DealsOnTheWeb Daily Deal: Buy.com's After-Christmas Super Store - Check out the Revolving Savings
Toshiba Announces 256 GB Solid State Drive
by , 12:45 PM EDT, September 29th, 2008
Toshiba announced that they will begin production of 256 GB Solid State Drives (SSD) in the fourth quarter, according to DigiTimes on Monday. Pricing was not announced.
Samples have been available in September pending full production. The drives use the more advanced MLC controller rather than the SLC consumer grade controller and features wear leveling technology.
Performance was reported to be 70 MB/s write and 120 MB/s read via a 3.0 Gb/s SATA interface. The package is about 70 x 53 x 3 mm.
Because of the high capacity of these drives and the use of the more advanced MLC controller, prices could remain beyond the reach of mainstream notebook computers or the so-called netbooks and be aimed primarily at the data center for the time being.
The good news, however, is that the 64 GB and 128 GB SSDs now in use for notebook computers will likely be coming down further in price, making them attractive alternatives to hard disk drives (HDD) for many users.
Currently, Apple offers a 64 GB SSD option (instead of an 80 GB HDD) in the MacBook Air for an additional US$599.00. Toshiba's 12.1-inch DynaBook NX has a 128 GB SSD option priced at about US$900.
Observer Comments
QuotePricing was not announced
Arm, Leg, Left....well you get the idea.
These things are PAINFULLY expensive as of yet. I'm going to give them a couple of years before I get one by which time the price will have dropped to more sane levels and systems will handle SSDs much more comfortably and efficiently.
Eventually SSDs will replace spinning plate hard drives. But not yet.
Mon Sep 29, 2008 2:33 pm Subject: By then, there may be new technology...
Quotegeoduck wrote:QuotePricing was not announced
Arm, Leg, Left....well you get the idea.
These things are PAINFULLY expensive as of yet. I'm going to give them a couple of years before I get one by which time the price will have dropped to more sane levels and systems will handle SSDs much more comfortably and efficiently.
Eventually SSDs will replace spinning plate hard drives. But not yet.
By then there may be Memristor memory! I've been reading about these in electronics magazines. Here's a choice quote from the Wikipedia article on Memristor:
QuoteWikipedia wrote:
HP prototyped a crossbar latch memory using the devices that can fit 100 gigabits in a square centimeter.[11] For comparison, as of 2008 the highest-density flash memories hold 32 gigabits.
Quotectopher wrote:
By then there may be Memristor memory! I've been reading about these in electronics magazines. Here's a choice quote from the Wikipedia article on Memristor:
QuoteWikipedia wrote:
HP prototyped a crossbar latch memory using the devices that can fit 100 gigabits in a square centimeter.[11] For comparison, as of 2008 the highest-density flash memories hold 32 gigabits.
They sound interesting but {also from Wikipedia}
QuoteAlthough the HP memristor is a major discovery for electrical engineering theory, it has yet to be demonstrated in operation at practical speeds and densities. Graphs in Williams' original report show switching operation at only ~1 Hz. Although the small dimension of the device seem to imply fast operation, the charge carriers move very slowly, with an ion mobility of 10-10 cm2/(V?s). In comparison, the highest known drift ionic mobilities occur in advanced superionic conductors, such as rubidium silver iodide with about 2x10-4 cm?/(V?s) conducting silver ions at room temperature. Electrons and holes in silicon have a mobility ~1000 cm?/(V?s), a figure which is essential to the performance of transistors.
Until they can get the speed up I don't see them challenging existing technology. But then, IANA Chip Engineer or Physicist. Who knows what will become practical in 5-10 years.
They do sound really cool though
QuoteGuest wrote:
And I can remember when the 1.4MB floppies first came on the market...
WOW this sucker holds over a megabyte!
I love tech.
Did you ever use one of those little tools that would punch a notch in a single sided 5" floppy to make it work as a double sided one?
Now I'm dating myself (but it's not like anyone else would...)
Quotegeoduck wrote:QuoteGuest wrote:
And I can remember when the 1.4MB floppies first came on the market...
WOW this sucker holds over a megabyte!
I love tech.
Did you ever use one of those little tools that would punch a notch in a single sided 5" floppy to make it work as a double sided one?
Now I'm dating myself (but it's not like anyone else would...)
I vaguely remember hearing about something like that, did it really work.
BTW, loved the "dating myself" line!
QuoteGuest wrote:
I vaguely remember hearing about something like that, did it really work.
BTW, loved the "dating myself" line!
Sure it worked great. It punched a ~1/4 deep x ~ 1/2 wide noch in the corner and suddenly you could write on both sides of the disk. The other aspect was that you could write protect the disk with duct tape by covering over the notches.
Ah yes the old days of computing.
Tue Sep 30, 2008 2:43 am Subject: "Old Days of Computing"
My holdover from the "Old Days of Computing" are the neat little boxes that the floppies were stored in. They are perfect for CDs and DVDs.
BTW: the "Old Days of Computing" for me was working on a Vacuum Tube run machine which occupied a couple of acres of air-conditioned room. (1969)
Main memory was 3K!! We ran Fortran and Cobal on this thing plus an Assembler language that was in Dutch. We had a virtual memory of 128K on a magnetic drum. Messages to the operator were typed out on an IBM ball typewriter. We also had a tape punch and a huge printer which spewed boxes and boxes of pinfeed paper about 2 feet wide.
