All Storage Feeds

Big 512GB cheap solid-state storage imminent

J Mark Lytle — 1208934788

We already know that solid state disks (SSDs) are slowly pushing out hard drives to make a dent in the laptop storage arena, but could not have predicted that they’d snare a quarter of the market by 2011.

That forecast comes courtesy of an executive in charge of the storage business at Toshiba Japan. Speaking at the IDEMA conference there, Shozo Saito said that 25 per cent of notebooks would come with SSD storage in three years.

Prices to fall

On the size front, Saito said that Toshiba would be scaling up its SSDs to 512GB from the current maximum of 128GB. Naturally, the price premium over standard hard drives will remain but the gap will shrink as the price of NAND flash memory falls.

Current 2.5-inch laptop SSDs cost 6.4 times as much as hard drives – Saito claims the multiplier will fall to half that value by 2010, which is undoubtedly why he’s so confident about the take-up of solid state storage.

Seagate sues STEC over 'patent infringements'

Audley Jarvis — 1208427623

Seagate CEO Bill Watkins has made good on his threat to sue solid-state drive (SSD) manufacturers if he ever felt they threatened the Seagate-dominated HDD industry.

Earlier in the week Seagate filed suit against memory-tech firm STEC claiming the memory technology company had infringed four of Seagate’s IP patents relating to its SSDs, memory-backup systems, and self-testing systems.

Watkins said that the company had filed the suit because "we believe they [STEC] are relying on intellectual property developed or acquired by Seagate."

Stranglehold

In response to charges that Seagate’s action was essentially an attempt to retain a stranglehold on the market by throttling the competition, Watkins remained adamant that the suit was a purely a matter of protecting Seagate’s IP.

"This is not about stifling innovation or threats to our business ... We have an obligation to our company and our shareholders to protect what belongs to them," Watkins said.

In response STEC has claimed that Seagate never opened any dialogue prior to issuing the writ, and said that it believes that its SSD technology predates that of the Seagate patents allegedly infringed.

"STEC believes it held such technology including prior patents, dating more than a decade prior to any of Seagate's patents," a STEC company spokesperson said.

Inroads

Commentators note that regardless of Seagate’s action, the company is ultimately powerless to prevent SSD technology from making inroads into the HDD market.

While SSD currently lags a very long way behind HDD in terms of cost-per-gigabyte of storage, it won’t always be so. Once SSD can get the price down to a level that competes directly with HDD then consumers are going to opt in ever greater numbers for the increased speed and greater reliability of SSD technology.

It won’t happen overnight say analysts, but it will happen.

Another interesting thing to note is how Seagate has chosen to go after a relatively small player. This kind of begs the question as to whether Seagate will ever have the strength of conviction to go after larger SSD fish, namely Intel and Samsung? Only time will tell.

IBM's revolutionary new memory format

Audley Jarvis — 1207909136

IBM researchers are working on a new hi-tech form of memory they believe could eventually replace hard drives and flash-based memory altogether.

Based on the recently discovered spintronic phenomena, the new memory format has been dubbed racetrack memory by the IBM researchers working on it and uses tiny magnetic boundaries, known as domain walls, to store data.

The domain walls are read by exploiting the weak magnetic fields generated by the spin of electrons.

Years away

Although the IBM research team have yet to build a functioning racetrack memory unit and estimate that the technology is another eight years away from becoming viable for commercial use, they are confident that the technology could eventually replace existing storage methods.

Currently, conventional hard discs are cheap, but consist of moving parts that can break down. Solid state memory, by comparison, is quicker and more reliable, but costs considerably more that hard discs.

The IBM researchers expect that, once fully developed, racetrack memory will be cheaper, faster and more reliable than any existing storage medium.

Replacement

Ultimately, the IBM researchers hope it will come to replace hard disc and solid state memory altogether.

It’s believed that the capacity of racetrack memory could be up to 100 times that of existing hard drive technology, which means even more songs and movies on your portable media player.

Intel's UMPC is still a crap idea

Jeremy Laird — 1207269208

The smorgasbord of technology, slightly crazed enthusiasm and side-stepped questions that is the Intel Developer Forum is over. Here's our take on the key highlights of IDF: Shanghai and what they mean for computing's future.

It's a long way to go...

At this IDF, Intel fleshed out speeds and feeds for the first ultra mobile variant of its Atom processor. But that was about it regarding significant announcements relating to Intel's core computer chip activities.

For that, thank a conference call a few weeks prior to IDF Shanghai that dished out details on both the upcoming Nehalem CPU architecture and the Larrabee graphics chip. Not enough news, perhaps, in return for the typically monumental IDF carbon footprint.

The UMPC is still a crap idea

Intel may have given the UMPC concept a new name - the Mobile Internet Device, or MID for short. But it's still the same lame idea. Indeed, when pressed to discuss the pocket-busting proportions of the MIDs shown at IDF, the typical reaction of Intel suits was to get a little shirty. We've a feeling Intel knows that MIDs are not the answer.

Splitting the Atom

In the long run, we've little doubt that future revisions of Intel's Atom Centrino mobile platform and CPU promise revolutionary performance and software compatibility improvements for mobile digital devices.

