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Western Digital boosts SSD cred with $340 million sTec acquisition
Western Digital has clearly made a name for itself in the magnetic drive space, but it's hardly the go-to brand when it comes to SSDs. WD's betting that'll soon change, though, thanks to a $340 million investment. That sum will be used to acquire sTec Inc., a US-based SSD manufacturer best known for its enterprise solid-state drives (and a recent insider trading scandal). The company will fall under HGST, a WD wholly owned subsidiary, and will likely continue focusing its efforts on SSDs designed for business use -- serving up ones and zeroes in servers and data centers, for example. Catch a few more deets at the source link just below.
Toshiba announces first SSD drives using new mini-SATA interface
Netbook SSDs have come in all manner of shapes, sizes, and connectors for a while, but finding the right model for your machine is about to get a lot easier -- the SATA-IO working group just announced a new mini-SATA standard called mSATA that should put an end to the mish-mash. Toshiba's the first out the gate with 32nm drives in 30 and 62GB sizes, but expect to see mSATA drives and machines from a whole host of heavy hitters in the future, like Samsung, Dell, HP, SanDisk, Lenovo, STEC, and Toshiba. That's pretty good news -- now let's just hope standardization leads to lower prices as well. Read - SATA-IO announces mini-SATA standard Read - Toshiba announces first mSATA drives
Seagate drops patent suit against SSD maker STEC, runs home crying
Well, that was pretty anticlimactic. Seagate, which filed suit against SSD-maker STEC back in April -- claiming the company infringed on four of its patents for SSD interfaces -- in March after talking quite a sizeable game about similar possible actions against the big boys (Intel and Samsung), has just dropped the claim. Seagate said that the case against STEC was "no longer worth pursuing" because economic conditions are now so bad that STEC isn't really selling many of the SSDs in question. That all sounds a little like saying "Monopoly stinks, let's play something else" when you're losing so bad you only have Baltic Avenue left, but maybe that's just us.
SSD-maker responds to nasty report, says it'll do better next time
If you were shaken to your very core at the recent report that SSDs may not be as power-friendly as you'd been led to believe, drive-maker STEC wants to talk you down from the ledge. According to the company's Patrick Wilkison, the Tom's Hardware article which benchmarked (and gave failing grades) to power-consumption of the non-mechanical drives was flawed because, "They are using legacy drives, none of which will be used by any major PC OEM." According to Patrick (whose job, you might note, is to sell SSDs), new versions of the drives will / do have intelligent power management which circumvents the issues that report shed light on. Wilkison goes on to say that, "Drives will need to have very intelligent power management systems. Some of these SSDs will have them, and those (that) do not have such power intelligence will not be used (by PC makers)." So it's sort of like saying a car you buy in the future will get better gas mileage than the one you own now, provided the automaker cares about fuel efficiency. Small solace, we'd say.Update: We've gotten a statement from Micron concerning the report -- you can check it out after the break.
Seagate sues SSD maker STEC
Seagate was talking a big game last month about how SSD makers like Samsung and Intel were infringing its patents, and the company wasn't joking around, following up all that tough talk with... what appears to be a test case against relatively minor vendor STEC. Seagate says STEC's drives violate four patents it holds on SSD interfaces and that while "it's not a big financial issue yet," the company wants "to set things straight." As you'd expect, STEC doesn't feel quite as casual about the situation, saying that it's been making SSDs since 1994, before any of Seagate's patents were filed, and that it's going to aggressively defend Seagate's "desperate" claims and seek to invalidate its patents. many of which it believes aren't even relevant to SSD technology. That sounds like a fight to us -- get ready for some nonstop paperwork legal thrills, people.Read - NYT article about the suitRead - Official STEC response
STEC announces "cheap" 32GB to 512GB MLC NAND-based SSDs
Everyone wants to be packing some of that sweet flash memory in their notebooks these days, but not everyone wants to shell out such high prices for such relatively measly capacities. Well along comes Santa Ana-based STEC Inc. with what it claims to be a breakthrough NAND technology that will allegedly slash the price of solid state drives down to just $2/GB within two years; specifically, the company says it has successfully leveraged so-called multi-level cell-based (MLC) NAND into SSDs with 90MB/s read / 60MB/s write speeds -- good enough to exceed platter-based hard drive performance at prices supposedly half of what they are today. STEC is currently shipping manufacturing samples between 32GB and an impressive 512GB (in a 2.5-inch form factor; the largest 1.8-inch drive is 128GB), although it remains to be seen how much of those savings will be passed along to the consumer when these eventually come to market.
SimpleTech announces 512GB and 256GB 3.5-inch SSD drives
You know how it is, five minutes ago we were not aware of our dire need for 512GB of ridiculously fast NAND storage, but it's all so clear now: there can be no substitute. SimpleTech has announced the Zeus-IOPS SSD 512GB and 256GB SSD drives, which offer up the largest flash drive capacities we're aware of in a 3.5-inch enclosure. Performance ain't no slouch either, with SimpleTech claiming 200x performance over 15,000 RPM enterprise hard drives, with better reliability to boot. SimpleTech wouldn't come clean on an exact price, but it expects prices for SSD to drop to $2 per GB by 2012, meaning that in five years you can get one of these 512 giggers for the low, low price of $1,000 -- and we're guessing around ten times that when the drive launches in Q3 2007. The 256GB is available now.[Thanks, Kelly]
