OCZ Technology has announced its collaboration with SandForce on its next-generation mainstream and enterprise solid state drives (SSD).

Solid state drive (SSD) controller start-up SandForce has closed US$21 million in series C funding. Led by new investor TransLink Capital, the round also included new investors UMC Capital, LSI, Red Maple Ventures, Darwin Ventures and A-Data Technology.

Intel will release a US$120 solid-state disk (SSD) drive positioned as a server "boot drive" with only 40GB of capacity, but the drive could also be used in low-end laptops PCs and netbooks.

SanDisk has admitted that far not all solid-state drives (SSDs) that are on the market right now are really reliable, which is why many of them are never used inside branded personal computers.

Seagate's first 2010 fiscal quarter (ended October 2, 2009) brought cheering news and a better outlook as its numbers continue to recover and it beings sampling its solid state drive (SSD) with OEMs.

The major supplier of NAND flash silicon invested "millions" in Fusion-io, said Fusion-io President and CEO David Flynn, though he declined to give a more specific figure. The two will jointly evaluate technology for new applications of solid-state storage.

Price is still a huge barrier for solid state disks (SSD) in the enterprise, but for some datacenters the math already makes sense.

Samsung's new SSD conforms to the new mini-SATA (mSATA) interface, and is about one-quarter the size of a 2.5-in SSD.

"We spend many months developing and then fine-tuning the controller and firmware technology for our SSDs, working very closely with most of the major PC OEMs..."

For the quarter ended Aug. 28, Smart Modular reported a loss of US$289,000 compared with a loss of US$3.53 million a year ago. Gross margin rose to 21.4% from 15.5% on the price gains.

"Of course every transition to a new process has its problems," stated one source who requested anonymity. "We just weren't expecting it to be this slow."

The organization responsible for Serial ATA has announced the formation of a mini-SATA spec, suitable for small-form-factor SATA drives and mini SSDs. The mSATA connector will still transmit up to 1.5Gb/s or 3Gb/s SATA signals, but do so in a smaller connector.

The SSD market has been one of several factors that have boosted demand for NAND flash memory and, as a result, boosted NAND flash prices, too. While this trend will likely continue to benefit Micron and SanDisk, it is equally likely to work against STEC in the longer term.

The serial-ATA (SATA) SSDs, from Samsung Electronics, are aimed at supporting virtualized environments and I/O intensive applications.

Pliant Technology has released its first series of enterprise-class solid state disk (SSD) drives based on a proprietary ASIC design that the company claims can handle - without using any cache - more than twice the input/output operations per second as the top competitive drives.

The 50-page report from research firm Objective Analysis said that Braidwood's flash memory is less expensive to install because it resides directly on the motherboard and will offer all the same benefits of an SSD at a lower cost.

SSD is breaking into the mainstream due to the proliferation of models and the lower prices that have come in the last year from increased competition and improved production processes.

Cloud computing and flash-based storage, two fast-emerging IT technologies, are driving each other forward as users of Internet-based services like social networks demand near-real-time access to ever-growing amounts of data.

The Flash Memory Summit brought a range of opinions on the state of the NAND industry, scaling, 3-bit-per-cell and solid-state drives (SSDs).

Memory chip makers will offer more sophisticated flash drives for smartphones - technology that will be comparable to the solid-state drives (SSD) found in laptops today.

Eli Harari, founder, chairman and chief executive of SanDisk, made the predications during a keynote. He also warned that the NAND industry is at the "crossroads," as there is a "disconnect" between future capacity requirements and demand.

"On the DRAM side, there are shortages of DDR3 SDRAM due to surprising demand in the server and other markets...The price and demand picture for NAND are also improving," said Brian Shirley, VP of Micron Technology's memory group.

A technologist from Sun Microsystems has commented NAND vendors are going down the wrong path by racing each other in process technology--at the expense of customer needs. He was also critical of SSDs for servers, saying the emerging technology is still too expensive.

Intel said it had issued updated firmware for the Intel X25-M consumer SSDs that resolves the password bug. The firmware is available on Intel's Web site.

Toshiba has begun volume shipments of solid-state drives ranging up to 512GB in size. The drives are built on a 43nm manufacturing process using multi-level cell (MLC) technology.

OCZ Technology has confirmed it will release its Colossus solid-state drive (SSD) in the next couple of weeks, delivering the first 3.5-inch form factor SSD with 1TB of capacity.

Dubbed single mode level cell (SMLC) technology, Fusion-io says products using the enterprise class flash offer a cost-effective MLC-based solid-state solution with the endurance and performance of SLC at a much lower cost-per-gigabyte.

The Torqx SSD line is one of Patriot's latest releases designed with Patriot's new cutting-edge technology that adds 64MB of DRAM cache in conjunction with its current equipped NAND technology.

SandForce has announced a new family of solid-state disk (SSD) processors that the company claims will allow lower-cost, commodity NAND flash memory to be used in data center operations. The disks will also be faster and more reliable for use in mobile applications, the company said.

Western Digital has announced that it has completed a US$65 million cash acquisition of SiliconSystems, Aliso Viejo, California, a supplier of solid-state drives for the embedded systems market.

Three years ago, as head of Toshiba's (TSBAa.BE) power business, Norio Sasaki orchestrated the tech conglomerate's $5.4 billion acquisition of Westinghouse's nuclear-power-plant business. Now, as Sasaki prepares to take over the president's post, he will have to show the same willingness to take chances as he tries to help overhaul the company after its biggest-ever expected annual loss.

Samsung expects solid-state drives to reach price parity with hard-disk drives within the next few years amid steep annual price declines in flash memory chips.