Hasta La Gadget!

One of the great many announcements of CES 2011 was Lexar’s new pair of Class 10 SDXC memory cards, one sized at 64GB and the other touting a spectacular 128GB capacity. The two performance — minimum transfer speeds of 20MBps — and storage enhancers for DSLRs and camcorders have now started shipping, asking for a measly $200 and $330, respectively. Those are steep price hills to climb, to be sure, but they’re peanuts compared to the initial $400 and $700 MSRPs that Lexar was touting back in January. And hey, that Professional label adorning the new cards isn’t there accidentally either, Lexar’s offering a limited lifetime warranty with each storage cell. Full press release and locations where you can buy the new SDXC lovelies await after the break.

Continue reading Lexar now shipping 128GB and 64GB SDXC cards from the future straight to your door

Lexar now shipping 128GB and 64GB SDXC cards from the future straight to your door originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 15 Mar 2011 16:17:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Indilinx, the company responsible for designing the Barefoot SSD controller, has today agreed to hand its future over to the capable lads and ladies of OCZ Technology in exchange for $32 million in common OCZ stock. The companies have announced a definitive agreement for the chipmaker’s acquisition, which OCZ is performing in order to gobble up a set of 20 yummy patents and patent applications while also expanding its presence in embedded, hybrid storage and industrial markets. Indilinx will continue its current operations, including providing controllers and firmware to other OEMs, and OCZ too will continue to use others’ wares, namedropping its long-term partner SandForce as among the outside companies that will be supplying it with SSD goodies. So it’s business as usual unless and until this partnership spawns some lightning-fast combination of software and hardware that forces us to hear that cursed “exclusive” word again. Ah well, best of luck of luck to them.

Continue reading OCZ buys Indilinx, probably has designs on building its own SSD controllers

OCZ buys Indilinx, probably has designs on building its own SSD controllers originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 14 Mar 2011 23:08:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Before last week, we’d gone well over a year without discussing solid state storage purveyors Fusion-io — and their extremely expensive and expeditious flash drives — but things seem to have been ticking along just fine behind the scenes. While the company’s unlikely to have sold many ioDrives to good old Joe Consumer, its upcoming IPO application features an impressive list of corporate clients, highlighted by Facebook, its biggest customer, IBM, HP, and Credit Suisse — the latter using Fusion-io technology to speed up the mathematical alchemy of making money where there was none before. Taken together with strategic investments from Samsung and Dell, these deals paint a rosy outlook for the Woz-employing startup, however it’s worth noting that profitability is still a decent way away. Fusion-io’s rapid growth is costing it more than it’s making at the moment, which is most likely to have catalyzed its current decision to go public and collect its biggest round of investments yet. Let’s hope the investor prospectus includes a forecast for when things like the ioXtreme might actually become affordable to non-millionaires, eh?

Continue reading Fusion-io IPO filing discloses list of prestigious clients, led by Facebook

Fusion-io IPO filing discloses list of prestigious clients, led by Facebook originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 10 Mar 2011 05:25:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Been wondering how that new 6Gbps SATA interface and Marvell controller have been treating Intel’s latest SSDs? The answer, it turns out, is really rather nicely. Faced off with OCZ’s awesomely quick Vertex 3 drive, the 250GB SSD 510 from Intel more than holds its own, occasionally flashing ahead and taking the lead. Opting for Marvell’s processing chip has improved Intel’s sequential performance, but has actually led to it taking a ding on random read speeds — the latter being arguably more important on a day-to-day basis. Still, this $584 drive is one of the finest the consumer world has yet had to feast upon and should encourage high expectations from Intel’s 25nm G3 storage units, which are still to come. As to having the extra Serial ATA bandwidth, we’ll leave it to Anand from AnandTech to summarize: “these next-generation SSDs not only use 6Gbps SATA, they really need it.”

Intel’s SSD 510 reviewed, measures up well against Vertex 3 originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 04 Mar 2011 11:27:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We didn’t think the previous generation of SSDs, topping out at around 280MBps read speeds, were in any way hampered by their celerity, but Intel’s bringing the future to us whether we like it or not with its new 510 Series SSDs. These Marvell-controlled flash storage drives will zip data to your processing unit at a rate of 500MB per second and write anything you send back at a clip of 315MBps. That’s mostly thanks to the 510 being one of a new breed of consumer SSDs with a 6Gbps SATA interface, which has effectively removed a bottleneck from the performance equation and uncorked the extra vroom now contained within. When bought in bulk, a 250GB SSD 510 will cost you $584, while the slightly slower (450MBps read, 210MBps write) 120GB model will set you back $284. Full press release after the break.

Continue reading Intel outs SSD 510 Series with 6Gbps SATA interface, 500MBps transfer speeds

Intel outs SSD 510 Series with 6Gbps SATA interface, 500MBps transfer speeds originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 28 Feb 2011 14:54:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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