ssds

Sony’s Vaio line of laptops and ultraportables has always been full of lookers, but the new Vaio Z is the sort that turns heads.

Not only is it thinner and lighter than the Macbook Air, but it packs a pretty ridiculous punch by carrying a full-power, 2.7GHz Core i7 processor (capable of hitting 3.4GHz), 8GB of DDR3 RAM, a USB 3.0 port, and Thunderbolt connectivity.

That’s not where the power stops, though.

ServerWatch: "Have you ever heard the terms, head crash or stiction? Better yet, have you ever experienced either of them?

These terms are just two of the unhappy occurrences associated with mechanical disks."

The H Open: "Linux 2.6.38 contains patches to improve the scalability of VFS that has been the topic of much discussion for the past six months and that Torvalds himself was waiting for.

Ext3 and XFS now support batched discard, which is interesting for SSDs, while Btrfs and SquashFS support additional compression technologies."

Linux Magazine: "This month we have been testing a new kernel patch named bcache that takes SSDs and uses them as a cache for block devices (with the typical device being hard drives).

This article wraps up the testing with an investigation of the throughput of large files and summarizes all the testing to date"

OCZ's IBIS SSD is the first solid state drive to make use of this new HSDL interface. The IBIS is capable of delivering 750MB/s read/write speeds and up to 125,000 random write IOPS.

IBIS SSDs will be available in a complete spectrum of capacities ranging from 100GB to 1TB. HotHardware Review

SSDs can offer big speed improvements over hard drives—assuming you know what to do with them. Here's how to get the most bang for your storage buck.

The inventive $200 Antec DF-85 case is loaded with fans, room to work, and ways to hot-swap hard drives and SSDs.

Internetnews: "Seagate, the world's largest hard drive vendor, is expanding into new territories with the announcements of solid-state drives (SSDs) and a revamp of its mobility drive business to include the smallest drive yet.

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Linux Magazine: "The last article talked about the anatomy of SSDs and the origins of some of the their characteristics.

In this article, we break down tuning storage and file systems for SSDs with an eye toward improving performance and helping overcome some of the platform’s limitations."

LWN.net: "The flash translation layer in a modern, full-featured SSD resembles a log-structured file system in several important ways.

Extrapolating from log-structured file systems research lets us predict how to get the best performance out of an SSD.

In particular, full support for the TRIM command, at both the SSD and file system levels, will be key for sustaining long-term peak performance for most SSDs."