Imation Reveals 'fastest' Solid-state Drive

[Guest Reimar]

Good news from Imation: Imation is on a way to ship the fastes Solid State Drive in first Qurter of this year.

With this "drive" the Vista feature ReadyBoost is really ready to boost! But read by yourself:

Friday, January 4th

Imation today unveiled its CES lineup and announced its intention to launch into the rapidly expanding solid-state drive business. Signing an agreement with Mtron, Imation says it has co-developed a new line of flash-based hard drives it says will be the world's fastest of its type. The SSD MOBI 3000 reads at an already quick 100 megabytes per second but is said to be more impressive with its 80 megabyte per second write speed. This performance is not just better than most flash drives but also bests fast traditional drives in many key areas such as OS boot time and tasks where constant disk access is important, such as working with large videos, Imation argues. A special enterprise version, the SSD PRO 7000, is even faster with 120MB/sec read and 90MB/sec write speeds but is optimized for the typical tasks handled by servers and other large-scale work computers. All versions of the technology also bring with them an inherently skip-proof design and a quieter, cooler drive ideal for notebooks and similar portables.

Imation has not mentioned the capacity of the drives but says these details along with prices will appear in the run-up to the official product launch, which is expected to ship in the first quarter of this year.

The storage company has provided early details of several of its future devices that will be on show at CES, including its Memorex iWake, a clock radio speaker system for the iPhone and iPod; a new Pivot Plus flash drive and a remake of the original Pivot (pictured); and new storage options, including mini Blu-ray recordable discs and colored Lightscribe DVDs. No release dates or prices have been announced for these upcoming products.

Source

Edited January 6, 2008 by Reimar

[stumonster]

they may quote these high speeds for read and write - but the USB2 speeds will be a bottleneck

USB signalling

USB supports three data rates:

* A Low Speed (1.1, 2.0) rate of 1.5 Mbit/s (187 kB/s) that is mostly used for Human Interface Devices (HID) such as keyboards, mice, and joysticks.

* A Full Speed (1.1, 2.0) rate of 12 Mbit/s (1.5 MB/s). Full Speed was the fastest rate before the USB 2.0 specification and many devices fall back to Full Speed. Full Speed devices divide the USB bandwidth between them in a first-come first-served basis and it is not uncommon to run out of bandwidth with several isochronous devices. All USB Hubs support Full Speed.

* A Hi-Speed (2.0) rate of 480 Mbit/s (60 MB/s).

[Veazer]

they may quote these high speeds for read and write - but the USB2 speeds will be a bottleneck

USB signalling

USB supports three data rates:

* A Low Speed (1.1, 2.0) rate of 1.5 Mbit/s (187 kB/s) that is mostly used for Human Interface Devices (HID) such as keyboards, mice, and joysticks.

* A Full Speed (1.1, 2.0) rate of 12 Mbit/s (1.5 MB/s). Full Speed was the fastest rate before the USB 2.0 specification and many devices fall back to Full Speed. Full Speed devices divide the USB bandwidth between them in a first-come first-served basis and it is not uncommon to run out of bandwidth with several isochronous devices. All USB Hubs support Full Speed.

* A Hi-Speed (2.0) rate of 480 Mbit/s (60 MB/s).

The article was discussing Solid state hard drives, so the USB bus won't be involved. I'm not sure why the article included the photo of the usb flashdrive.

EDIT: typo

Edited January 6, 2008 by Veazer

[cali]

Imation has not mentioned the capacity of the drives but says these details along with prices will appear...

Hiding the capacity and price can only mean these things are going to be so cheap and huge, not!

Meanwhile Hitachi is on the verge of unleashing a 500GB, 5400RPM laptop drive (2.5") drawing less than 2 watts of power and with an embedded data encryption option. Priced at $399, that is a lot more impressive announcement than the vaporware Imation drive.

[Guest Reimar]

Imation has not mentioned the capacity of the drives but says these details along with prices will appear...

Hiding the capacity and price can only mean these things are going to be so cheap and huge, not!

Meanwhile Hitachi is on the verge of unleashing a 500GB, 5400RPM laptop drive (2.5") drawing less than 2 watts of power and with an embedded data encryption option. Priced at $399, that is a lot more impressive announcement than the vaporware Imation drive.

Yes you're right but, and now came the minus for the 500 GB drive: Hitatchi usinge 3 Platter instead of to and the thickness of that drive will be 12,5 mm instead of 9 mm! Most of the todays Laptops will haveing problems with exactly that: 12.5 mm!

I checked my Acer (1 year old) and the max thickness for the drive is 10,8 mm for to place in the Laptop!!

The solid State Drive with the announced speed is interesting for to use as "extra" Memory or ReadyBosst as MS name it! And that even if the capacity is low!

But let wait and see. As soon as I get some info about the capacity and Price, I'll post it here.

[cali]

the thickness of that drive will be 12,5 mm instead of 9 mm!

