Hasta La Gadget!

It’s difficult to thrive in the solid-state drive world. Unless you’ve got just the right controller and flash memory, most performance-minded PC users will rarely give you a second glance. Samsung muscled its way into that narrow view with the SSD 830 last year; it intends to lock our attention with the new SSD 840 and SSD 840 Pro. The Pro’s 520MB/s and 450MB/s sequential read and write speeds are only modest bumps over the 830, but they don’t tell the whole story of just how fast it gets. The upgraded MDX controller boosts the random read access to a nicely rounded 100,000IOPS, and random writes have more than doubled to 78,000IOPS or 90,000IOPS, depending on who you ask and what drive you use. The improved performance in either direction is a useful boost to on-the-ground performance, as both AnandTech and Storage Review will tell you. We’re waiting on details of the ordinary triple level cell-based 840 model beyond its 120GB, 250GB and 500GB capacities, although there won’t be an enormous premium for the multi-level cell 840 Pro over existing drives when it arrives in mid-October — the flagship line should start at $100 for a basic 64GB drive, and peak at $600 for the ultimate 512GB version.

Filed under: Storage

Samsung SSD 840 Pro caters to speed seekers with faster random access originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 24 Sep 2012 21:16:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Sony has set a new memory card speed record, achieving a whopping 168MB/s from its next-gen XQD S-Series cards targeting HD video and high-res photographers. The 64GB QD-S64 and 32GB QD-S32 cards use a PCI Express Gen interface to hit an identical 168MB/s read and write rate, meaning it takes just 3.8 minutes to shuttle across 32GB of data to your computer.

It also means a big boost to photographers looking to shoot multiple frames at speed, without hitting a data transfer wall. Sony claims it slotted one of the cards into a Nikon D4 and managed a whopping 108 shots in ten seconds.

Sony doesn’t make any specific claims about what sort of bitrate video you can capture to the S-Series cards, but with 168 MB/s to play with there should be no problem filling it up with high-def footage. You’ll probably need a Thunderbolt card reader to make the most of the transfer rates copying footage back to your PC, the company says.

The new Sony XQD S-Series will go on sale July 11 in Japan, priced at around 60,000 yen ($754) for the 64GB model and 40,000 yen ($503) for the 32GB model. Expensive stuff, but speed costs money.

Sony hits 168MB/s with whippet-fast XQD memory cards is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
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