SanDisk Corp. has shown off speedy solid-state hard drives at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. The company’s new G3 series of SSDs will go on sale later this year with capacities of 60GB, 120GB and 240GB, with the 240GB model costing $499. The SSDs are designed specifically for notebooks, as replacements for traditional HDDs. SSDs are popular for notebook use because they consume less power.
SSD technology is coming along, and is expected to be the next major step for the industry. SSDs contain no motors or moving parts, consume less power and have the potential to offer significant performance advantages. Granted, the prices are still higher, and performance in the current SSD models falls short of traditional hard drives in many areas, but as the technology advances the prices will fall.
SanDisk claims that the G3 models are more than 5 times faster than the fastest HDDs now on the market, and twice as fast as SSDs that shipped in 2008.
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SanDisk Corp. has announced a new flash memory management system that it claims will significantly boost performance from Solid-State Drives (SSD). ExtremeFSS will boost the speed of writing common types of data by 100 times, said Don Barnetson, senior director of marketing at SanDisk. The system will allow data to be written to the drive without erasing and rewriting nearby data. The ExtremeFSS system will also boost the longevity of SSDs.
Currently available SSD drives are marketed as having significant advantages over mechanical spinning hard drives; they produce less heat, use less power and would seemingly be less prone to failure. However, in reality they were found to under-perform compared to standard mechanical HDDs when they were first widely used in notebooks.
They tend to be slower at writing small amounts of data to the memory, while performing quite well with large files. This isn’t very convenient for excessive use. In addition to announcing ExtremeFSS, SanDisk also pushed for the industry to adopt a few helpful metrics. Long-term Data Endurance (LDE) for example would be a measure of the amount of data that could be written to an SSD before it fails.
As an example, a drive with a value of 40 TBW (terabytes written) would last for 11 years at an average of 10GB per day. Barnetson suggested that an LDE measure would be similar to an MPG (miles-per-gallon) measure for a car. A second metric SanDisk proposes is “virtual rpm,” which would measure how well the SSD compares to a mechanical drive at a certain speed (measured in revolutions per minute, or RPM).
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We have reviewed three netbook models from some of the largest netbook - and laptop - manufacturers in the world. Among the three models we received are the Asus Eee PC 901, Acer Aspire One 110 and MSI Wind U100. You can read other two reviews via the links below and the wrap-up from here. The tests did not cover all the aspects of computing and only scratch the surface of the three devices. Still, if you are interested in buying a netbook at some point, maybe these reviews can point you in the right direction.
*Asus Eee PC 901
*Acer Aspire One 110
*MSI Wind U100
Hands-on
MSI Wind U100 is the lone 10″ laptop amongst the three we tested. With a bigger display you’ll obviously have to compromise for a larger and heavier device. Size is not all bad, and an inch wider keyboard can make all the difference. Even though it is almost a third heavier than the other two, the weight distribution seems better than, for example, the Eee PC 901 which is prone to falling back. MSI’s netbook is also the only one with a traditional hard drive instead of SSD.
The package only includes a two piece AC adapter. The U100 model sports a good quality finish; it doesn’t squeek or creak and it doesn’t look cheap.
MSI Wind U100 on top of a 15″ HP
Technical specifications
MSI Wind U100
-1,6GHz Intel Atom
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