M4Ssd
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Crucial ships mSATA-based m4 SSD upgrade, your Ultrabook never felt better
Crucial has already managed to stuff its m4 SSD into Ultrabook sizes, but the 7mm thick design may still be too portly for the thinner laptops in the pack. With that in mind, the flash memory guru has just started shipping the m4 mSATA, a barebones card that sits cozily next to the motherboard either as a cache for a rotating disk or as a main drive. It's still as speedy as many of its bigger cousins, with read speeds of up to 500MB/s per second. We suspect most buyers will be lured in by the low prices: at just $53 for a cache-friendly 32GB SSD and no more than $226 for a 256GB example, it's entirely feasible to give that spinning-drive Ultrabook a shot in the arm.
Crucial outs Adrenalin Solid State Cache Solution, less long-winded m4 SSDs
Until the cost of flash storage comes down to the same plane of existence as most human wallets, hybrid solutions -- which pair an HDD with an SSD cache -- remain a smart way forward. OCZ scored some attention with its Synapse products, so now Crucial has to wave its arms in our faces and point to its own offering: the Adrenalin Solid State Cache Solution, which pairs a 50GB m4 SSD with proprietary caching software, and which will be out sometime this quarter for an undisclosed but surely rivalrous price. In the meantime, a fresh range of pure-breed m4 drives is already available, looking much like their predecessors but now whittled down to a mere 7mm in thickness so they can be squeezed into ever-narrower crevices. Pricing starts at $119 for 64GB and tops out at $795 for 512GB -- like we said, not your average plane of existence.
Micron debuts RealSSD C400 drives using 25nm NAND technology
What's "bringing excitement back into personal computing" more than anything else? According to Micron, it's SSDs, and it says it's now "accelerating this enthusiasm" with its new RealSSD C400 drives. Those are apparently the industry's first drives to use 25 nanometer NAND technology, which naturally brings with it a number of benefits -- namely, storage capacities from 64GB to 512GB (in 1.8-inch and 2.5-inch sizes), peak read speeds of 415 MB/second, and write speeds varying by drive (the 512GB hits 260MB/s). No word on prices just yet, but Micron expects mass production to begin in February, and the drives will also sold by Micron's Crucial division as the m4 SSD in the first quarter of the year. Update: Hot Hardware managed a hands-on with this bad boy, and there's a video proving it just after the break.
