4TB in the same space as a standard 3.5-inch hard drive. According to pureSilicon's own benchmarks, the drives "approach" the maximum SATA II transfer speed of 300MB/s and, if 1TB is a bit excessive for your needs, the company also has drives ranging from 32GB to 512GB in its Nitro series. No word on price, naturally, but the drives will apparently be available sometime in the third quarter of this year.

[Wolfticket @ Jan 10th 2009 1:57PM]

If you have to ask...

[Chris Anderson @ Jan 10th 2009 3:31PM]

Yeah, this is clearly marketed towards high-end datacenters and enterprises, but for the initial cost of investment I think you're still better off with spinning drives. SSDs consume the same voltage ALL the time, so unless you're really straining your existing storage for I/O, i can't really see you saving money on energy in the long run either.

[no thanks @ Jan 10th 2009 4:30PM]

you do realize that any real server in a datacenter or enterprise environment has it's drives spinning ALL THE TIME as well.......



right?

[loosely_coupled @ Jan 10th 2009 5:51PM]

With SSDs, the power consumption and performance characteristics vary widely between manufacturers, but even so there is no way that these drives consume more power than datacenter harddrives. Not only are busy 2.5" server drives constantly spinning (therefore using max power), but they are typically 10K or 15K RPM, and use a lot more power than your average consumer harddrives.

Also, there are obviously many other considerations besides just power and cooling when looking into replacing HDDs with SSDs in a server environment, the most important generally being hardware density, performance, lifetime, etc.

[Jonny @ Apr 15th 2009 3:51PM]

Christ Anderson:

I dunno what you mean about voltage, that's not really how to measure power consumption... but according to the specs on the Nitro it consumes almost no power when it is idle:

Nitro
Power
-- Active: 4.8W typical
-- Idle: 0.1W typical

[ThomasBags @ Jan 10th 2009 1:58PM]

For the low price of $200,000

[KarlW @ Jan 10th 2009 2:02PM]

... and a kidney

[Evangelion @ Jan 10th 2009 2:17PM]

Or an arm and a leg.

[angelwolf71885 @ Jan 10th 2009 2:21PM]

and your first borin

[gfar @ Jan 10th 2009 3:52PM]

That's $400 000 and both kidneys if you get it as an option from Apple.

[Knee to the Groin @ Jan 10th 2009 5:57PM]

Plus $10,000 for the then would be released microSATA adapter...

[matt @ Mar 2nd 2009 8:49PM]

don't for get $100 to get a second SUPERdrive!

[feffrey @ Jan 10th 2009 2:00PM]

wow that was fast, did not expect SSD to reach 1tb anytime soon.
Hard drives your days are even shorter!

[Sam Zebian @ Jan 10th 2009 2:08PM]

yeah and they got to 1tb in the 2.5" form factor before hard drives have!!! This means that SSD's have officially beaten HDD in capacity (in one form factor)! Just imagine if they used this design in a 3.5" drive, they would easily be able to surpass the 1.5TB HDD. This hopefully means our SSD capacity issue is no more, now all they need to fix is price.

[Wolfticket @ Jan 10th 2009 3:06PM]

I think SSDs have the potential to increase (and decrease in price) in size more rapidly that HDDs do.

[matt @ Mar 2nd 2009 8:50PM]

they double in sizes every rendition.

16,32,64,128,256,512,1024

except the 160gb one. idk how they got that. 128GB of chips plus a 32?

I love how its not about platters anymore and its how many chips can you fit in this space.

[Kinger @ Mar 2nd 2009 10:04PM]

It's always about space matt

[telepheedian @ Jan 10th 2009 2:02PM]

All hail the inevitable 1TB Eee PC.

[Samboini @ Jan 10th 2009 3:02PM]

*Shudder*

[Dave Chappelle @ Jan 10th 2009 10:37PM]

Ahh you mean 1tb Vaio P.... with Windows 7, ofcourse.

