|
|
| see also:- "USB
SSD" - editor mentions on StorageSearch.com |
| USB
storage page news - from
storage history
|
a new way to kill flash SSD
data
Editor:- March 15, 2011 - Pangaea Media has
recently entered the SSD backup
market with a removable 2.5"
SSD which integrates backup,
encryption and a
completely new (to me) patented
fast purge
technology.
how times change - the fastest SSDs
Editor:-
February 8, 2011 - I've updated
the fastest SSDs list
again today.
This article actually gets updated many times each month -
and attracts a lot of vendor emails - when companies aren't listed - or get
bumped off the list.
I thought it would be interesting to look back
again at the
1st
edition of the fastest SSDs list in 2007 (which is visible on the internet
archive).
Depending what form factors you look at - products today are
about 3x to 5x faster. They're much cheaper too.
Does
this diversionary tactic mean I haven't finished my promised - SSD power
management article yet?
I plead guilty to that. In my defense it's
morphed into 6 mini articles which I'm juggling to fit into a single readable
whole - and may take another few days. Or I may just publish it in the usual
mangled state - and then incrementally improve it (as with many previous major
articles).
new edition - Top 20 SSD Companies
Editor:- January
12, 2011 - StorageSearch.com
today published the new edition of the
Top 20 SSD companies.
The
15th quarterly edition in this popular series is based on market data for the
4th quarter of 2010. Whether you're buying SSDs, selling them, trying to
understand what's happening in the SSD market, choosing a strategic SSD partner
or want to invest in an SSD company - this is the much anticipated short list
which you can't afford to ignore.
...read the article
Patriot launches native USB 3 flash drive
Editor:-
December 9, 2010 - Patriot
Memory
launched
a 64GB native USB 3 flash
drive - which offers faster performance than other designs which use include
a USB bridge chip.
"Patriot
is one of the first companies to integrate a native single-chip USB 3.0 flash
memory controller. By pairing the controller with our Quad-Channel technology,
we're able to maximize performance with the Supersonic series," said Les
Henry, Patriot Memory's VP of Engineering.
Xyratex expands HDD test assets
Editor:- December
8, 2010 - Xyratex
today announced
that it has acquired
the HDD component test
related business and assets of Magnetic
Recording Solutions, Inc. (MRS), including a 10 person development team.
This coincides with the recent acquisition of the assets, as well
as the development team, of Optical Systems
Corp - a respected provider of
automated production
technology to the disk drive industry.
A key element of Xyratex's business strategy is to expand its
portfolio of test and process technology within the hard disk drive industry.
The acquisition of MRS will combine Xyratex's industry-leading expertise in high
volume disk drive test, servo writing, and media cleaning, handling and
inspection technologies with MRS' extensive experience in complex media testing
and head characterization.
new article - SSD Data Recovery Concepts
Editor:-
December 1, 2010 - StorageSearch.com
today published a new article -
Introduction to SSD
Data Recovery Concepts and Technologies - written by Jeremy Brock,
President, A+
Perfect Computers.
It's hard enough understanding the
design of any single SSD. And there are so many different designs in the
market.
If you've ever wondered what it looks like at the other end of
the SSD supply chain - when a user has a damaged SSD which contains priceless
data with no usable backup - this article - written by one of a rare new
breed of
SSD recovery
experts will give you some idea. I've waited more than 3 years to find
someone to write an article on this subject for you. And now it's only a click
away - read the
article
USB3 faster than eSATA 2 for SMB disk backup
Editor:-
November 8, 2010 - Idealstor
announced today the release of a
new rugged
USB 3
removable HDD based
backup product called the Bantam.
Editor's
comments:- I asked marketing manager Ben Ginster about performance - and
where the name of the product came from.
Re performance:- he said
- "When we originally were testing the unit we were planning on having
eSATA and USB3 on this drive but we found that USB3 speeds were faster than
eSATA so we decided to just go with USB3. We have controllers for
(customers with) systems that don't have USB3."
Re the Bantam (which for me having kept chickens - I had latched
onto as a opportunity to add yet another inmate to my
storage animal
metaphors zoo / article) - I was wrong.
