SSD Drives: Faster Bigger Cheaper
2008 Is The Year Of SSD's For Consumers


The SSD market is changing so rapidly it's unreal. At January 2008 CES a ton of Solid-State products were announced. Only dribble of SSD's came out as NONE of the manufacturers wanted to reveal their pricing. The first to lay their cards down would get undercut. Then the bloodbath began. And the dribble became a deluge of shipping drives. SSD transfer rates, price per gigabyte, better design, and SSD read/write reliability is improving each month. That is to say; 'Welcome to this website!'



Solid-State High Performance Means:
  • SSD Costs As Low As $3 GB Per Gigabyte
  • Fast Data Reads Exceeding Hard Drives
  • High-Density 100-200mbps NAND Flash
  • Interfaces: IDE-ATA + SATA I & II
  • No Bearings - No Access Noise
  • Weight Saving ~50% Less Than HDD's
  • Zero Latency With No Seek Time
  • Lower Power Consumption & Heat
  • Extended Product & Laptop Battery Life
  • Shock Resistance - No Moving Parts
  • Standard Form-Factors & Screw Mounts
  • 1.8" 2.5" 3.5" Drives + Adapters-Brackets
Can You Digg it? Bookmark To Track Pricing In The SSD Marketplace


FEATURED SSD DRIVES OF NOTE: November 15th 2008

Patriot PE128GS25SSDR Warp Series Extreme Performance 128GB SATA-II 2.5" SSD

Super Talent 2.5" 120GB MasterDrive MX SATA2 SSD

OCZ OCZSSD2-2C120G 120GB 2.5-Inch Core Series V2 SATA II + USB SSD This drive features a MINI-USB connector beside the SATA interface. - A brilliant innovation allowing you to use the drive without having to internally mount the SSD at all. Great for testing, backups, epescially for computer technicians. SMART DESIGN that's also features OCZ's impressive 170 MB/s read and 98 MB/s write speeds.

Imation/Mtron Solid State MOBI 3000 - Full Size 3.5" Mounts - SATA-150 Mtron ships some of the fastest SSD's known to date - and are co-branding with Imation. Mtron's drive controller and flash NAND technology splits the line into a 'Value' 3000 series, and a high-performance SSD 7000 line - priced accordingly. They also make 3.5" form-factor direct replacement drives, whereas most others are focusing on smaller laptop/portable 2.5" and 1.8" drive sizes. Mtron's premium 7000 series SSD has mind blowing benchmarks detailed here at NextLevelHardware.com

PHOTOFAST CR-9000 2.5" SSD : 6 slot SDHC to SATA SSD adaptersupports any size 4GB/8GB/12GB/16GB/32GB/64GB/128GB/192GBUser upgradable SATA drive chassis

Tom's Hardware has an informative take and Solid-State Mtron benchmarks pitted against a WD Raptor 10k RPM drive and the rip-snortin' 250gb 7200rpm 16mb cache SATA II 2.5" Scorpio Black series laptop drive.

eBay's starting to list an interesting selection of solid-state drives - tho beware of discontinued, previous generation, used SSD's:


July 3rd, 2008: Apple announced a $500 price-drop on the Apple MacBook Air SSD Laptop The 64gb SSD still adds quite a premium to the Mac Book's price. New price is $2598 for the SSD model versus $1799 for the conventional 80gb ATA drive model.

French website HardMac had an interesting tidbit today on DIY MacBook AIR SSD upgrade replacement:
"You will need 1.8" PATA SSDs, 5mm thick featuring a ZIF socket. There are different sizes of ZIF, you will need the smallest version. To our knowledge, only SSDs from Samsung or Supertalent are compatible with the MacBook Air, with storage capacity topping at 64GB."

If it's any consolation to current Apple MacBook owners, the low-end MacBook's drive is ridiculously easy to replace with any currently shipping and readily available 2.5" SATA SSD. Just remove the battery, 3 screws to loosen the metal plate that covers the memory slots and pull the drive's plastic tab! The easiest Apple laptop to plunk and slap a 2.5" flash drive into. MacBook PRO models are decidedly more complicated to get open.

Most SSD's manufactured today use the SATA - SERIAL interface. But 40-pin ATA drives can be found at ATA & SATA SSD's Choose carefully: Newer Transcend models such as Transcend 2.5" Solid State Disk 64 GB - Internal 2.5" IDE/ATA from thier faster next generation are available. Transcend has been in the SSD market a long, long, long time for industrial, military and embedded markets. So they might be good at leveraging a faster drive lineup and putting the Price-Squeeze on everyone else.

Sandisk 32GB & 64GB 2.5" consumer market drives now in wide production as are their pSSD 1.8" Parallel ATA models. Sandisk enjoys consumer mind-share, shelf-space and wide distribution from their reputation for flash memory alone. I can forsee them dominating the consumer space in SSDs given their marketing prowess.

Toshiba is aiming to start out of the gate with a high-capacity 128gb 1.8" & 2.5" multi-layer MLC modules promising well over >100mbps Read, >40-90mbps Write speeds - preferring to come out Bigger, Later.

TDK is working on an "HS1" series line of 1.8-inch SLC solid-state drives with the Micro Serial-ATA (SATA) interface. The Micro SATA specification provides for a smaller connector for the high-speed SATA interface used widely in PCs today.

Lexar announces Crucial Technologies SSD launch: shipping 2.5" 3gbps SATA laptop drives in Q1 2008

Get that Dell Laptop, HP Notebook, or Apple MacBook ready for a FAST, silent, low-power, battery-saving hard disk drive replacement. The future is arriving; Solid-State drop-in flash memory drives!

ARS Technica has a great article on NAND SSD's expected to reach and exceed 200mbps
ARS Technica SSD Drive Benchmark Graph