[gold5225 @ Jan 10th 2009 3:01PM]

Lol could you imagine this being put into a PS3 the 1TB amount of Space and the Super Quietness i could just imagine the PS3 would be silent adn have soo much Space i just recently put in a 320 GB harddrive its not Solid State though Solid States are expensive.

[somedude @ Jan 10th 2009 3:25PM]

Lol, could you imagine putting punctuation into sentence structure?

Lol.

[thesonandheir @ Jan 11th 2009 7:11AM]

Solid Snake drives? I see a Sony marketing opportunity here.

[Imabasser @ Mar 2nd 2009 10:45PM]

i seriously laughed at somedude's comment for a good 4 minutes...

[jakjak9210 @ Jan 10th 2009 2:07PM]

with the way that prices are falling on solid state memory, these will be competing with harddrives by the end of the year. :)
im exited.

[Bob @ Jan 10th 2009 4:23PM]

... and I'm entered!!!

[Fubar @ Jan 11th 2009 10:10AM]

@Bob--You do realize that you're just asking for a "That's what she said!!!" or a "Well, if that's your thing--not that there's anything wrong with that", don't you?

[Bob @ Jan 11th 2009 9:37PM]

[ Comment Withdrawn ]

[Fubar @ Jan 11th 2009 11:53PM]

Commentus interruptus?

[octoberasian @ Jan 10th 2009 2:08PM]

Here's the nice thing about SSDs: Unlike regular hard disks, a 1 terabyte SSD should feasibly give you the full space of the entire drive instead of losing tens if not not hundreds of gigabytes of disk-based HDDs.

Too bad this will cost an arm, a leg, and maybe your house (if it hasn't been foreclosed yet...)

[Rob Conway @ Jan 10th 2009 2:13PM]

i haven't even thought about this part of the equation! do you keep the whole capacity on say a 32 GB SSD? if so it should theoretically do the same for 1 TB.

[Kieran @ Jan 10th 2009 2:22PM]

I don't think that is entirely correct. The 'loss' of memory is due to the whole gigabyte/gibibyte issue, not the medium used. I remember 1GB flash memory cards reading 900 odd MB once they're formatted.

[kal326 @ Jan 10th 2009 3:05PM]

Yeah its more of that 1024 versus 1000 byte thing. 1000/1024=0.9765625, easiest thing is just right click on a HD in Windows and go to properties. In the middle you see Capacity:, I have a 500GB drive that reads as 500,105,216,000 465GB. Add into that the loss of space on formating and you have the missing Capacity. Trust me if companies were trying to sell a smaller device then they were actually delivering to consumers, somebody probably would have sued....Oh wait they did http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/gadgets/western-digital-settles-hard-drive-capacity-lawsuit-183980.php

[octoberasian @ Jan 10th 2009 3:50PM]

@Kieran...

My thinking is that: Doesn't the SSDs use the 1024 (hence 32, 64, 128, 256, 512 GiB, and 1 TiB SSDs) and regular disk-based HDDs use 1000 (like 80, 100, 120, 160, 250 TB, etc.)?

So, technically, the SSDs should still use the entire disk space.

[menozcm @ Mar 2nd 2009 8:55PM]

@ octoberasian
all computer size measurements are in base 2
no the base 10 numbers is what got the hdd companies sued
your computer will read the size the same no matter what medium any differences are in how the formatting and manufacturing are done

[Seanross @ Jan 10th 2009 2:08PM]

Wow, pretty soon we'll be able to carry around 1TB SSB External drives... just crazy.
To think my old computer back in 96~ had a 4GB Hard Drive lol

[Broo @ Jan 10th 2009 3:33PM]

lol- I remember my first hard drive (sometime around 94ish) was a spacious 40MB...

today I have a 16GB MicroSD in my phone.

soon we'll be seeing people having problems with the 2TB partition limit

[no thanks @ Jan 10th 2009 4:33PM]

people running enterprise servers have "had problems with the 2TB limit" for many years.

hell home users have for several years if they have large storage pools.