Ben Ginster told me "
We came up with name after the
Bantam
Weight in boxing/wrestling. Small but
powerful." |
|
| PhotoFast
unveils USB 3 SSD for MacBook Air |
Editor:- October 26, 2010 -PhotoFast said it
will ship a 256GB USB
SSD for the
MacBook Air at the end of November.
Sustained R/W speeds are
250MB/s. Random R/W speeds are 50MB/s and 30MB/s respectively.
"Creating
a whole new form factor SSD in the very limited time was quite a challenge"
said PhotoFast's chief engineer Eddie Wang. "Thanks to support from
SandForce, we finally
made it".
WD's new 3 TB USB 3 HDD
Editor:- October 5, 2010 -
Western Digital
today introduced the -My
Book Essential (approx $250) - an external 3TB
USB 3 (consumer)
hard drive, with up
to 150MB/s throughput.
upgrading old PCs with new SSDs
Editor:- July 9,
2010 -
Upgrading
Old PCs with SSDs is a cautionary tale published on Denali Software's blog.
I've often told readers who asked me about this subject - that they
could be wasting their time trying to upgrade old notebooks with
PATA or
SATA SSDs - because
most of the speedup benefits - if any - will be lost by the latency damping
effects of cheap and slow bridge
chips on the motherboard - and that - unlike in a server - notebooks have
precious little CPU headroom.
It's nice to see these views are
shared by the author of this article who works for an
SSD IP vendor. ...read
the article
Seagate offers consumers 3TB USB HDD for under $250
Editor:-
June 29, 2010 - Seagatetoday
announced availability of the
3TB
GoFlex (under $250) - an
external desktop
FireWire /
USB 3.0
hard drive. |
|
| WD launches
new TV media player for USB disks |
| . |
Editor:- June 9, 2010 - Western Digital
introduced the
WD TV Live
Plus HD media player (US$149.99) which connects directly to a users' HDTV
and automatically converts and plays
many file
formats stored on a connected
USB drive.
(But
it doesn't support protected premium content such as movies or music from
iTunes.) |
| . |
 |
| . |
The WiFi enabled box (via
optional extra USB adapter) also includes a user remote interface to the
Netflix online movie on demand service.
See
also:- SSDs in the tv
industry | |
|
ioSafe Launches Disaster
Proof Backup SSD
Editor:- January 5, 2010 - ioSafe launched the
ioSafe Solo SSD - an ultra rugged
USB /
eSATA
external
flash SSD with
upto 256GB capacity ($1,250) designed to provide data protection against
disasters such as fire, flood, and building collapse.
ioSafe offers
a "no questions asked"
Data Recovery policy
to help customers recover from any data disaster including accidental deletion,
virus or physical disaster.
"The new ioSafe Solo SSD is the world's most rugged and versatile
desktop external hard drive. It can be used alone or in conjunction with any
offsite or online backup
strategy to add real time, zero data loss, synchronous disaster protection to
any data that sits vulnerable," said ioSafe CEO, Robb Moore.
See
also:- Robb
Moore's SSD Bookmarks | |
|
|
USB 3 is the first version
of USB in 20 years which makes sense as a way to connect SSDs
All
previous versions of USB were too slow to exploit the speed potential of SSDs -
and relegated the role of USB flash drives to little more than high capacity
sneakernet disks or personal
backup media.
When
the USB interface first appeared in Windows PCs in the 1990s - getting
devices to connect successfully was a hit and miss process - which started with
obtaining a working driver. Just because support for your OS was listed in
the product info didn't mean that the driver was shipped with the product. And
it didn't mean you could download it from the oem's web site either - due to
the marketers having neglected to mention the need for retrospective OS
support to their developers.
Having a driver for your new USB storage
device was the starting point for discovering if it would stop something else
you'd already installed from working. Because developers never imagined that you
would have any other USB devices or software operating at the same time. That's
when the expression "plug and pray" came into popular parlance.
This
kind of "will it or won't it work?" experience - often leading to a
roller coaster of downloads and hard resets - was still prevalent in the late
1990s when the Megabyte graphic for USB storage was being created. So I decided
that Unstable Sinking Barrel suited the situation. Also note the single barrel.