There was a bank of 6- 1" Ampex tape units. We had to read binary and hex because the console lights only displayed binary.
If there was a hardware problem, the technicians would come into the computer room with an oscilloscope, wire and a soldering gun.
There were two computers of which one was built in 1949 and the other was built in 1950. The purpose of these machines was designing and building of 3rd gen mainframes which were similar to IBM's 360 & 370 series. The company was Phillips Netherlands.
It sure was a great introduction to computers.
Cheers:
Bob
Your main memory was 3K?
Luxury!
Why when I started out, we had 1 bit and we had to share it with the billing department!
Joking aside, I used to have a PDP-11 in my apartment with a pair of RX02 drives and 8" floppies! And let me tell you that was when the floppy was indeed floppy!
And yes Geoduck, I too notched my share of 5/14" floppies to make them 2 sided. Didn't always work, but I was cheap enough to keep trying.
Ahhh, those were the days. Kids today have no idea!
(Hey, get off my lawn!)
Tue Sep 30, 2008 12:31 pm Subject: Oldie but Goodie
My Dad loaned some time on AT&T's main frame to the high school I attended in the late 60s. We had a terminal that looks like a teletype machine. We were the only school in the state with access to a computer. About 4 kids took advantage of the opportunity. My Dad pulled the plug when my brother graduated. The iPhone in my pocket has more computational power than the IBM system Dad had back then and he ran the Southeastern area of AT&T billing and accounting on it! I don't recall the specs, but Dad looks at his PC at home and laughs about the "good old days!" Kids on my staff think Windows 3.1 is ancient technology, and my kids can not imagine being tethered to a CAT5 cable for internet access, they have known only wireless in their computing lives. It is hard to grasp sometimes how far we have come in my lifetime, hell, the last twenty-five years have been a blur of technological advances.
I used to work at DEC (who made the PDP-11's). For me, the coolest thing in the lab was DECtape. This was a random access tape drive. The spindles were about 3" inches in diameter and were placed side by side. This thing would spin and reverse itself. Very cool!
Then of course we had washing machine sized hard drives that held 600MB.
BTW, the guy who invented DECtape is Gordon Bell. Gordon also holds the patents for key pieces of the PDP-11 architecture including the Unibus. He now works at Microsoft.
Quotectopher wrote:
Your main memory was 3K?
Luxury!
Why when I started out, we had 1 bit and we had to share it with the billing department!
Joking aside, I used to have a PDP-11 in my apartment with a pair of RX02 drives and 8" floppies! And let me tell you that was when the floppy was indeed floppy!
And yes Geoduck, I too notched my share of 5/14" floppies to make them 2 sided. Didn't always work, but I was cheap enough to keep trying.
Ahhh, those were the days. Kids today have no idea!
(Hey, get off my lawn!)
first off, i will not get off your lawn
second, i remember destroying many 5 1/4" floppies making them double side writable on an old ][gs
the only reason was at that time we had one 3" floppy and one 5 1/4" floppy and copying disks had to go through 5 1/4" intermediaries
then the local school had another 3" drive go "bad" that my brother and i rebuilt and got working so we had a full 3 floppy drives working - made for some great times on mean 18
PR#5
TRO
I was more Q-Bus and RT-11. I wasn't a fan of RSTS/E or RSX as I wanted a more personal experience with my VT-100. If I was helping out friends I might pop in a DLV-11J and fire up a spare VT-52 and TSX-11 for all night coding and Adventure playing. My LSI 11/23 purred along with my RA71 and a Tally dot matrix printer.
yea, I'm a geek.
PR#5 - Is that all you got? I could PR#6 back in the day too.
But back to Macs and solid state storage, I can remember back in 1990 getting a prototype solid-state drive to try out when I was programming the Mac II. I wish I could remember the manufacturer and the size, but as I recall it wasn't big enough to hold a complete copy of System 6. I did try and move my MPW to it and it did help speed up Object Pascal compiles, but they really wanted to see if it would be good for image editing work. I can't remember what happened though...
(I said, get off my lawn you little sh*t! *kids!*)
The Mac Observer Reader Specials
- Download Typestyler, still the Ultimate Styling Tool for Internet, Print and Video Graphics. Works great in Classic with a Native OS X Version on the way. Free Tryout: www.typestyler.com
New MacPro Memory 800Mhz With Apple Spec Heat Sink - 2GB $62 / 4GB $82 / 8GB $158. Click to Maximize your Macs...
Mac observers can now play Party Poker for Mac as well as Mac casino games by going to MacPokerOnline.com.
RamJet Memory: Mac Pro FB-DIMMs: 2GB Kit $95, 4GB Kit $159, 8GB Kit $309! MacBook/Pro DDR2 4GB $118, DDR3 4GB $99! Click hereFor the latest Apple products use Ciao a comparison website to find laptops like MacBook Air. Then find the best prices on MP3 players and use our comparison tool to evaluate cell phones.
Laptop Hardware Provided by TechRestore - Overnight Mac & iPod Repairs.
