As Computex is getting ready to open its doors in and around Taipei, the capital of Taiwan – more products are leaking to the surface. Thanks to a Spanish e-tailer PCComponentes, we learned of one such product coming to the market comes from the States, in the form of Crucial’s Solid State Drive (SSD).

Crucial’s Retail box for the MX100 SSD

MX100 line of SSDs will mark the beginning of the end for memory chips produced using the 20nm process. While the 128GB drive will carry the 20nm MLC NAND memory chips, 256GB and 512GB models will feature brand new 16nm NAND flash from Micron. According to Micron,

“Our 16nm NAND technology is not only the leading Flash process, but it is also the most advanced processing node for any sampling semiconductor device. It improves on our award-winning planar cell design to create a highly compact storage solution.

Our advanced 16nm technology is also enabling a new 128Gb MLC device for applications that demand high-capacity storage in small form factors— including consumer SSDs, removable storage (USB drives and Flash cards), tablets, ultrathin devices, mobile handsets, and data center cloud storage.”

Micron’s 16nm MLC NAND Flash memory chip

Translated into regular English, a single 16nm chip features no less than 16GB of storage space. Should you wish to integrate this into an ultrabook of the latest type, you’ll be pleased to know that the drive in fact is a 7mm thick 2.5″ drive, featuring an 9mm adapter as well (if you buy a retail packaged unit).

The company stayed clear of LSI / Avago / Seagate / SandForce one more time, and utilizes Marvell’s 88SS9189 controller. This means the drive will connect using a convetional SATA-III (6Gbps), meaning the drive cannot achieve higher transfer speed than 600MB/s up and down. Naturally, the real stated numbers are far lower than that.

All three drives are capable of sequential reading of 550MB/s. Write speeds vary by drive (given the amount of memory chips used for the drive). 128GB SSD comes with the smallest number of NAND flash chips and it achieves barely 150MB/s write, while 256GB drive tops at 330MB/s. The big hitter is the 512GB model, with 500MB/s write speed.

These drives won’t be fastest in the class, but the 16nm process might help 256 and 512GB drives to achieve longer life span.

The post Crucial to Launch SSDs with 16nm Memory Chips appeared first on VR World.

At the same time, SSDs aren’t exactly the “silver bullet” of storage, since these drives are subject to slowdowns as the time goes by. This was especially visible with MLC drives, which can be pretty darn slow (depends what NAND controller is being used), and your expensive investment can turn into a headache. You can thank this to the fact that operating systems aren’t optimized for SSD technology – W7 will be the first operating system that brings specialized read/write techniques for the SSD drives.

Thanks to tireless newshound Jan Loncik, I learned that there is a solution to that in a form of software called HyperFast. Diskeeper Corporation released an advanced SSD optimization utility that uses proprietary algorithms to optimize reading and writing on the SSD. Just like InvisiTasking technology inside Diskeeper utility for hard drives, HyperFast uses similar optimization techniques to cache the often used space in available system memory and optimize positioning of the data on NAND chips.

HyperFast is doing nothing else but helping the Windows OS to access the data on the SSD as soon as possible. In order to prove their claims, they took 8GB SSD from entry-level netbooks (we’re talking about slowest possible SSD) and simulated real world scenario, compressing six months of usage. The claimed result is 5.9x faster reads, 19.5x faster writes, 3.9x faster random reads and 9x faster random writes.

Claimed improvements on el cheapo SSDs for netbooks...

We will keep the opinion for ourselves until we get the opportunity to benchmark the drive in real world scenario, using different SSDs. But for all of you SSD owners out there, there is a utility that could help you out… the price of HyperFast is 25 bucks if you want to buy Diskeeper 2009.

UPDATE JAN 28. 2009, 9:20 PM CET: As you can read from the comments, we have received some interesting comments from competing companies. For optimizing operation of Solid State Disk drives, you can also try following links: SSD Tweaker (project at SourceForge). You’re also welcomed to try a trial version of Perfect Disk 10 Professional.

The post UPDATED: Diskeeper releases SSD optimization utility appeared first on VR World.