The PC Report

Micron has released what appears to be the fastest solid state drive on the market today. Under the Crucial brand, the RealSSD C300 boats whopping 355 MB/s read speeds and 215 MB/s write speeds -  faster than what is on offer from Intel, OCZ, Kingston and more. So you can make use of these speeds, the drive is completely compatible with SATA 6Gb/s technology.

The drives themselves will be available in 1.8″ and 2.5″ form factors in both 128 GB and 256 GB capacities. If you want to purchase one of these drives it will set you back quite a bit: US$499 for the 128GB and US$799 for the 256GB. But you pay for quality, right?

Intel-Micron Flash Technologies (IMFT; a joint venture between Intel and Micron), responsible for a huge chunk of advances in SSDs and flash technology, has announced that they are sampling 2-bits-per-cell 25nm MLC NAND (pictured above). What this basically means is that solid state drives will be able to be bigger in capacity as well as cheaper for the consumers – both great pieces of news for the SSD market. Mass production of this new 25nm NAND should begin in Q2 of this year with products such as Intel’s 3rd-gen X-25M drives arriving in Q4.

OCZ has released some quality SSDs in the past, and their going to be adding to their line-up this CES. First up are the brand new ultrathin USB 3.0 external solid state drives which will support transfer rates up to a whopping 5Gb/s (~625MB/s). They will be available in 64GB, 128GB and 256GB capacities. OCZ is also releasing a new range of internal SSDs named Vertex 2, as well as new PCIe drives that look like they are going under the same Z-Drive name. We aren’t sure of the exact specifics of any of the drives, or their release dates or pricing, but we’ll know soon enough.

The solid state speed war is not over yet, and now one of the biggest storage companies, Seagate, has announced their first range of SSDs – the Pulsar lineup. These solid state drives will come in 50GB, 100GB and 200Gb options, and while that’s slightly strange for solid state drives, we’re sure they will perform fine against other market leaders.

The Pulsar range will be able to manage 240MB/s read and 220MB/s write speeds and will be compatible with the SATA 3Gb/s specification. While slower in read speeds than the Intel X-25M, its write speeds far exceed those of the X-25M. The Pulsar drives have already began shipping to OEMs, which means consumers should be able to get the drives pretty soon, but we expect that the prices aren’t going to be pretty.

We have a new champion claiming the world’s fastest drive awards: the Micron RealSSD C300 line. These 2.5-inch, SATA 6Gb/s solid state drives are available in 128GB and 256GB capacities, and carry blazing fast read speeds of 355MB/s and write speeds of 215MB/s (the OCZ Agility EX only manages 255MB/s read and 195MB/s write).

These speeds are possible thanks to the latest ONFI 2.1 specification for solid state drives, which also improve multitasking capabilities. Like usual, these SSDs come at a price -- US$350 for the 128GB and US$715 for the 256GB, both when bought in bulk. The drives are set to go on sale next year, and we’re probably going to be seeing them in high-end laptops soon enough.

Looking for massive storage and massive speed in the one drive along with a massive price tag? Look no further than the new Super Talent 2TB RAIDDrive GS said to be shipping next month. The aluminium-enclosed drive slots into one of the free PCIe slots on your motherboard and offers blazingly fast speeds of 1.4 GBps, thanks to the four discrete SSDs enclosed inside the case.

However all this speed and storage does come at a hefty price. While no price has actually been specified yet, we do know that the lower end model 1TB RAIDDrive GS is set to cost US$4,999, which would place the higher-end brother around the US$8000-9000 mark – or the same price as a car. I know I’d choose the car, but for all those people wanting to spend that amount of money will be able to pick one up next month.

Last month Corsair released its brand new Extreme series SSDs in the sizes of 32GB, 64GB and 128GB, and yesterday they announced that a new SSD would be joining their line-up.

The X256 will be, obviously, 256GB and should carry the same read/write speeds as the previous drives, namely 240 MB/s read and 170 MB/s write. The speeds lag slightly behind other SSDs we’ve seen being released in the past, but are still blazingly fast compared to hard drives. While there is no official word on price, it is expected to market for around US$700.

Looks like Kingston is re-joining the SSD market with some faster versions of its SSDNow V range, by adding a plus and calling them SSDNow V+. The new SSDs carry capacities of 64GB, 128GB and 256GB, and boast read speeds of 220MB/s and write speeds of 180MB/s as well as higher input/output operations per second making them a fair bit faster than the old range.

As with all SSDs these days, they still carry a hefty price tag, coming in at US$254, US$500 and US$992 for the 64GB, 128GB and 256GB respectively. While normal hard drives are cheaper for more storage, these do cater for the speed-freaks out there

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The Solid State Drive market is really flourishing these days, and while it’s not cheaper than conventional hard drives, they still provide the best speed. Joining this market in mid-August is OCZ’s (best known for their RAM) Colossus SSD range, going from the 128GB drive way up to 1TB

Today OCZ said that the release is about three weeks off, and the official pricing for the drives is as follows: 128GB – $300, 256GB – $650, 512GB – $1,200 and the 1TB drive comes in at a whopping $2,200. Hopefully closer to the release date we can get our hands on some of these drives and performance benchmark them, otherwise we really don’t have an idea abouthow fast they are.

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We have been seeing a lot of solid state drive news over the past week, and we now have some more with Intel releasing two new 34nm drives. The drives, available in 80GB and 160GB, will be named the same as previous Intel SSDs: the X18-M for a 1.8″ drive and the X25-M for the 2.5″ drive iteration.

There are two benefits to 34nm SSDs – one is that they’re faster and the other is that they’re cheaper. These new SSDs can read at 250 MB/s but write speeds are still at 100 MB/s, but Intel noted that “while many specs have been improved, we do not expect any noticeable gains on application-based benchmarks.” Oh well, at least the drives are cheaper, with the 80GB coming in at US$225 and the 160GB at US$440; down almost US$300 from the 50nm models

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