Thursday, July 2nd 2009
Green-House Expands SSD Lineup with New IDE Drives
Japanese manufacturer Green-House recently announced lines of internal and portable SSDs. The company now announced two new IDE SSDs, in 1.8 and 2.5 inch form-factors. Both the 1.8 inch GH-SSDxxGP-1yA and 2.5 inch GH-SSDxxGP-2yA (where "x" is the capacity amount in GB, "y" being S or M, denoting SLC or MLC NAND flash type respectively) use the aging parallel ATA interface, and come in capacities of 16, 32, 64, and 128 GB.
The 1.8 inch drive's SLC variant offers read/write speeds of 65/55 MBps, while its MLC variant offers speeds of 60/35 MBps. The speeds of the 2.5 inch drive shows a simlar trend. The SLC variant provides speeds of 70/60 MBps, with the MLC variant trailing it at 60/40 MBps. While the 1.8 inch drive uses a ZIF ATA interface, the 2.5 inch drive has a standard 44-pin IDE interface. Sales will begin soon in Japan. While not exactly making a mark with its speeds, the SSDs could use durability and low access-times as their selling points for aging notebooks with the older interface.
Source:
Green-House
The 1.8 inch drive's SLC variant offers read/write speeds of 65/55 MBps, while its MLC variant offers speeds of 60/35 MBps. The speeds of the 2.5 inch drive shows a simlar trend. The SLC variant provides speeds of 70/60 MBps, with the MLC variant trailing it at 60/40 MBps. While the 1.8 inch drive uses a ZIF ATA interface, the 2.5 inch drive has a standard 44-pin IDE interface. Sales will begin soon in Japan. While not exactly making a mark with its speeds, the SSDs could use durability and low access-times as their selling points for aging notebooks with the older interface.
17 Comments on Green-House Expands SSD Lineup with New IDE Drives
IDE???? Really IDE??? That is like dropping a LS1 engine in an Ford Probe. Yeah, you force it to fit, but everything else will limit its power anyway, so what was the point.
Granted, the SSD will use less power and lower latency, but the Read/Write speeds are about the same as most current IDE lappy HDD. I don't know, maybe I am being narrow minded, but it just seems to be a rather expensive upgrade that will not yield enough improvement to warrant that cost.
At any rate, these are IDE for older notebooks and PMPs and such. They wouldn't make them if a market didn't exist for them. And it's not the read write that will increase performance drastically, it's the heavily reduced latency.
In fact, I'd like to know If I could get one of these IDE 1.8" drive to work in my old 4th gen iPod.
There are software/vendor specific versions to some industries which are designed for heavy duty and have some unique features not seen in normal laptops. I believe this is the market where this HDD is aimed at.
For example car diagnostics. Im sure SSD's will or already are put into these maybe even without any mainboard changes because theres no need for that. But Im sure garages will love the shock resistance of an SSD :)
While reducing the latency will help, which I am sure I stated before, but read/write speed is still important. Especially when it done often and on large files. Besides, my primary issue is still the COST. I still say the increase in performance is not worth the price of an SSD for a system old enough to need this type of drive.
Keeping that in mind, someone with a system that old will not be looking for a $250+ upgrade, so I really don't think there is a market for these.
iPod, should work just fine....until the SSD "delete" issue comes up, then you would need to format it and re-sync the iPod.....not that a big a deal.
There IS most definitely a market for these. There are still plenty of embedded platforms that use IDE, not to mention many PMP's and so on. There are a great many OEM's that could use this. Individual upgraders are only a very small percentage of sales in objects of this nature. Again, they wouldn't produce them if the market for them didn't exist.
As far as the read/write speed, they write just as fast, if not faster than the current 2.5" IDE HDD's, but are several orders of a magnitude faster at random access. It's a speed upgrade, no matter how you look at it.
The other 2.5" IDE drives on the market that compare to these speed wise, go for around $125 for a 32GB MLC model. So, even for an upgrader, the price isn't prohibitive.
And for the last time, I didn't say their wasn't a market for it. I merely voiced my opinion this was not a good idea and cost (no matter how non-restrictive) just out weighs the benefits to me.
You want faster, here you go.
www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820609392
They get Faster.
You said the upgrade would be useless. I disagree with you.