Sun Microsystem has laid out more of its plans for using solid-state drives in its servers, which it says will help customers to reduce energy costs and improve application performance in the data center.

Toshiba said on Tuesday it planned to start production of solid-state drives (SSD) overseas to cut costs and increase output, beginning assembly in the Philippines by the middle of the year. The Nikkei business daily reported Toshiba aimed to generate 100 billion yen ($1 billion) in SSD sales in the year starting April 2010, more than 10 times the current figure.

SanDisk and Toshiba has announced the co-development of multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash memory using 32nm process technology to produce a 32Gb 3-bits-per-cell (X3) memory chip for products ranging from memory cards to solid state drives (SSD).

Recent production adjustments for NAND flash memory won't bring the desired effect of stabilizing and increasing prices, a research report published by Baird suggests. Manufacturers will have to brace for further production cuts and price declines in the second quarter, while consumers should benefit from this scenario through cheaper flash memory devices, especially in SSDs.

Seagate Technology on Monday shook up its executive ranks as the No. 1 maker of computer hard-disk drives replaced Chief Executive William Watkins with the company's chairman, Stephen Luczo. The move comes less than a week after Seagate said it would cut about 10% of its US-based workforce.

Mainstream SSD drives tend to be limited to 80 GB or less for affordability. There are drives that have larger capacities, but the cost is significantly higher than a similar HDD, which is what is keeping SSD drives out of the hands of many at this point. Despite this, capacities are ramping up fast!

Toshiba says it will debut a 512GB solid state hard drive during the 2009 Consumer Electronics Show.

Samsung Electronics is upgrading its memory technology and manufacturing processes, which could lead to price drops for the solid-state drives that are becoming more widely used in laptops. Samsung will introduce three-bit chips with a capacity of 64Gbit in the first half of 2009, manufactured using a 30nm process technology.

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies and Intel are teaming up to produce solid-state drives (SSDs) for servers and workstations, the companies said Tuesday. Under terms of the deal, drive maker Hitachi GST will only use NAND flash chips obtained from Intel in its high-end SSDs. The two companies will jointly develop drives that use Serial Attached SCSI and Fibre Channel interfaces, with products expected to hit the market in 2010, they said. Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

Japan's Toshiba said it planned to increase its output of flash memory-based solid state drives (SSDs) 15-fold over the next two years, aiming to control half of the global market for the new memory devices.

SanDisk has released details of its new flash management technology, ExtremeFFS (Extreme Flash File System) which has the potential to extend endurance and accelerate SSD random write speeds by as much as 100 times compared with existing systems.

...The debate boils down to how much speed you need," Crump said. DRAM storage is faster, but that's at a cost that's much higher than Flash-based storage. For example, 2TB of Flash-based storage costs about US$180,000, compared to about US$1 million for the same amount of DRAM-based storage. "DRAM is faster, but if flash does it for you, why spend the extra money?" he asked. In that case, it depends on the needs of the business, he said...

The company claims the RamSan-440 is the world's first non-volatile RAM-based solid state disk (SSD) to sustain up to 600,000 IOPS (input/outputs per second) and deliver up to 512GB of storage capacity in a 4U rack-mount chassis. It's also the first SSD to use RAIDed NAND Flash memory modules for data backup, and the first system to incorporate Texas Memory Systems' patented IO2 (Instant-On Input-Output) technology.

Despite the hype surrounding the promising technology, SanDisk is placing blame on Windows Vista for not providing enough of a speed boost when using SSDs... ...(but) It is quite true that SanDisk's SSD are woefully subpar in performance when running Windows Vista. Numerous benchmarks from around the web have shown SanDisk SSDs getting outpaced by the competition.