But if the oversized MIDs on show are anything to go by, the first iteration is simply too bulky and power hungry to change the world. We therefore suspect Atom will actually make more impact on traditional form factors. Expect to see some astonishingly cheap Atom-based desktops and notebook systems before the year is out.

Larrabee remains a mystery

Intel may have come clean with its intentions for the mystical Larrabee processor. We now know it is unambiguously targeted at Nvidia and AMD's graphics boards. In fact, Intel reckons it will kill those cards stone dead.

And there's little doubt Intel is hoping Larrabee will drag the entire graphics industry over to ray-tracing tech. But we remain clueless as to Larrabee's true potential in traditional raster-based 3D rendering scenarios. And that is what will make or break it, in its initial iteration at least.

Critical mass for solid state drives

Intel is nothing if not the absolute bomb when it comes to economies of scale in silicon chip production. So, confirmation that it is planning the imminent roll out of a full family of solid state drives (SSDs) looks awfully promising in terms of driving prices down.

In partnership with STM Microelectronics, Intel will shortly unleash SSDs spanning a range of capacities from 32 to 160GB. With any luck, the spinning hard disk will be dead for all but seriously high capacity bulk storage by mid 2009.

Political posturing

Is Intel shameless enough to go on stage with a straight face and talk about an energy saving partnership with China... all the while with the Chinese reportedly commissioning a new coal fired power station every week? You betcha!

Intel was also happy to give stage time to the jocular but somehow slightly sinister looking Chinese Minister for Railways. We're not sure about his presentation skills, but he certainly looked the kind of guy who can make the trains run on time. So, it was no doubt a great week for Sino-Intel relations. Just don't mention capital punishment or widespread human rights abuse, umm-kay?

Intel puts TechRadar on a par with The Economist...

...And The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and BusinessWeek. At least that was the august company we shared (in our outgoing Tech.co.uk guise) in the form of a foil festooned with quotes from leading publications during the opening keynote on day one. No other technology publications made the grade.

Shopping in Shanghai

...And finally, don't go shopping in China unless you are prepared to haggle for Britain – don't be surprised to see the Chinese shoehorn in haggling as a demonstration sport at Beijing this summer. And if you do manage to beat your opponent down to your target price, for goodness sake don't then change your mind and flatly refuse any purchase at all. You'll be lucky to get out of his market stall alive.

If that makes shopping in Shanghai sound like a chore, try this for size. You can still have a suit made to measure and delivered to your hotel room within 24 hours. And all for around £70. Long live the Chinese experiment in capital-socialist fusion!

Western Digital maximises dual-platter HDDs

1205936261

Western Digital has announced that its Caviar SE16 dual-platter 640GB hard drives are now shipping in volume.

The high-end drives are built on the 320-GB-per-platter technology. They deliver “high performance with their extreme areal density, 3Gb/s transfer rate, and Native Command Queuing (NCQ).”

Expanding capacity

"The 640 GB capacity point will be an important one for our desktop customers, and WD is leading high-volume shipments to the channel and OEM customers," said Don Bennett, general manager and vice president of WD's desktop business unit.

"Two-platter hard drives have always been the perfect balance of value, capacity and performance for many of our customers.

“Today's common two-platter drives are limited to 500GB, but we are expanding capacity by 28 per cent on the same design with WD's leading technology heads and disks."

SSD failure rate is '10-20 per cent'

Audley Jarvis — 1205846603

A large computer manufacturer is reported to be getting 20-30 per cent of its SSD flash memory-equipped computers returned due to technical failure and poor performance.

According to IT research firm, Avian Securities, between 10-20 per cent of SSD returns are due to straightforward technical failure, far higher than the 1-2 per cent failure rate of standard hard drives.

"There is an order of magnitude higher in failure rates," Avi Cohen, head of research at Avian Securities explained to CNET.

The remainder of SSD returns are down to poor performance. While flash memory allows for quicker boot-up times and better battery performance, some applications such as video streaming and, oddly, Microsoft Outlook suffer a dip in performance.

Although Avian Securities is reported to use the term “large computer manufacturer”, it is believed that the research company is referring to Dell Computers and its SSD supplier, Samsung.

In defence of SSD

Indeed, since CNET posted the original story, spokespersons from both Dell and Samsung have both come to the defence of SSD memory.

Troy Winslow from Intel said the challenge is to make SSD drives reliable. "The ability to manage those failures and ensure that no data ever gets lost, that’s the challenge. Reliability will be a key differentiation point among solid state drive vendors," he said.

Meanwhile, Michael Yang from Samsung said that when failures do occur, they typically occur in the controller silicon, not in the flash device itself.

In addition to the reportedly high failure rates and performance issues affecting SSD memory there is another factor which could inhibit growth of the technology more so than failure rates and performance issues, and that’s its high price. An SSD option on a standard HD configuration currently comes at a hefty price premium. Unless that begins to change soon, people may be increasingly put off.

Despite its status as a relatively new technology there’s clearly still some way to go before SSD truly establishes itself.

