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A-Data Produces 128GB SSDs

Large 2.5" SSDs are starting to emerge

By Ionut Ciocirlie, Hardware Editor

11th of January 2007, 14:41 GMT

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There are moments in the IT industry when "a little time ago" sounds like "forever". Maybe this phrase sounds a little too romantic to be true, but stay with me on this one. Take the SSDs for example. 2 months ago there
were no such products on the market. And now we have Samsung's 32GB SSD, Ridata's value 16GB $189/$199 (in 1.8" and 2.5" form) SSDs and even a pricy 32GB SSD coming from Sandisk (which by the way sells for about $600). Solid State Hard Drives are here and I feel like I've seen them on the market for a long time.

A-DATA has decided to produce its own SSDs but wanted to enter the market with a bang. Motive for which they are currently sampling 32GB SSDs (ExpressCard size), 64GB SSDs (in 1.8" notebook size) and an impressive 128GB unit (2.5" form factor) with SATA-II connectors. Production is said to start at the beginning of the first quarter and by the middle of the 2nd one the drives will probably be available on the market.

Prices are unknown at the moment but don't expect these flash-based hard disks to turn any heads here since the ones that are already out, are known to be pretty expensive. A quick look at the prices tells me that you should expect to pay at least $1,000 if not more for the 128GB unit. But if you skip the price part, you'll understand that such a hard drive could literally change the way a portable works. Anything from faster boot times to lower consumption is possible when you use an SSD instead of a magnetic hard drive. Keep that in mind, because this moment might be as well the beginning of the end for the classical hard drives.


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Comment #1 by: Tess on 14 Sep 2008, 05:29 GMT reply to this comment

LOL adding $1,000 to the price of a laptop just for fast boots? LOL!!!!

And laptop performance overall will will get cut nearly in half or worse. These flash based SSDs are slower than molasses for the majority of computing tasks - which involve accessing hundreds or even thousands of small files and/or relative seeks into DB files. Even a junky drive from 6 years ago out preforms flash based SSDs in these areas.

Maybe if you had 20 or 40 of them in a RAID0 configuration and a fast controller...

Battery life would be improved some as you mentions but not that much. Perhaps 20% ~ 30% increase.

All things considered flash based SSDs unless offered at a competing price point with current magnetic HDDs are a no sale for anyone who can read, think or has ever used them.

I feel this is a bit like developing a 110 film camera that can autowind 20 FPS and that sells for $5,000. OK, it's interesting - but of absolutely no realistic benefit and priced so far out of reach no sane persons would consider it without a mission-critical purpose.

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