In a world where planes are constantly flying further and faster and where particles can be accelerated nearly to the speed of light, it’s no surprise that a new type of data storage has been proven to be faster than anything on the market. Scientists at UC San Diego performed an experiment that showed phase changing memory can beat some of the best off the shelf flash memory on the market. They were using a prototype phase changing module called Onyx made by Micron.

Of course this was only when writing small bits of data at a time. When doing so, the memory was able to achieve speeds that were 70 to 120 percent faster than its flash counterpart. When writing larger chunks of data, the drive was actually slower than flash memory. Nonetheless, the phase changing memory was faster at reading data of any size and placed a significantly smaller load on the CPU when used. Phase changing memory also has the added benefit of being able to write on demand without having to keep tables or logs like flash memory does.

Besides the uptick in speeds, the most fascinating part of phase changing memory is how it works. These chips work by storing data in a metal alloy called chalcogenide. In order to write memory, small bursts of heat switch sections of the material between its crystalline state or an amorphous arrangement that represent either a 0 or a 1. These 0s and 1s are then translated by the CPU into a digital file.

In practical terms, this increase in read times means that RAID drives and internal drives using this kind of memory should help editors save time when editing and rendering – especially in an era of large HD video file sizes. Also, this memory has been shown to have an average life of 100 million write cycles compared to a paltry 100,000 for NAND flash, meaning that these drives might be around just long enough to seem rather slow.

Well, it’s finally about to happen. Intel announced that they’re getting into the world of high capacity drives by releasing a new line of solid-state drives all the way up to 600 gigabytes. The new drives are the third generation of Intel’s SSD 320 Series. The new series is an upgrade to the high-performing X25-M SATA by using Intel’s new 25nm manufacturing process. With this process, Intel is able to shrink the size of the chips that the flash memory is held on making it possible to fit more flash memory within a standard 2.5 or 3.5 inch drive enclosure.

The new series comes in 40, 80, 120, 160, 300, and 600 GB flavors and will be using a 3 gigabit per second data interface for fast transfers. However, with 6 Gb/s SATA interfaces available, it’s curious why Intel decided to go with the much slower 3 Gb/s interface. The solid-state drives boast up to 39,500 input/output operations per second of random reads and drops to 23,000 IOPS of random writes for their high capacity drives.  Read and write speeds have also doubled from their last drives at 270 MB/s and 220 MB/s.

This announcement finally makes solid-state drives large enough to handle the typical HD workload at speeds much faster than any disk-based hard drive can achieve.  Though the drives are rather expensive going all the way from $89 for the 40 GB model to a whopping $1,069 for the 600 GB model, they can still be worth the cost for many who need better read/write times and reliability. Many of these drives will still be out of reach for the average video enthusiast, but this latest announcement from Intel shows that the technology is heading in the right direction. It’s no stretch of the imagination to think that someday a few years from now almost every video editor could be using a RAID full of inexpensive, 1 TB, solid-state drives.

Remember the good ol’ days of VHS tape (if you can call them that)? Well, it seems those days are back. Before you start to laugh or roll your eyes, it should be said that there won’t be any large, blocky, plastic cassettes to insert into a player. Rather, scientists from the EPFL school in Switzerland are using the same nickel-iron material to make nonowires that can store bits of information magnetically. The interesting part is both the speed and the amount of memory that can be put on the chip. When a user decides to access that memory, it simply gets pushed around inside the tape using a spin polarized current which allows it to go several hundred miles per second. Of course, the real beauty of the design is that billions of these nanowires could be embedded on a chip providing a seriously large capacity hard drive that would also be shock proof at the same time.

Of course, the real question is if we will even see this technology in our lifetime. I can’t tell you how many times I hear about a cool new technology only to be completely deflated when I read at the end of the announcement that it won’t be available until sometime after the apocalypse. Thankfully, this isn’t the case with racetrack memory. Since the scientists who discovered the speed of racetrack memory have a great relationship with IBM, they are saying we could be seeing this as a market-ready product in 5-7 years. A technology that can make hard drives 100,000 times faster than current models in 5 years time? I suppose we can all live with that.

I’m sure you don’t need to be convinced of the huge potential this technology has for video editing. With read and write speeds being 100,000 times faster, we could have applications that open up instantaneously and video that renders twice as fast as what you could possibly get right now without an SSD. As video editors, I’m sure that’s something we can all tip our hats to.

Reprinted from a Super Talent Technology press release.

Super Talent Technology today launched a new line of MasterDrive SX SSDs that incorporate 128MB of DRAM cache and reach new performance levels in high performance laptops.

The MasterDrive SX is based on an advanced new 8-channel controller and MLC NAND Flash. Its 8-channel architecture combined with a hefty 128MB of DRAM cache takes full advantage of the 3Gbps SATA-II bandwidth. The MasterDrive SX is capable of sequential read speeds up to 220 MB/sec and sequential write speeds up to 200 MB/sec. Read the rest of this entry »