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.

Toshiba has announced a new, tiny SSD that will almost certainly find its way into next year’s flash-based camcorders, making them even smaller than this year’s already-small flash-based camcorders. They are also one of the first devices to use the new mini-SATA (mSATA) device connector. Sizes are 30GB and 62GB, and volume production will begin in October.

Why so small? An advantage to having such a small device is less weight and less power consumption (typical read power consumption is 1.3W, write is 1.8W.) This will probably lead to longer battery life for the end-user.

The advantages to using SSDs for video are many: they’re pretty fast, they’re more resistant to impact than a hard drive, the capacities are nearly as big (but their physical size is a fraction of that of a hard drive), and the cost difference is becoming less and less by the day. Makes me wonder when there’ll be a camcorder with an eSATA port, to get your video off to a computer that much faster? It’s probably inevitable, really.

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 »