A collection of barrels tied together was the 1998 metaphor for
RAID systems.
The
current user PC experience is well described in this blog - Subterranean
Home PC Blues | |
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| USB
Storage Milestones from
Storage History
|
The USB (for Universal
Serial Bus) is a low cost serial bus which, when originally shipped in
1996
(USB 1.0), provided upto 12Mb/S. That's about 100x faster than the
RS-232
style serial interfaces used in earlier generations of computers which it
replaced.
The USB is now widely used in Macs, PC's and even Linux
systems. USB is typically used to connect devices such as printers, scanners,
keyboards, digital cameras, MP3 players and external storage devices.
In
June 2002, Intel and others started to demonstrate
USB 2.0, which increases the speed of the peripheral to PC connection
from 12 megabits per second (Mbps) on USB 1.1 to up to 480 Mbps on USB 2.0, or
40 times faster than with the older technology.
USB 3.0 - which
at 5Gbps is
10x faster than USB 2.0 - was originally expected to be available in
the summer of 2008. Instead shipments started in December 2009. It
offers throughput similar to
eSATA 2.0 - upto
approx 300MB/s.
The article -
USB 3.0 - A simple idea
full of challenges - summarizes the problems facing chip designers hoping
to achieve 5Gbps on cheap USB cables.
What if you're stuck with a USB 2 notebook and need fast cheap
external storage now?
Some companies, such as
Dane-Elec Memory,
are marketing USB 3.0 adapters.
Another solution - for those who want
to get more performance out of legacy USB 2.0
flash memory sticks is
to look at USB SuperCharger Software
from EasyCo which can
apparently speed up writes by 2x to about 5x.
eSATA is another option
- although for most notebooks it too - requires an adapter card.
Finally
AoE storage provides a
way for consumers to hook up a storage
network using their inbuilt ethernet - which may be easier to set up than
traditional NAS. | | |
| . |
|
| SSD encryption - does
it hurt? |
Editor:- a reader asked me a
good question...
Does SSD encryption hurt performance and
reliability? |
|
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 |
Megabyte's Unstable Spinning
Barrel
crosses the data stream | |
| . |
|
| . |
5 Years Ago - from
SSD
history
World's 1st dual
interface USB+SATA SSD |
Editor:- September 13, 2005 - STEC today
announced
the industry's first solid state drive with SATA and USB interfaces on one
drive.
The
Zeus
Dual Interface SSD is the only available Flash drive that allows users to
easily remove a single SSD from one system and use it in a 2nd system with
different interface requirements. This makes it an optimal solution for
applications that require that the SSD have a high-speed
SATA interface for
digital mission data storage in a combat system and an industry standard
USB interface for direct
connection to a debriefing station or other PC.
STEC is demonstrating
the new Zeus drive this week at the
Defence Systems & Equipment International
2005 Exhibition and Conference in London.
Since Zeus Dual Interface SSDs offer both SATA and USB connectivity,
customers can work with an SSD design that is extremely flexible and optimized
for use as a removable
mass memory storage device. The product removes complexity from the design of
host applications by eliminating the need to design interface adapters for the
SSD.
Zeus Dual Interface SSDs have a
3.5-inch footprint and
a 9.5 mm case height.and are available with capacities from 12 to 192 GB with
sustained read/write rates of 60MBytes per second. Zeus SSDs are MIL-STD-810F
compliant, and offer patented
purge features.
...Later:- 2010 - this kind of dual interfacetechnology has
since become a popular way for SSD vendors to offer user installable SSD
upgrades - in which the user transfers data from a rotating storage notebook
onto an external SSD using USB - and then (hoping for the best) replaces the
internal HDD with the SSD. | | |
| . |
| SSD Pricing -
where does all the money go? |
SSDs are among the most
expensive computer hardware products you will ever buy.
Understanding
the factors which determine SSD costs is often a confusing and irritating
process... |
 |
...not made any easier when
market prices for identical capacity SSDs can vary more than 100x to 1!
Why is that? ...read
the article | | | |
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