Intel: SSD SATA 3.0 in 2008 Hitachi & Fujitsu: Hybrids of little interest

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Intel: SSD SATA 3.0 in 2008   Posted on 21/09/2007 at 21:36 by Nicolas

	During a keynote presentation at the IDF Pat Gelsinger, Senior Vice President at Intel, announced that the firm would produce SSD drives and unveiled the specifications of a first model. Equipped with an SATA 3.0 Gbits/s interface, Intel promises not only a power consumption at least 4.5 times inferior to classic hard drives but doubled writing performances (compared to what we don’t know). Our colleagues at AnandTech specify that it could arrive starting next year and certain details suggest it will be destined for servers. It’s then a rather logical evolution because Intel produces flash memory and already offers SSDs, however, relying on a USB interface. Moreover, this will allow them to better compete with another flash giant, Samsung, which currently sets standards in the domain of the Solid State Drive.

Hitachi & Fujitsu: Hybrids of little interest   Posted on 21/09/2007 at 20:48 by Nicolas - source: CNet

	Already criticized by Lenovo engineers, the poor interest of the current generation of hybrid disk drives is now openly mentioned by certain manufacturers including Hitachi. Richard New, director of the Japanese firm’s subsidiary, Global Storage, declared without hesitation that the initial versions didn’t offer the performances expected by consumers. According to him, the problem comes from the limited quantity of flash memory, usually around 256 MB, while ideally 4 GB would be necessary to efficiently reduce consumption and startup time. Moreover, Joel Hagberg, Vice President of Marketing at Fujitsu Computing Products of America, adds that hybrids currently allow the reduction of startup time from 28 to 21 seconds and that he couldn’t envision anyone paying for that alone. All of this then explains the weak demand and doesn’t really motivate certain manufacturers such as Western Digital. In short, before seeing the mass arrival of hybrid drives, the price of flash memory will have to be reduced, and this will not necessarily be easy in the near future even if Intel feels obliged to restructure itself in this sector.