[cb88 @ Jan 10th 2009 5:03PM]

While us Linux users will be fine and dandy with our new ext4 filesystem that supports files yes files upto 16TB and exabyte size drives

[Errorkid @ Mar 3rd 2009 12:43AM]

Don't forget folks: in Linux-Land it's the user who tests and debugs. Your 16Tb is corrupt because of some undiscovered bug? GoodLuckWithThat

[Errorkid @ Mar 11th 2009 11:34PM]

... and 2 weeks later:

http://www.h-online.com/open/Possible-data-loss-in-Ext4--/news/112821

Thanks for using linux new ext4, and good luck recovering your data.

[whopper @ Jan 10th 2009 2:13PM]

and i still wonder why my eee has 4gb of storage....

[Valicore @ Jan 10th 2009 2:48PM]

Man, I am impressed. Manufacturers have really moved forward with SSDs much faster than I expected, and I actually thought it would go pretty damn fast. @Seanross: Dude, in 96 you must have been the SHIT. I was 10 in '96 and My Packard Bell barely had a 1gb hard drive (although I thought that was ginormous at the time).

[Wonderkid @ Jan 10th 2009 2:53PM]

In 1988, we purchased an 8 1/4" 300Meg external SCSI hard drive. It was the size of a shoebox and weighed ooh, about 15lbs. It cost (ready?) £8000. (That's about $12,000 Benjamins in EngadgetSpeak at today's exchange rate.) Around the same time, a sales chap left a nice Toshiba Fax machine with us for a trial. He came back a week later to take it away. We wouldn't let him. So, he insisted we parted with £2500. Which we gladly did, being this remarkable machine (32K page memory) would send a communication instantly. Prior to that, it was a First Class stamp and a 48 hour wait. Oh, and there was the Sony optical drive, £8000 for that and about £250 for the 600MB cartridges that were about 8" wide and 10" long. Today, you can get a thousand fold the memory solid state, in your pocket for a few ££ on Amazon and a fax for £50 - for those still using them. But this all begs the question, what other product category (of any type) has seen such a remarkable price / performance improvement? More's law appears very focused.

[Samboini @ Jan 10th 2009 3:04PM]

Moore's Law. I feel obliged to correct out of respect for the guy!

[Marcello @ Jan 10th 2009 2:58PM]

time to change my '92 300 mb hard disk, i just had some problems trying to install windows 7

[Karl Viklund @ Jan 10th 2009 3:11PM]

Who cares...
What matters is price. Nothing else.

[Precurse @ Jan 10th 2009 3:20PM]

No, what matters is the fact there are introduced. This means it is possible to produce and more manufacturers are going to jump on board. Supply goes up, price goes down. Economics. You can't put a price on something that doesn't exist...

[Stymie @ Jan 10th 2009 3:21PM]

For some people, price makes a difference. For others, price makes no difference. Obviously, this thing is going to be super expensive, but about a year ago, 32gb and 64gb drives were prohibitively expensive, and now they are within reach of most people (who want that size). What this produce means, hopefully, is that 1gb and beyond SSDs will soon be coming way down in price. This drive offers 4TB in the space of a 3.5" bay, so this type of storage density will be great for laptop and desktop.

[no thanks @ Jan 10th 2009 4:40PM]

in the enterprise environment, especially in high density storage environments, price is very low on the list of whats needed.

transfer speeds (real world)
reliability
density
"floor" space
power

all of those are way more important than the cost.

i'll take my superfast SAS drives over any SATA drive all day long.
if i can trade out and still have their I/O speeds, with higher density, and more reliability, cost doesn't really matter all that.

take a high density SAN for instance.

it may hold 50 2.5" HDD's.
If i can double the total storage space (or quadruple or more) simply by spending $100K on these SSD drives, it is essentially a push versus purchasing a new second SAN to add to the center.
now take in that i dont have to add power, take up space (which is usually at a premium), and of course set it all up on the network with that needed infrastructure, and I'm money ahead by quite a bit. if it can quadruple the storage pool, i'm money well ahead.