Buffalo is back with a new SATA SSD range with the SHD-NSUM. You can choose between the storage capacities ranging from 30GB to 32GB, 60GB, 64GB, 120GB and 128GB. It’s equipped with a mini USB port so you can use it as an external hard drive for easy data transfer or to clone a machine before the new SSD drive is installed. Buffalo said an increase in speed by 30% to start, then hope that the performance in real life will reflect the same thing. Apart from that, prices are not known, nor their reading/writing speed respectively.

Silicon Power has just announced their new 256GB SATA II 2.5-inch SSD drive, which can hold twice more than the previous 128GB. Besides the extra storage space, almost everything remains the same, including a maximum reading speed of 165 MB/s and writing speed of 95MB/s. Silicon Power also states that the SSD has a latency of 0.2 milliseconds, with a new controller for quick access to data. As usual, there are other “specifications” such that resistance to falls, shock and vibration. Too bad that the price and availability are not known, but it should remain in the same price range as those of other similar SSD drives on sale now.

According to an Australian reseller, Intel will launch this month a new version of its X-25E 64GB SSD. Rather interesting in the sense that it could display a reading speed of 250MB/s and a write speed of 170MB/s … therefore announced on 22 February at a price of $790.

Like Corsair, Kingston Technology enters in the field of solid-state drives (SSD). Apparently, Kingston will not the only one because it will co-brand their products with Intel (which plans to release the 320GB SSD this fall). Kingston offers two ranges of SSD – the SSDNow E and SSDNow M series. The first will be for enterprise servers, while the second will be for professional laptops. The price is not known yet. Nice to see more and more manufacturers of memory module interest in SSD – hope that the competition will also reduce prices.

Toshiba is the first to release 2.5-inch SSD drives of 512GB through its 43 nanometers assembly process and particularly the cell multi-level storage which doubles the current record of 256Go which was reached in early this year. You will not only have more storage space, but the starting up is also faster, capable to reach a speed (theoretical) of 240MB/s in reading and a speed of 200MB/s in writing. Its lifetime is about one millon of hours (114 years). Other specifications include AES encryption to secure your data. It will certainly cost a fortune.

Believe it or not, there still exist companies in this world which believe that through these difficult times, people have money to throw out the window? Buffalo’s latest LinkStation Mini NAS with a price of $1,150 (106 000 Yen) is the perfect example!
For such a price, the Japanese manufacturer has decided to replace the two SATA hard drives of 2.5-inch by 2 SSD drives of 120 GB, which produces, depending on your RAID configuration, up to 240GB of storage space.

And you will certainly say that this is a lot of money for so little storage space, and you’re quite right! But while your classic NAS has a noise level of 19dB, our new SSD MiniStation is simply silent with only 2.3db …
Is this enough to justify such a price?

A few weeks ago, Samsung had shown its willingness to invest more in this market segment of ’solid state disks (SSD), or ‘flash memory’ drives.
On November 20, the Korean group announced that it has crossed the record production volume of SSD with a capacity of 256 gigabytes of storage – components including laptop computers or not…

Samsung said that the performance of these new memory ‘chips’ are twice higher than the previous models of 64 and 128 GB

The manufacturer said that it has reached a 10% reduction in the gap between rates of reading in sequential mode to 220 MB/s and writing in sequential mode of 200 MB/s. No price for the moment.