14 DAY TRIAL // Unlike nature, man doesn't go into a deep slumber during winter and, as such, neither does the IT industry, which seems to be very much alive and kicking. Among the various segments, the section of this industry that seems to be doing rather well for itself is that of solid state storage. Just days before the current year is set to end, Buffalo announced its plans to release a new line of SSD storage units even before the coming of the New Year's eve.
The storage product line is known as SHD-NSUH and is made up of four models. As it is usually the case with such products, the four individual units only differ from each other through their respective capacities, with most, if not all, other features being similar.
The line is made of four 2.5-inch drives, each built with multi-level cell (MLC) flash memory chips. All four SSDs may connect to a personal computer via the SATA 3.0 Gbps interface and the universal serial bus, with the maximum transfer speeds indicated to be 186.6 MB/s.
In addition to their speeds and storage capacities of 32, 64, 128 and 256GB, the SHD-NSUH SSDs operate using a 64MB cache memory. Also, through support for the Windows 7 operating system, the storage modules even have support for the TRIM command. This feature constantly cleans up the unused data blocks in order to preserve the performance and reliability of the drives even after long periods of use.
The prices will be $253 for the 32GB model, $396 for the 64GB unit, $637 for the 128GB version and $1,161 for the 256GB SSD. Unfortunately, only the 64GB and the 128GB storage modules will debut by this year's end, and even those solely in Japan. Out of the other two, the 32GB will become available during the latter half of January, with the 256GB model set for much later, namely May 2010.