Solid state drives (SSDs) are quickly becoming a staple in today’s laptops for their ability to quickly boot up the operating system, a process that at one point took a few minutes. Today’s SSDs boot your OS in under a minute. Whether you run Windows, Mac OS X or Linux, an SSD is an ideal place to host your OS, but until recently, SSDs were rather expensive. Plextor has revealed their SSD product lineup at CES this week.
The M5M mSATA SSD runs at a speedy 6 Gbps and is about an eighth the size of a standard 2.5-inch drive. This drive was designed for ultrabooks with limited space. It features the new Marvell 88SS9187 controller, and Toshiba’s new 19nm Toggle NAND. The drive comes in 64GB, 128GB, and 256GB capacities, and all of them have read speeds of up to 540 MBps. The sequential write speeds, however, are 160 MBps, 320 MBps, and 430 MBps respectively. The drive’s mean time between failures is 2.4 million hours. It will be available in the first quarter of 2013.
Smartphones and mobile devices will also have an SSD coming their way: the NGFF SSD. It’s even smaller than the mSATA drives, and is only 51 x 30 x 5 mm, which makes it around the size of a smaller thumb drive, but thinner. The drive is available in 128 GB and 256 GB capacities with sequential read and write speeds of 700MBps and 550MBps, respectively. The new NGFF SSD will also be available in the first quarter of 2013.
If you think the other devices were still too large, the eMMC is the size of a small fingernail. The drive is available only in embedded applications such as digital cameras, smartphones, and tablets. According to Plextor, an eMMC is a standardized method for bundling the controller into the flash die, and now includes features such as secure erase, TRIM, and high-priority interrupt. It offers up to 128GB of storage space with high performance, and is expected to be available in the second quarter of 2013.
Plextor also revealed 2.5″ standard enterprise SSDs that use Single Level Cell (SLC) NAND and Multiple Level Cell (MLC) NAND. Plextor says the SLC drive focuses on high endurance to offer extreme reliability. They can both guard against elements such as high temperatures and power outages. They are available now, but there is no word as to when they will hit our shores.