Laptop vendors to be offered thinner solid-state drive
256GB SSD courtesy of Super Talent.
By Martyn Williams. IDG News Service | Published: 08:30, 26 March 2008
Super Talent is to introduce a solid-state disk (SSD) drive for laptops that can store 256GB of data.
SSDs are an emerging class of storage device that are typically drop-in replacements for hard-disk drives but store data on flash memory chips rather than a rotating magnetic disk. The use of memory chips means the drives are more sturdy and brings a big performance boost but the per-byte storage cost is also much higher, so at present they're largely confined to niche applications.
The new drive from Super Talent is the same size as a 12.5-millimetre-thick 2.5-inch laptop drive -- that's thicker than most common laptop drives, which are 9.5mm high, but the same size as some of the larger capacity drives currently on the market. Compared to other 256GBe SSDs on the market the Super Talent drive is thinner.
It has a SATA-I interface so can be easily changed with a conventional disk drive without any special work.
Access time is 0.1 milliseconds, maximum sequential read speed is 65M bytes per second and write speed is 50MB/s.
Super Talent is already shipping samples of the drive to customers and plans to begin volume shipments in late April.
