Las Vegas (CA) - A-Data, a Taiwanese memory and peripheral company, has shown off prototypes of an upcoming solid-state drive for ExpressCard, IDE and SATA interfaces. Mainly built for notebook computers, the drives have capacities of 32, 64 and 128 GB.
The samples were shown to editors of the Inquirer website and they have a few pictures embedded in their article. The 32 and 64 GB drives come in 1.8" form factors while the 128 GB drive is in a 2.5" size.
Solid state drives promise to be much faster than traditional hard drives. Since there are no moving parts, the drives can reach sustained read speeds of 62 MB/s and have an access time in the sub-millisecond range. Regular hard drives typically have access times between 8 and 19 ms. In addition, SSDs promise to enhance battery life by a few minutes.
A-Data didn't specify the price, but did say that mass production should start late Q1. Both Samsung and Sandisk have announced competing 32 GB solid-state drives. Those will be several hundred dollars and we expect A-Data's drive to be at least one thousand dollars.
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