Mtron Develops New 128GB 1.8-inch High Capacity SSD

[malware]

South Korean SSD manufacturer Mtronstorage Technology announced today that it has completed the development of a new 1.8-inch ZIF-type SSD (Solid State Drive) for laptops. Mtron's new SSD with Single Level Cell (SLC) Flash memory supports PATA (ZIF-type) interface and has a maximum reading speed of 120MB/s and writing speed of 100MB/s, which is more than 6 times faster than the current 1.8-inch HDDs. Mtron expects to ship the new SSD in capacity of up to 128GB. Worldwide premiere for these drives is set for April this year.

http://www.techpowerup.com/img/08-02-18/mtron128gbssd-lg_thm.jpg (http://www.techpowerup.com/img/08-02-18/mtron128gbssd-lg.jpg)

Source: Mtron (http://www.mtron.net/english/PressRoom/PressRoom.asp?sid=PressRoom&xact=view&idx=171), Electronista (http://www.electronista.com/articles/08/02/18/mtron.128gb.ssd/)

[Ravenas]

Starting to look like SSDs are the wave of the future.

[EastCoasthandle]

Yeah, it's all that and a bag of chips but how much :shadedshu. This is where the rubber mets the road.

[tigger]

Pity their still so expensive.Mebbe in 5yrs we'll all have large ssd's.

[moto666]

SSDs Are the Future!
In 2Years the price's are lower and the drives larger!

The future are laptop/sub laptop format's with no moving part's!
With instant boot ups (Like my PSP)

Like Asus EEEPC

[jothy]

man, that's a fast drive.

[Darksaber]

See if the Macbook Air would simply use a 64GB variant of this drive, than the halfass one available now for a whooping price...then I would have bought one already...

cheers
DS

[Darkrealms]

But how is the reliability? I'm not too keen on a lot of these companies that are coming out with this technology. I've never heard of a lot of them. There is also the possibility that these could quit after so many writes, there are so many companies that don't have history (“assurance of quality”).

[PVTCaboose1337]

See if the Macbook Air would simply use a 64GB variant of this drive, than the halfass one available now for a whooping price...then I would have bought one already...

cheers
DS

Apple would still charge the same though. They would not lower the price cause they are evil. :D

[Nitro-Max]

I said this a while ago lol these things will take over and will be reliable because theres no moving parts.Bring it on i cant wait!!.

[Darkrealms]

I said this a while ago lol these things will take over and will be reliable because theres no moving parts.Bring it on i cant wait!!.
The problem with a lot of low end cheap chips is that they are limited on the number of writes they can handle. Thats why I had a comment about quality and unknown companies. Harddrives are constantly being accessed for both read and write.

[Nemesis881]

I said this a while ago lol these things will take over and will be reliable because theres no moving parts.

good point and big companies will make them even better.

no moving parts means obviously less noise but does that mean less power/heat as well?

[hat]

This renders RAID0 obsolete. RAID0 increaces performacne so much because the drive is limited by moving parts... one of these, no moving parts... RAID0 wouldn't yeild much of a performance increace, I imagine.

[Mussels]

This renders RAID0 obsolete. RAID0 increaces performacne so much because the drive is limited by moving parts... one of these, no moving parts... RAID0 wouldn't yeild much of a performance increace, I imagine.

it makes raid 0 godly :)

no moving parts means no delay, just more bandwidth - if one does 100MB/s, four will do 400MB/s - its quite attractive if you need the speed.

Shock resistant, no heat concerns, defragmentation is no longer an issue...

[beyond_amusia]

The problem with a lot of low end cheap chips is that they are limited on the number of writes they can handle. Thats why I had a comment about quality and unknown companies. Harddrives are constantly being accessed for both read and write.

That's true. If I remeber correctly, some people's older USB thumb drives are starting to fail because they only have a 10,000 read\write lifetime. Let's hope that will improve a lot before SSDs replace hard drives.

