Last December, Toshiba announced a new range of SSD using MLC Flash NAND engraved at 43nm and with a maximum capacity of 512 GB. After some delay with mass production only beginning in the second quarter, Toshiba has announced the imminent delivery of these new SSDs.
The 2.5" versions have been announced with 64, 128, 256 and 512 GB capacities and the 1.8" versions with 64, 128 and 256 GB capacities. Read speeds have been announced at 230 MB/s and writes at 180 MB/s and from what we can see Toshiba are using a proprietary controller. Does this mean new competition for Indilinx, Intel and Samsung? A fourth decent MLC solution?
Following on from the Vertex, Vertex Turbo and Agility, OCZ have launched a fourth series of SSD based on the Indilinx Barefoot controller. With 64 MB of cache like the other models, these new 60 and 120 GB SSDs use slower and therefore cheaper MLC Flash NAND memory which should allow OCZ to set even more competitive tarifs for these Solid 2 OCZs.
In terms of performance, OCZ has announced reads of 125 MB/s and writes of 80 MB/s for the 60 GB version and writes of 100 MB/s for the 120 GB version. The 120 GB versions of the Vertex Turbos, Vertexes and Agilities have respective reads/writes of 270/200, 250/180 and 230/135 MB/s. There is then a significant difference in performance and it remains to be seen if the price difference will be of the same order…
IOPanel has just published photos of the forthcoming P55 Express from MSI, the Big Bang. The particularity of this card is that it has an additional chip manufactured by Lucid that is positioned between the processor’s inbuilt northbridge and the card’s three PCI Express x16 slots.
This Israeli startup in which Intel has invested, is proud of being able to use its Hydra Engine technology to combine the performance of several graphics chips. The chip seems to be a 200 series Hydra, though this hasn’t yet been announced.
It remains to be seen if the chip integrated in the MSI Big Bang will indeed work towards this goal: in fact with P55, SLI and CrossFire is already supported and the only real interest of this sort of solution – if it does indeed really work – will be to pair up AMD and NVIDIA chips, something that you can’t currently do. The chip may for example be used as a multiplier for PCI-Express lanes, as is already the case with the nForce 200 for example. Anyway, let’s hold our horses until further proof!
