Japanese electronics conglomerate Hitachi said it and U.S. chipmaker Intel would jointly develop solid state drive (SSD) memory devices, which are seen as a promising alternative to hard disk drives.
The move marks a strategic shift for Hitachi, the world’s third-largest hard drive maker, which until now has not made a commitment to SSD technology.
SSDs are increasingly being used as the storage device in laptop PCs, primarily because they are better at absorbing shocks and consume less power than hard disk drives.
Under the agreement, Intel will manufacture SSDs jointly developed by the two firms. Hitachi will sell the devices, with the first shipment planned for 2010, the companies said in a joint statement.
“More the merrier” won’t make Toshiba and Samsung happy.
SSD’s for laptops….great until one realizes that they constantly pull the same amount of power from the system regardless of load on hard drive; hence the laptop battery life is cut in half. Also more electricity per gig required than those darned HDs.
Que ill informed comment about the duty cycle of SSD’s….
#1: You’re correct qualitatively, but not quantitatively. Yes, battery life with an SSD is generally reduced compared to battery life with a standard hard drive. (See http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-hdd-battery,1955.html and make sure to check out the follow up which corrected some procedural problems) but “battery life is cut in half” is overstating it. That means that if the only reason you’re getting an SSD is to increase your battery life then you bought the wrong device. Performance is a good reason to go for an SSD if you have the $.
Another reason they make sense for laptops is they are much more reliable in a device that is regularly moved around and occasionally dropped while it’s running. Hard drives still have spinning platters which will always be sensitive to moving and dropping. Drop your laptop and the amount of shock and force applied to the bearings of those spinning platters is pretty ridiculous. Memory doesn’t have this issue.
One reason I’m glad that SSDs are the way things are going is that memory technology is advancing MUCH faster than hard drive technology. Memory density, performance and efficiency is increasing at a rate that FAR outstrips hard drives. It also has a much higher theoretical limit for all of these factors than hard drives do. Assuming a 2.5″ laptop hard drive has 2″ platters they have approximately a 6″ circumference. That means that in the slower, 5400RPM drives the outside edge of the platter moves 6″ 5400 time a second which adds up to 2700 feet per second. That is about 1841 miles per hour. Memory chips do not involve platters where the outside edge exceeds Mach 2.
#1 ; #2 Blah.. you guys have no clue what you’re talking about. More electricity per Gig? What a ridiculous metric that is.
Duty cycle of an SSD/ WTF are you talking about. Do you even know what duty cycle means? If failure rate is what you meant, SSD failure rate is measured in MTBF like any other disk drive and it’s far better than spinning mechanical platters.
#4 Dallas.
Do you know any comp data for access time, read/write, between the two technologies?
Where do I find the notebook computers that can be occasionally dropped without it being a total disaster???
Well, Intel has been gunning to kill of all magnetic memory since the 1103 memory chip killed off core memory in the ’70s !!! But disks seem to have a thousand lives, coming back again and again from the “Dead” !!! SSDs now cost two or three times – or more – than magnetic drives, which continue to get bigger and cheaper !!! Competition is great, isn’t it !!!
And whatever happended to the hybrid hard drives that were supposed to be so great?
#5 Note that Intel SSD’s provides:
Sustained sequential read: up to 250 MB/s
Sustained sequential write: up to 170 MB/s
Compare that to high end enterprise class Seagate Cheetah 10K RPM drives that have read data rates up to 125 MB/s. Never mind they consume huge amounts of power.
SSD’s are one of the best innovations out there for power dissipation, performance and ruggedness. Only amateurs focus on nonsense things like maximum density vs hard drives or cost per bit and shit like that. That is not what SSD’s are valued for.
I do not have one on my PC only because of cost. I can imagine how fast my suspend/resume will be or how fast my Adobe will launch if I pin that one application to a small SSD drive. Perhaps next year when I upgrade to 64bit WIndows 7 and Intel quad core I7 processor machine. Sweet.
#8,
Widey available, but then the tech media would be forced to admit the only operating system capable of taking advantage of their superior performance is Windows Vista and the tech media can’t just go back on their meme that Vista sucks. I bet when Snow Leopard ships, it will support them, and Steve Jobbs will proudly present a refreshed Macintosh that has this revolutionary technology on it. The tech media will applaud hybrid hard drives at that point, and not a moment sooner.
Bottom line is, dollars per gigabyte. Now there is real competition, maybe that bottom line will look better.
# 9 Dallas
Thanks for the data. Impressive indeed.
wHEN THEY HIT 512 GIG…
EVERYONE will start watching..
when that HITS $500 for 512gig…IT WILL BE SHOPPING TIME.
# 3 Alex Wollangk, I must disagree with a couple of things you said.
First, the last few years, hard drives, largely driven by better sensor technology (giant magnetoresistance, for example) have increased speed and capacity _much_ faster than Moore’s Law for silicon devices.
Second, your computation of hard drive speeds is off by a factor of 60, since RPM stands for Revolutions Per _Minute_, not per second. So the outside edge of a 2.5″ 5400RPM drive only travels about 40 miles per hour.
Once they get the bugs worked out of these devices, they should be quite popular, especially once the cost can be brought down a little. I doubt they will ever (in Moore’s Law terms, “ever” means “in the next 6 to 8 years”) be as cheap as magnetic disks. Having used Amigas extensively in the past, I became quite enamored of their RAM disk technology, and these SSDs, being non-volatile, will be even better.
After much research I sprung for the Acer Aspire One with the SSD drive and Linux. It boots in 15 seconds!
I’ve had it for about a month and I still like it — FINALLY a worthy replacement for my Tandy 102!
Quantum Rushmoore.. SSD like 20 years ago.