bit-tech.net

Team Group displays prototype 128GB SSD

Published on 16th March 2007 by Richard Swinburne

SSD is going to make a big impact this year and many memory manufacturers, including Team Group, are jumping on board.

It seems like solid-state storage is really trying to make a serious move into the market this year, with Sandisk already showing us its 32GB SATA drive.

We popped along to see Taiwanese memory manufacturer, Team Group Inc. – a brand that’s popular among enthusiast circles – to find that the company was displaying its latest solid-state drive.

Like the Sandisk, Team Group’s SSD uses a SATA interface and is the same size as a standard 2.5” notebook hard drive. However, this one boasts four times the capacity of Sandisk’s drive and also comes with an IDE interface too.

The drives on Team Group’s stand were not functional though, and the company didn’t commit to a timeframe on when we can expect these capacities to appear in the solid-state market.

Finally, Team’s solid-state drives don’t perform as well as Sandisk’s on paper, with only 25MB/sec read and 18MB/sec write speeds. However, company reps were quick to say that the drives would be twice as fast by the time they make it to the market. That date hasn’t been confirmed yet though, and neither has the expected retail price.

Discuss in the forums.

11 Comments

Discuss in the forums Reply

Colonel Sanders 16th March 2007, 07:09

Looks nice! However, I'd prefer a 3.5" version with SATA only. Also, I kinda doubt my wallet will like the price of one of those. . . Just pure speculation, but I doubt the SSD will be cheap.

L J

Paradigm Shifter 16th March 2007, 10:28

128GB is a little more useful than 32, although if the read/write speeds are that low it's going to be a pain. :( (I know, they said they'd double...)

Bet it's gonna cost an arm and a leg, though, if the Sandisk 32GB drive is £200...

...£1000 for a 128GB HDD...?

Woodstock 16th March 2007, 11:10

now thats intersting, more compition and larger size cant complain there

FooSai 16th March 2007, 12:43

What's the point in having an IDE version?... Surely anyone with money for things like this at the moment, won't be using old tech in other places?

ralph.pickering 16th March 2007, 14:12

Quote:

Originally Posted by Paradigm Shifter
Bet it's gonna cost an arm and a leg, though, if the Sandisk 32GB drive is £200...

...£1000 for a 128GB HDD...?

Even if it comes out at twice the price of the Sandisk unit it'll be a bit too pricey for most people. Besides - for a laptop #i'd say 32Gb is usually enough - you can always use a big USB drive to dump your data onto when you get home / back to the office.

Jamie 16th March 2007, 14:48

Sooner we get these in laptops the better

Snaek 16th March 2007, 15:10

I agree that 128GB is overkill for a laptop, unless you use it as your main PC. For me, Sandisks 32GB drive would be plenty for a laptop.

rowin4kicks 16th March 2007, 15:14

i cqant wait for a 64gb version for about £150 so i can fit it into my mac! that would rock, the battery times would shoot up and there would be literally no noise coming out of it! cant wait!

DXR_13KE 16th March 2007, 15:32

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jamie
Sooner we get these in laptops the better

what he says.

Kipman725 16th March 2007, 20:26

Quote:

Originally Posted by FooSai
What's the point in having an IDE version?... Surely anyone with money for things like this at the moment, won't be using old tech in other places?

most flash can be directly connected to IDE wheras stata needs conversion chips. (hence the cheapo CF-IDE adaptors but expensive and rarer Cf-Sata adaptors).

cool drives :D (the 128gb one is bigger than my os drive.. where almost there :D )

metarinka 16th March 2007, 21:54

Is there a big advantage to jump to these in desktop computers (not considering price which is bound to fall). If memory serves me right the non volatile flash based memory has a specific number of read/write cycles before the data can no longer be stored there. the cycle time is high enough that it's not an issue for that text document you create and use once amonth, but what about windows swap files and other large files that are read and write numerous times? I hear they have algorythms to swap data around the drives so it wears evenly esepcially since theres no negative to fragmenting data and no associated seek times, but I see issues with long term use as an OS drive.
or is the read/write cycles getting comparable to the life expectancy of a platter based HDD?