What does $65 million buy you these days? How about a company named SiliconPower which is a big force in the SSD market? Western Digital thought it was a good deal. They purchased the company yesterday and they will be rebranding it as WD Solid-State Storage. They will produce drives for “netbook, client and enterprise markets”. Let’s hope WD brings some fast, affordable SSDs into the fray.
This might sound like we’re bragging, but Benchmark Reviews has been testing Solid State Drive products longer than most consumers have known them to exist. On the other hand, performance enthusiasts have been keeping notes on SSD technology for a while now. SSD products are not mainstream, not yet, but that day isn’t very far off anymore. Lower power consumption and heat output are the least impressive benefits of Solid State Drives. The real payoff is in the practically instant response time and high-performance throughput.
OCZ may not have created the Solid State Drive, but they’ve done more to bring SSD technology mainstream than any other company in the industry. Once SSDs could outperform their HDD counterpart, it was all about price and capacity. The OCZ Core Series helped to offer affordable Solid State Drive technology to the masses, but capacity and stuttering became new issues. Adding up to 64MB of Elpida DRAM to the buffer has permanently solved stuttering problems, making raw performance the last bottleneck. An Indilinx ‘Barefoot’ internal controller commands the bank of Samsung K9HCG08U1M DRAM modules, allowing the OCZ Vertex Series SSD to offer an impressive capacity with unmatched performance. Benchmark Reviews tests the reaction time and bandwidth performance for the OCZSSD2-1VTX120G against over two dozen other products in this article.
Since first making a commercial public debut at the 2007 Consumer Electronics Show, Solid State Drives (SSD’s) have been a topic of hot discussion among performance enthusiasts. These nonvolatile flash memory-based drives feature virtually no access time delay and promise a more reliable storage medium with greater performance while operating at a fraction of the power level. Moving into 2008, SSDs became a consumer reality for many performance-minded power users. Now that 2009 has revealed promising industry support for Solid State Drive technology, we should hope that mainstream acceptance moves faster than DDR3 SDRAM has.
Back in November 2007, after experiencing the SuperComputing Conference SC07, finding Solid State Drives on sale anywhere was a real challenge. One year later, and online stores are offering dozens of SSD models at reasonable prices. Solid State Drives are rapidly changing the computing landscape, and many enthusiasts are using SSD technology in their primary systems to help boost performance. Benchmark Reviews has tested nearly all of the products available to the retail market in this sector, and several do well while others fall flat. It used to be that performance was the largest hurdle for mass storage NAND Solid State Drives, followed by stability, and later price.
Solid State Drive products are no longer restricted to bleeding edge hardware enthusiasts or wealthy elitists. Heading into 2009, SSD storage devices were available online for nearly $2 per gigabyte of storage capacity while the most popular performance desktop hard drive hovered just above $1/GB. While most consumers are waiting for that day when SSD costs the same as HDD, they seem to be forgetting how Solid State Drives have already surpassed Hard Disk performance in every other regard. Our collection of SSD reviews is a good starting point for comparing the competition.
According to a Q1 2008 report by the semiconductor market research firm iSuppli, the SSD market will grow at an annualized average of 124 percent during the four-year period from 2008 until 2012. iSuppli now projects SSD sales to increase by an additional 35 percent in 2009 over what it projected last year, 51 percent more in 2010, and 89 percent more in 2011, and continue to show dramatic increases in subsequent years.