April 24 - 3:45pm EDT   OCZ on Friday took its turn at the new class of RAID-striped solid-state drives and launched the Z-Drive. Like offerings from Fusion-io, the Z-Drive ties together four SSDs to a central RAID controller and plugs into a PCI Express slot, eliminating the bottlenecks of SATA and transferring data twice as fast or more than single SSDs. OCZ claims peak read speeds of 510MB per second and peak writes of 480MB per second for its top-end drive. [full story]

April 7 - 3:45pm EDT   High-speed solid-state drive maker Fusion-io today marked the occasion of getting $47.5 million in extra funding by providing early details about a new storage device. The ioSAN (Storage Area Network) will borrow the same concept of a PCI Express drive with multiple SSDs in a RAID stripe but put it on a local network, theoretically giving the benefits of the extra-quick read and write times as quickly as the network allows. It's unknown if it would use Ethernet or else a faster but more exotic networking method like Fiber Channel. [full story]

November 26 - 10:05am EST   Micron has developed an extremely fast solid-state drive that could set new records for internal storage and shown the drive in an early test. The claimed new breakthrough in storage uses two SSDs with 16 data channels for the flash memory to generate a total transfer speed of 1GB per second. The performance tops 200,000 IOPS (input/output operations per second) and is quick enough that Micron has to drop Serial ATA II's 300MB per second bandwidth cap in favor of PCI Express. [full story]

October 3 - 2:55pm EDT   Normally known for its business storage, Fusion-io today provided a glance at an upcoming solid-state drive built for very high-performance home systems. The ioExtreme card will hold just 80GB but switches from SATA to PCI Express and is tuned for sheer transfer rate above all else: data reading speeds hover between 500MB and 700MB per second, or about five times as quick as current SSDs. The extra speed is pitched as ideal for particularly disk-heavy tasks such as compiling code, content editing or large games. [full story]