March 10 - 3:55pm EDT   Imation has entered the burgeoning field of SSD storage with two sets of drives, designed in collaboration with Mtron. The first of these are the MOBI 3000s, SATA disks meant for the consumer market; these consist of 16 and 32GB 2.5-inch drives, as well as 16, 32 and 64GB 3.5-inch models. The drives are capable of reading at 100MBs, and writing at 80MBs; random access speed is just 0.1ms. Prices start at approximately $700. [full story]

February 18 - 9:10am EST   Korean firm Mtron today said it has readied significant upgrade to its SSD line. The company has developed a new, 1.8-inch hard drive that should supply 128GB of storage without compromising on either size or speed. As it uses faster Single Level Cell (SLC) storage in place of denser but slower Multi Level Cell (MLC) technology, the drive can read at 120MB per second and write at 100MB per second -- about six times faster than a same-size rotating hard drive and faster than many desktops, Mtron estimates. Like with most SSD storage, the lack of moving parts also results in less than half the power consumption and a completely skip-proof design. [full story]

January 4 - 9:45am EST   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. [full story]