Imation reveals 'fastest' solid-state drive

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.

Filed under: peripherals, gadgets, upgrades/storage
Other story tags: SSD, Imation, Mtron