Mum's the word on what controller Hitachi has attached to its new enterprise-class Ultrastar SSD400S.B family of solid state and whether it skipped Intel's chipset in favor of something from SandForce, just like the Santa Clara chip maker recently did, but we at least know the new SSDs are rocking Intel-produced 25nm single-level cell (SLC) NAND flash memory chips, a fact both companies are quick to boast.
Having Intel knock on your door to request a chipset would be like having Muhammad Ali ask to use your boxing gloves in a title fight when he was at the top of his game. If you look at it that way, LSI should be thrilled that the Santa Clara chip maker abandoned its own solid state drive (SSD) chipset in favor of SandForce's SF-2200 chipset family in its just-launched SSD 520 Series.
One of the major problems with covering all of the news flowing out of CES is that inevitably, something nifty gets missed. This year, we were so busy reporting on Ultrabooks and AMD chips that we totally glossed over what may be the most awesome survival tool of all time; a Swiss Army knife with a whopping 1TB hard drive built in. Whether you need to pry open a can of beans, file your nails, or transfer over 220 million pages of text, this bad boy's got you covered.
A high performing solid state drive at a reasonable price is something every enthusiast wants, but they're harder to find than a needle in a mountain of hay. Kingston believes it's found that balance with its new SSDNow V+200 line. Featuring a SATA 6Gbps interface and SandForce's SF-2281 controller technology, the SSDNow V+200 offers some serious speed for "performance minded yet cost-conscious business or home users," Kingston says.
Since when did the enterprise market get a sense of style? That's the first question that comes to mind when spying pureSilicon's new line of enterprise-focused storage devices, the Kage K1 USB Flash Drive and the Kage K1 SATA SSD, both of which bring a little pizazz to the storage sector. The "impossibly thing" (4.5mm) flash drive is especially funky looking and resemebles something you might see in a sci-fi flick.
What is it with SATA 6Gb/s SSDs and blue screen of death (BSOD) errors? First it was only SSDs with the SandForce SF-2000 series controller that were making users feel blue, but earlier this month Crucial also acknowledged a BSOD issue of its own. A firmware bug was found to be causing the company’s M4 SSD to restart every hour “after approximately 5,000 hours of actual ‘on time’ use.” The company promised a firmware update to rectify the problem sometime during the week of January 16, 2012. That firmware update is now available.
You know a technology’s starting to make it big when kinder, gentler, easier to install versions of it begin hitting the streets. Looks like we’re getting there with SSDs; just last week, Crucial said it planned on releasing a stand-alone SSD cache solution to give PCs a speed boost, and today, Corsair followed suit, announcing an SSD/software tandem that can perk up your PC with a minimum of muss and fuss.
LG has a need for speed, and it's not the kind that Electronic Arts or Goose or Maverick can satisfy. Instead it's OCZ's subsidiary, Indilinix, that's providing LG with a shot of adrenaline by injecting its Super Ultrabook Z300 with a fast 256GB mSATA solid state drive (SSD) based on Everest. The Z330 will ship with a 256GB SSD that will be anything but a bottleneck.
After OCZ snatched up SSD controller-maker Indilinx back in March of 2011, it took them nearly nine months to work the company’s speedy new Everest controller into an actual product. (The Everest-sporting OCZ Octane launched back in the beginning of November.) It’s going to take them less time than that to roll out an Everest update; at CES, OCZ is showing off its new Everest 2 controller, which doubles up on the first-gen’s random IOPS performance and should hit the streets in June.Connect with MaximumPC
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