Good point, I missed that! That makes this new Hitachi drive a disappointment. Well today Samsung came out with its 500GB laptop drive too, and theirs fits in the regular size bay even though it also has 3 platters.

Samsung also released a 128GB SSD at the same time with 100MB/sec read, 70 MB/sec write, but that will cost thousands of dollars:

http://www.electronista.com/articles/08/01...b.ssd.and.more/

[sibeymai]

picked up a 750gb Seagate external drive at Pantip last week for 8,600Bt. Not too bulky for an external drive and good value with a 5 year warranty. Not quite a flash drive but a good compromise.

Edited January 7, 2008 by sibeymai

[britmaveric]

Working on USB3.0, so perhaps the bottle neck wont be for long?

[Guest Reimar]

picked up a 750gb Seagate external drive at Pantip last week for 8,600Bt. Not too bulky for an external drive and good value with a 5 year warranty. Not quite a flash drive but a good compromise.

Try to measure the Read and Write speed and than you know how fast the drive really is!! Mayby 30-40 MB write /s?! But I think a bit more slow because the 320 GB Seagate Sata 2 is 35 MB Read and 22 MB write with mixed contents!

Edit: Forget to mention that a 320 GB Hitachi is nearly doubble fst than the Seagate! I've both of them and use the Seagat for Backup only because of the slow speed!

Edited January 7, 2008 by Reimar

[sibeymai]

picked up a 750gb Seagate external drive at Pantip last week for 8,600Bt. Not too bulky for an external drive and good value with a 5 year warranty. Not quite a flash drive but a good compromise.

Try to measure the Read and Write speed and than you know how fast the drive really is!! Mayby 30-40 MB write /s?! But I think a bit more slow because the 320 GB Seagate Sata 2 is 35 MB Read and 22 MB write with mixed contents!

Edit: Forget to mention that a 320 GB Hitachi is nearly doubble fst than the Seagate! I've both of them and use the Seagat for Backup only because of the slow speed!

Yes, backup is ok. I use the Seagate for storing the original AVCHD format video files from my Sony camcorder. The converted MPEG files I keep in the PC's hard internal hard drive. It may be slow, but it's faster than burning DVDs all the time. AVCHD files are very large so I went for the biggest drive I could find at a reasonable price. Does Hitachi offer a 5 year warranty ? I think it might be only 1 year.

[cali]

a 320 GB Hitachi is nearly doubble fst than the Seagate! I've both of them and use the Seagat for Backup only because of the slow speed!

Seagate has a bad batch of firmware for their perpindicular drives that makes performance low! This is discussed all over the net. Make sure you don't have AAK firmware or it will be slow. From this article: Some people who wrote to Seagate earlier said that Seagate had offered to take back their AAK disks. An important detail is that the disks exhibited no errors aside from the performance issues.

Edited January 9, 2008 by cali

[Guest Reimar]

picked up a 750gb Seagate external drive at Pantip last week for 8,600Bt. Not too bulky for an external drive and good value with a 5 year warranty. Not quite a flash drive but a good compromise.

Try to measure the Read and Write speed and than you know how fast the drive really is!! Mayby 30-40 MB write /s?! But I think a bit more slow because the 320 GB Seagate Sata 2 is 35 MB Read and 22 MB write with mixed contents!

Edit: Forget to mention that a 320 GB Hitachi is nearly doubble fst than the Seagate! I've both of them and use the Seagat for Backup only because of the slow speed!

Yes, backup is ok. I use the Seagate for storing the original AVCHD format video files from my Sony camcorder. The converted MPEG files I keep in the PC's hard internal hard drive. It may be slow, but it's faster than burning DVDs all the time. AVCHD files are very large so I went for the biggest drive I could find at a reasonable price. Does Hitachi offer a 5 year warranty ? I think it might be only 1 year.

5 Years limted.

[nikster]

USB 2.0 also consistently reaches less than 1/2 its theoretical transfer rate because of the way it's designed (lots of polling requests, if I understand correctly). That would be 30MB/s. Personally, my USB 2.0 drives seem to be capped at 20MB/s and quite often they run at a rather abysmal 10MB/s.

Here's to hoping these new flash drives come as eSata external or ExpressCard eSata. Internal, e.g. HD replacement, would be too expensive for a long time to come.

Shame about the Hitachi drive, too - 12.5mm is useless for the vast majority of laptops. The Samsung one is 9.5 and ships "in March". Not bad at all

[cali]

The problem with eSATA is it cannot power the device. So in addition to plugging it into a eSATA port, you would have to have to have an AC adapter plugged into the SSD, steal power from a USB jack, or something like that.

[sibeymai]

The Seagate external drive, although it uses USB, also has an external power supply and yes it is a hassle. The back of the PC looks like a rats nest. How much faster is eSATA than USB 2.0 ?

[Tywais]

How much faster is eSATA than USB 2.0 ?

Quite a bit actually. Take a look here > dslreports

USB 3.0 is being developed (10x faster then 2.0) and new firewire (4x faster then current firewire) that will reduce the performance gaps in the standards.