Is there an official or reliable SSD roadmap?

[mlah384]

Seems like there will be a lot of SSD improvements in 2010 (capacities, speed, etc..) but is there anything definite yet? It would be great to see a SSD roadmap....

 

[Engineer]

Sandforce controller drives should be available at the end of February or March. These will offer a big jump in speed (The OCZ Vertex Limited edition is showing up for preorder but the price is at a premium ($400+ for a 100GB model)). Also, a new Marvell controller with ramped up speeds should be showing up this month (Crucial RealSSD).

Crucial RealSSD should be on sale this month - smoking fast

With Intel/Micron joint venture, 25nm Flash "should" be available by the end of the year. Double capacities without a big (if any) price jump should be possible but we'll see how that shakes out. Also, Intel should have something by the end of 3rd quarter/somewhere in 4th quarter as far as their next generation controller/drive. I would suspect that the new Sandforce/Marvell (and even Indilinx 2nd generation Jet-Stream controller coming up (sampling this quarter)) will light a fire under Intel's ass! 😛

Other interesting things that may happen this year is DDR-NAND and 3 bit MLC from Samsung. Click me.

"Jet Stream" Indilinx 2nd generation controller

 

[Emulex]

intel rolls their own controllers - the x25-E is the next hottest model coming out.

i'm not so sure you'd want 3-bit mlc anywhere near an ssd drive

 

[MagickMan]

Sandforce is available now from OWC. Pricey, but insanely fast.

 

[RU482]

are there any drives on the market with the Indilinx Amigos controller yet?
I know it's not as fast as the barefoot controller, but is 'supposed' to be lower cost.

just curious

 

[taltamir]

there are roadmaps.
intel and micron joint venture will start mass producing 25nm chips in Q2 of this year and intel claims they will sell G3 drives based on those chips in Q4. those will feature an upgraded intel controller and new 25nm flash chips.
the sandforce and jetstream controllers have been discussed already by other users here.

 

[mlah384]

Thanks for the replies! Yeah, doubling the capacity for the same price sounds like a dream come true, especially for laptops! Are the new SSDs going to be the newer 6gb/s? or a mixture of both 3gb/s and 6gb/s?

Also, on a side note, when is USB3 going to be out?..

 

[Engineer]

There are going to be both 3Gb/s and 6Gb/s models. I'm thinking that most will be 6Gb/s that are backwards compatible to 1.5/3Gb/sec. I know that the SandForce and Marvell units are capable of running on a 6Gb/s. The Crucial article mentions it and I've read the OCZ forums posts that state that the Vertex Limited (Sandforce based) will run faster on a SATA III port.

 

[taltamir]

Thanks for the replies! Yeah, doubling the capacity for the same price sounds like a dream come true, especially for laptops! Are the new SSDs going to be the newer 6gb/s? or a mixture of both 3gb/s and 6gb/s?

Also, on a side note, when is USB3 going to be out?

doubling the capacity for the same price for THEM... (which saves even more money on high density drives because of the lack of the need of costly 3d stacking which is currently used... this is why the first G1 intel 160GB drives were so expensive).
Intel cut the cost by half with the G2 yet prices went down less than 33%. And mostly because of competition from indilinx.

Since this actually increases performance, I expect that intel will want to charge more for it despite it costing half as much or even less to produce, and will only drop prices if competition forces them to.

 

[Orubasarot]

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