[Mussels]

That's true. If I remeber correctly, some people's older USB thumb drives are starting to fail because they only have a 10,000 read\write lifetime. Let's hope that will improve a lot before SSDs replace hard drives.

i saw it mentioned a while back, that was related more to the chipset of the drive than the memory units themselves, and that SSD's were updated to support longer lifetimes - it was a few months ago when reports of SSD drives started coming out that i saw it here.

[beyond_amusia]

i saw it mentioned a while back, that was related more to the chipset of the drive than the memory units themselves, and that SSD's were updated to support longer lifetimes - it was a few months ago when reports of SSD drives started coming out that i saw it here.

I think it should mandatory that companies put the expected lifespan of flash products on the package. I know that if my flashdrive died I'd be pissed.

[Mussels]

I think it should mandatory that companies put the expected lifespan of flash products on the package. I know that if my flashdrive died I'd be pissed.

Yeah. I've never had one die yet, so the amount of use is pretty high for a flash drive - but hard drives are another matter.

[kwchang007]

I think it should have a counter, but think of it you use the writes less because of no defrag. Also I believe it's writes that are counted, not reads, but I'm not 100% sure. Good step in the right direction though.

[Mussels]

i'm not sure an exact number would help, but wouldnt that be in SMART data anyway? Seems like a good place to throw a counter, i think mechanical drives have 'hours of operation' in there.

[largon]

Most SSDs have a built-in algorithm that divides the writes ~ evenly on the chips so that no cell get's hammered all the time and they also tag the dead cells thus the life-expectancy of the device is infact several years under heavy usage.
And yes, it's just the writes that count on flash reads don't cause wear-down.

[Mussels]

Most SSDs have a built-in algorithm that divides the writes ~ evenly on the chips so that no cell get's hammered all the time and they also tag the dead cells thus the life-expectancy of the device is infact several years under heavy usage.
And yes, it's just the writes that count on flash reads don't cause wear-down.

So its like good old fat32, where bad sectors merely get disabled. That works well, imo - as the files would be in ram while being written, an error would simply write it somewhere else. While the drive could get smaller over time, the odds of data loss are practically none.

[Nitro-Max]

You cant really compare this to what you get in a small thumbnail size flash usb drive.

On somthing like this were size isnt resticted as much they can use bigger and better quality chips.

Ok nothing lasts forever and its life will come to a end one day but i can see these lasting a lot longer than the average pen drive and harddrive.

and the speed over the avarage HD should be blisteringly fast.

[hat]

That's true. If I remeber correctly, some people's older USB thumb drives are starting to fail because they only have a 10,000 read\write lifetime. Let's hope that will improve a lot before SSDs replace hard drives.

lol the pagefile would be rape

[1c3d0g]

Amazing they could squeeze all that tech into a 1.8" form factor. This should go over well with the ultra-portable crowd... :)

[Mussels]

Amazing they could squeeze all that tech into a 1.8" form factor. This should go over well with the ultra-portable crowd... :)

imagine a 3.5" sized drive with 6 of these packed in :P Mmmm raid.

[Darkrealms]

It was actually a consern when the drives were first being built. Some of the companies since then have posted updates. Don't remember which one but one of them claimed over 100 years on "average" hard drive usage. So the bigger/well known companies are claiming improvements and write reliability. Its the smaller new companies that I'm not seeing as many guaranties from . . .
Only writes count as largon said. The data can be read forever (???), its the changing of the "data" on the chips that slowly wears them down.

[pp7]

I just bought a 32gb Mtron 6000 ssd recently and just can't seem to get the random reads beyond 8400 iops. I'm running Ubuntu gutsy on a dell dimension 9200 with an intel core duo 1.86ghz cpu. Mtron claim that this drive can achieve 16000 random iops at 512b random reads. Am I not interpreting the numbers properly or just missing something? Can it be the built sata controller (NVIDIA nForce4) that is slowing things down? I've used iozone and my own custom made program to measure random io speed over say 16gb but can get nowhere near 16000 iops.