June 26 - 1:25pm EDT   Intel may be ready to launch new solid-state drives based on 34nm NAND technology within two weeks or less, a report claims. Rumored since January, the drives are expected to ship in 80, 160 and 320GB capacities, the last being significant for more practically replacing a conventional hard disk. Other capacities may also be in the works, dense enough to replace many notebook hard drives, a source says. [full story]

June 3 - 1:30pm EDT   SanDisk has begun shipping its next-generation SSD drives geared for netbooks, the pSSD P2 and S2. Both series of components feature new non-volatile nCache technology which is claimed to enable a five-fold increase in random write performance compared to HDDs, an important advancement for netbooks that use full-featured operating systems such as XP or Ubuntu. The technology is designed to reduce instances of stalling or "shuddering" experienced with earlier-generation SSDs. [full story]

May 14 - 9:30am EDT   Toshiba on Thursday introduced the dynabook SS RX2/WAJ, its latest notebook that features a 512GB SSD. The drive utilizes 2-bit-per-cell multi-level NAND flash memory to quadruple the density compared to the company's previous 128GB offerings, while a new controller is claimed to increase read speeds by 230-percent to 230MB/s. Write speeds have also been boosted by 450-percent to 180MB/s. [full story]

March 26 - 1:05pm EDT   Japanese manufacturer PhotoFast has produced the G-Monster PCIe SSD, a new solid-state drive designed around extreme specifications. Whereas most SSDs are limited to 256GB or less, the G-Monster starts at that level, and additionally comes in 512GB and 1TB capacities, rivaling some hard drives. The G-Monster is substantially longer however, closer in size to a high-end video card. [full story]

January 10 - 4:30pm EST   pureSilicon this week showed its 1TB 2.5-inch SSD drive (pictured below). Featuring standard SATA II drive interface, the device, is "the most compact SSD per gigabyte: 15.40GB per cubic centimeter in a 2.5-inch form-factor" -- at least three times greater than any other SSD on the market, the company claims. The company says the high density has been achieved through innovative engineering techniques and its "exceptionally" thin enclosure and that four of the devices can fit into the same form factor as a typical 3.5-inch drive. Currently, the company say the SSD line is built for server, networking, datacenter, supercomputing, and professional media, but the technology ... [full story]

January 5 - 11:30pm EST   Samsung Electronics has extended its line of full-HD digital camcorders with four new models - the HMX-H106, HMX-H105, HMX-H104, and HMX-H100. In addition to full HD video, the new H-Series offers a renowned Schneider Kreuznach Varioplan HD lens with Optical Image Stabilization, H.264 and internal Solid State Drives to provide onboard memory. Samsung's new flagship HMX-H106 features an internal 64GB Solid State Drive (SSD), increasing both write performance and dramatically reduces power consumption. The company claims that when actively reading and writing data, Samsung's SSD technology consumes approximately 1/8th of the power of a comparable HDD. [full story]

September 28 - 11:50am EDT   Eric Cheng of Echeng.com says he has successfully installed and run a RAID 0 SSD array in a MacBook Pro, with strong performance results. Utilizing two 120GB OCZ SATA SSD notebook hard drives, and an MCE OptiBay hard drive adapter (placed in the MacBook Pro's SuperDrive bay), Cheng was able to configure the two drives and set them up in a striped RAID 0 array, and install a bootable copy of Mac OS X. [full story]

August 19 - 12:25pm EDT   In the wake of last Friday's leak, Intel has now formally announced its Mainstream series of SSD drives. Models will be available in 1.8- and 2.5-inch sizes, and rely on MLC (multi-level cell) NAND memory, which should in theory aid to keep prices down. One of the first examples is the 80GB X25-M, which is also Intel's first SATA-based SSD for notebook and desktop OEM builders. [full story]

August 15 - 12:25am EDT   Sunnyvale-based OCZ on Thursday unveiled new Core Series V2 SATA II 2.5-inch SSD drives, offering users speedy 170 megabyte-per-second read and 98 megabyte-per-second write times, with much larger sizes. The drives represent a continued effort for OCZ to push down the prices of SSDs for mainstream users. While OCZ declines to supply exact prices from its release, it says that the new Core Series V2 drives cost half of what comparable products do, while offering sizes of up to 250GB. [full story]

August 12 - 1:45pm EDT   Intel has announced the availability of a new solid-state drive, a variant of the Z-P230. While a 40-pin ZIF version for PATA connections remains available, Intel has introduced a new PCIe "mini-card" model which is even smaller. The PATA model is itself said to be four times smaller than a normal 1.8-inch mechanical hard drive. Read and write speeds remain at 38 and 10Mbps, respectively. [full story]

August 11 - 1:30pm EDT   Semiconductor maker Indilinx has upped the potential throughput of SSD drives, an announcement claims. The company says that its Barefoot controller, just out of development, is capable of peak read/write speeds up to 230MBps, allegedly the fastest on the market. This speed is entirely dependent on the type of memory used however, and in practicality it operates at 170MBps with SLC (single-level) NAND memory, or 200/160MBps using MLC (multi-level) NAND. [full story]

June 24 - 5:00pm EDT   Seagate is rumored to be looking into buying out Intel's 49 percent stake in the IM Flash Technologies joint venture between the chip maker and Micron, a flash memory manufacturer, according to analysts. That is just one option for Seagate, but the analysts say the company would be better off buying into SanDisk, as it is not involved with any other companies and is less costly. Furthermore, they maintain that Seagate needs to purchase or team up with a NAND flash memory maker in order to be successful in its solid state drive (SSD) production. [full story]

June 2 - 3:05pm EDT   TDK will debut its HS1-series solid-state disk drives at the Computex Taipei 2008 show due to start tomorrow in Taiwan. At 1.8 inches, the drives are the smallest on the market to use a Micro SATA interface, and are meant for notebook computers and industrial devices. The drives are available in 16, 32 and 64GB capacities, and use single-level cell NAND flash memory. Prototype versions of the HS1 drives were first shown at CEATEC in 2007, and TDK says are now ready for use in industrial devices. [full story]

May 25 - 10:55pm EDT   Samsung late on Sunday promised what it says is a breakthrough in solid-state drives with the launch of its first 256GB SSD. The drive offers twice the capacity of the Korean firm's previous 128GB SSD but is also much faster. The 256GB edition reads sequential data at 200MB per second, twice the rate of the original model, while also seeing an even greater increase in write speeds: where the earlier drive writes at 70MB per second, the new SSD writes at 160MB per second. This comes in a chassis that is also described as one of Samsung's thinnest at 9.5mm (0.37in), making it suitable for very thin and light notebooks. [full story]

April 30 - 12:10pm EDT   People contemplating SSD versions of computers like the MacBook Air -- which costs approximately $1,300 more than the HDD edition -- may not find the performance difference worthwhile, writes Computerworld. The magazine has conducted a test of 32GB SSDs by Crucial and Ridata, in comparison to two 7200rpm hard drives by Seagate. All four drives used cloned copies of Vista Home Premium, and were benchmarked by software called HD Tach. [full story]