Articles tagged with: ssd

Dell has admitted that its first foray into the netbook world, the Mini 9, suffered a manufacturing hiccup that caused some 8 and 16GB models to show only 4GB of usable storage space.

The problem – which afflicts only the earliest Ubuntu/Linux models off the production line – was the result of the disk imaging tool employed by Dell engineers during setup: the disk image was configured only to place a 4GB install on every machine, regardless of the actual size of its SSD. More after the cut.

The folks over at Super Talent have come up with an easy route to upgrade you Asus Eee PC. Its Eee-tested SSDs are designed to replace the built-in SSD storage attached to the Eee's miniPCI-Express slot.

They come in sizes from 8GB to 64Gb with reasonable-ish read rates of 40MB/sec and write rates of between 15 and 28MB/sec. Read on for which models you can use them with.

Be it by blender, tree nailing or power washing and cement mixing we love testing gadgets to destruction. Now Samsung's also got in on the action by hurling one of its new Solid State Drives off a three storey building.

Click through for the video of how it got on and listen out for the soon-to-be new catchphrase of a whole series of copycat videos: "Will it boot?" Remember kids, don't try this at home - or at the office...

If lightweight laptops with lightweight specs are getting you down, Sony has the antidote. The Vaio TT is a fully loaded machine yet only tips the scales at a smidgen (that's a technical term for 37g) over a kilogram.

Inside the typically Vaio-esque carbon-fibre case is not only an optional Blu-Ray player (making it the world's lightest Blu-Ray laptop) but also space for a whopping 256GB of solid state memory in two 128GB SSDs. Read on, chums.

Intel's new SSDs may only have been announced today but HP's already made god use of them. It's slotted an 80GB one and a new Illumi-Lite screen into its EliteBook 6930p to achieve an incredible 24 hours' battery life.

And while Dell may claim to have hit 19 hours' battery life with its E-Series Latitudes using a combination of a giant 9-cell internal battery and a whopping 12 cell external one, HP's managed it all with just the one internal battery.

Intel has announced that it will be launching two new solid-state disk drives this year, with 80Gb and 160Gb capacities. The X18-M and X25-M are 1.8in and 2.5in SATA drives, respectively, and Intel reckons they’re capable of increasing “storage system performance” over nine times, compared to a traditional hard disk.

Both the Intel X18-M and X25-M SSDs are only available in 80Gb capacities for now, with 160Gb capacities following towards the end of the year. Intel claims that the 80Gb drives achieve up to 250Mb/sec read speeds, up to 70Mb/sec write speeds and have an 85ms read latency. Both drives costs $595 for quantities up to 1,000 – that’s around £4.20 per gigabyte, compared to a typical 2.5in hard drive’s cost of around 43p per gigabyte.

Boring old hard drives are looking decidedly passée with the growth in the popularity of solid state drives. But while the likes of the Eee is  heralds the beginning of the end for spinning platters, replacement SSD technology remains stubbornly expensive.

That could be about to change with the announcement by Samsung of a new low-cost range of SSDs in 8GB, 16GB and 32GB capacities. Read on.

A couple of weeks back, Tom’s Hardware published an article with the headline "The SSD Power Consumption Hoax : Flash SSDs Don’t Improve Your Notebook Battery Runtime – They Reduce It".

The report’s conclusion, if you couldn’t guess from the headline, is that the new wave of solid-state drives are battery hogs that are simply not as power efficient as the hard disks that they are apparently destined one day to usurp in the notebook storage market.

One of the report’s crossheads asked: "Could Tom’s Hardware be wrong?". The unequivocal answer came: "No, our results are definitely correct."

So it must’ve really pained the Tom’s Hardware team to today admit that, in fact, they were wrong. Read their explanation after the cut.

How long now until all notebook manufacturers ditch traditional hard disk storage in favour of solid-state drives (SSDs)? Reading between the lines of the latest press release from Samsung, it could be as little as a year and a half.

The company has today announced SSDs with a capacity of 128GB, in both 1.8 and 2.5in forms. Samsung says that its new SSD models have a write speed of 70MB/s and a read speed of 90MB/s. As well, the firm says that this latest 128GB device will last "approximately 20 times longer than the generally accepted 4-5 year life span of a notebook PC hard drive".

Plenty dull and worth but for our money, the most interesting figure is hidden way down at the very bottom of the press release. And what is that number? Click the Read more link to find out.

The wind seems to have dropped out of the MacBook Air's sails, despite its status as the slimmest laptop currently on the shelves. A price cut could be just the thing to give it its puff back and so, with SSD prices tumbling, Apple's taking a cool £300 off.

Taking a red pen to the 1.8GHz 64GB SSD model's old £2,028 price tag, it'll now sell at a more comfortable £1,719 with all its original specs intact. The 1.6GHz 80GB hard drive model stays fast, though, at £1,199.

There's no doubt that SSDs are falling faster than house prices so we wouldn't be surprised to see a few more price chops before the year is out.

[The Register]