Chunky 128GB SSD market getting crowded

J Mark Lytle — 1205477851

Not that we needed any convincing that solid state storage is the future for home computers, but here's an addition to the field that points traditional hard drives clearly towards the door marked 'exit'.

Taiwanese storage specialist InnoDisk has just started production of its new SATA 10000 series SSDs in capacities up to 128GB. As the name suggests, the drives use SATA connectors, coming in 2.5-inch enclosures.

Faster flash memory

The new drives stand out from the crowd - at least until Intel gets its SSDs to market - by offering read and write speeds up to 20 per cent faster than normal hard disks. Sustained read speeds at 110MB/s and bursts at 300MB/s are impressive.

InnoDisk has also addressed the perceived short lifespan of SSDs by adding a 'wear-levelling' control chip that balances the workload across the different elements of NAND memory.

There's no word on pricing yet, but it's clear the rush to produce SSDs will drive prices down very quickly.

Intel to beef up solid state drives to 160GB

Don Reisinger — 1205199645

Intel is planning to release high capacity solid state drives (SSDs) next quarter that could reach a capacity of 160GB. That's according to numerous reports, which claim that the new models will come in 2.5-inch and 1.8-inch formats.

They'll compete with existing flash memory drives from Samsung, which has promised a 128GB version of its 1.8-inch solid state drive later this year.

"When Intel launches its products, you'll see that not all SSDs are created equal," Intel's NAND product chief Troy Winslow said. "The way the SSDs are architected, the way the controller and firmware operates makes a huge difference."

Price fall coming

Pricing, which has been a major concern for most customers for quite some time, may not be such a huge barrier going forward. Winslow pointed out that "price declines are historically 40 per cent per year. And in 2009, a 50 per cent reduction, then again in 2010."

Solid state drives are quickly becoming popular; with the cost to consumers dropping and the gigabyte count rising, look for them in more products soon.

Hands on: SanDisk's Flashback notebook adapter

James Rivington — 1204806776

A computing show like CeBIT will never be a staging ground for the launch of massively exciting consumer products. But it is a place where many low-key innovations first emerge, and the SanDisk Flashback adapter is certainly one of those.

The Flashback adapter fits into the ExpressCard slot on a laptop, and automatically backs up your important files onto a removable SD card. The idea is that if your laptop experiences an epic failure on the scale of a total hard disk crash, you won’t lose any of your most important files.

What’s more, it also protects your data if you happen to lose your entire laptop. All backed-up files are encrypted, and there’s also an option to additionally back-up all your files onto an online server. So your data can always be retrieved, no matter what happens.

We met up with SanDisk in Hall 26 at CeBIT for a hands-on test of the Flashback, to see if it works as well as SanDisk says it does.

SanDisk simplicity

As you can see from the picture, it’s a fairly basic product – it’s small and light – which is reflected in its modest price of around £20. For the money, you get the physical product and also some software which needs to be installed onto your PC.

It’s a fairly basic app, which will please some people but will also irritate others. In a small on-screen window, it uses four tabs to take you through the setup process. Here you select which folders and files you want backed up – so no unimportant files will be stored on the SD card (which you will need to buy separately).

One of the tabs presents you with the online back-up options, but unfortunately this part isn't very customisable. It’s either on or it’s off. There’s no way to tell it when to sync with the online server. And that means if you created a 10GB file in one of your selected folders, the file would immediately begin to upload to the server. There is no way of telling the app to wait until night-time to perform the back-ups, which could present you with some bandwidth problems if you’re on a slow or busy connection.

There also didn’t appear to be any way to limit the bandwidth that the application uses, which again might irritate some end-users.

But the beauty of this product is in its simplicity. Most people will be able to set it up once, and then never have to touch it again. It’ll happily back-up your files on flash memory, in real time. And from that moment onwards your data is happily stored, safe and sound.

All in all a great little product then. The price is right, it’s easy to use and it finally gives laptop users an excuse to use that normally vacant ExpressCard slot.

Blu-ray ROM drives to spread during 2008

Dan Grabham — 1204565129

Reports in Taiwan are suggesting that the BD-ROM format will ascend into the mainstream during 2008. Digitimes says BD-ROM will be helped along by even more manufacturers getting on board with the plain-and-simple drives.

It even goes so far as to suggest BD-ROM could be the most popular drive sold this year. Note that’s BD-ROM, not BD-R or BD-RW – so readers only.

After all, BD drive prices are falling dramatically, largely down to the fact that the laser power needed is a lot less in a reader than a writer.

BD support increases

Digitimes picks the Sony BDU-X10S out for special mention. The drive gives 2x playback of Blu-ray discs plus 8x playback of DVD-ROM and 24x for CD-ROMs according to the site. It believes it could go on sale this month for $230 (£115).

Other manufacturers such as Pioneer are expected to extend BD support over the coming months as the effect of the end of the format war kicks in. Panasonic had several drives on display at CES in January too. And lower production costs are finally coming into view.

On 26 February Digitimes quoted prices of $120 (£60) for OEM drives shipping later this year. Blu-ray could finally be truly affordable.