On October 26 Intel announced that it had begun offering a new firmware for their second-gen X25-M SSDs. The new firmware offered support for the SATA TRIM command, a feature in Windows 7 and Linux which helps SSDs maintain consistent performance over the long haul. Less than 24 hours later, however, and Intel pulled the firmware in response to a flood of reports claiming the upgrade process was responsible for bricked drives. Fast forward to today, and Intel has announced that it has replicated the issue and is working on a fix.

“Intel has replicated the issue on 34nm SSDs – X25-M – and is working on a fix,” said Alan Frost of Intel’s NAND Solutions Group.

“Intel is pursuing the resolution of this as a high priority. Intel is seeking direct feedback on this issue from members of the [Intel Support Community]… asking them to send their drives directly to Intel to expedite the analysis of the issues. This action will enable us to more quickly generate a resolution for this issue.”

Frost went on to imply that the firmware–version 02HA–was not to blame, but rather the v1.3 flashing tool.

Super Talent announced yesterday the world’s first flash drive designed to interface with the emerging USB SuperSpeed (USB 3.0) standard.

Dubbed the RAIDDrive, the lineup will include 32GB (STU32GSSK), 64GB (STU64GSSK) and 128GB (STU128GSSK) parts. The new devices turn out speeds between 200MB/s and 320MB/s, depending on the attachment method. The product is also backwards with prior USB standards per the official 3.0 spec.

Measuring 95 x 37 x13 mm, the SuperSpeed drive is a truly portable drive. Like most USB drives, it requires no separate cable. It plugs directly into any USB port. Although this drive will work in USB 2.0, it delivers transfer speeds up to 200MB/sec only in USB 3.0 ports. Using a separate UAS Protocol driver with a USB 3.0 port this SuperSpeed drive can reach up to 320MB/sec transfer speeds.

The product is scheduled for retail availability beginning in December.

In the wake of Gigabyte’s USB 3.0/SATA 6Gbps announcement, ASUS has announced today the impending launch of P55 mainboards sporting the same connectivity options.

ASUS today announces a range of enhanced motherboard solutions that deliver true USB 3.0 and SATA 6Gb/s data throughput. The ASUS Xtreme Design P7P55D-E Series motherboards feature onboard support while the ASUS Xtreme Design P7P55D Series utilize ASUS U3S6 PCIe x4 expansion cards to deliver the latest USB and SATA data transfer capabilities. Equipped with the Intel® P55 Express chipset, the P7P55D-E / P7P55D Series support the latest LGA 1156 socket for Intel® Core™ i7/Core™ i5 Processors. Additionally, they also feature exclusive Hybrid Technology—Hybrid Processor, Hybrid Phase, and Hybrid OS—offering intelligent performance enhancements, active cooling, and rapid online access.

With two of the world’s largest mobo makers preparing products with the new I/O specs, it seems nobody is interested in waiting on Intel which has delayed USB 3.0 support until 2011.

Netflix integration in Windows Media Center 7

The HTPC, or Home Theater PC, has been an elusive beast. For years, people have bandied about the concept of building a PC that is a dedicated home entertainment hub rather than a general-purpose computer. Up until very recently, building an HTPC has been a difficult journey to find the sorcerous combination of parts and software that would enable exactly everything one wanted the PC to do.

Luckily, everything has recently started coming together. Retail availability of key technologies such as efficient power supplies, cool and quiet processors, HDMI-enabled and 1080p-capable GPUs, massive storage capacities, and–perhaps most importantly–an HTPC-optimal OS have all come together in a ballet of technology which can provide a seamless and graceful HTPC experience.

We have put together an amazingly high performance and relatively low cost HTPC just in time for the 2009 holiday season. While we did operate with a liberal cost philosophy when it came to component choices, we feel that this remains an affordable project for those in the market for a full-featured home entertainment hub.

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Crucial has begun offering a new firmware update which will add ATA TRIM support to the company’s lineup of M225-branded solid state disks.

The new firmware is stamped with version 1819 and delivers nearly 20 fixes and enhancements, in addition to TRIM. Supported models include:

Crucial M225 64GB (CT64M225)
Crucial M225 128GB (CT128M225)
Crucial M225 256GB (CT256M225)

The outfit also warned users that they may have to juggle firmware in certain circumstances:

Firmware 1711 – Important Notice: If your Crucial M225 Solid-State Drive has firmware 1711 you must first revert back to the 1571 firmware prior to updating to the new 1819 version. Please download the 1571 firmware and follow these instructions.

What is ATA TRIM?

An SSD’s total size is composed of thousands of smaller units called “blocks,” which average about 512k these days. SSDs deliberately try to spread written data across all of these blocks so as not to prematurely wear out the memory chips, which can only accept a limited number of writes. This technique is called wear leveling. Over time, wear leveling guarantees that every block on the SSD will become filled with a hodgepodge of active and deleted data. Once this happens, new writes force the drive to perform an intensive process called the read/erase/modify/write cycle.

An REMW cycle forces an SSD to scan its blocks for deleted files, copy active data to cache, purge the deleted files, append the new data to the data in cache, and then write the cache back to the new free space. This is called write amplification, and in serious cases, it can force an SSD to shuffle up to 20GB of data just to write 1GB of new information. This causes significant performance issues for SSDs.

The solution to this problem is to let SSDs physically erase files the moment they are deleted in the OS, and that is precisely what the TRIM command does. Windows 7 is the only Microsoft OS that supports it, and it must be used with a TRIM-compatible drive.

Intel and Numonyx are today announcing a key breakthrough in the development of Phase Change Memory (PCM) technology.

The breakthrough has enabled the partnership to develop a 64Mb test chip that demonstrates multiple layers of PCM arrays on a single die. These findings will enable future PCM-based devices to offer lower power consumption, higher capacity and greater storage density.

The company is calling the breakthrough chip a PCMS, or Phase Change Memory and Switch. The PCMS interleaves layers of thin-film PCM arrays with controlling thin-film selectors called Ovonic Transfer Switches (OTS). The sandwiched PCM and OTS layers are arranged in a crosspoint architecture and fitted to a CMOS substrate to create high-density, high-bandwidth PCM cells.
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Today Micron unveiled a new line of MLC NAND cells which it claims improves write endurance over traditional cells by 600%.

Micron’s new MLC Enterprise NAND device achieves 30,000 write cycles–a 6x increase in endurance when compared to standard MLC NAND. And for enterprise applications that are more performance driven, Micron today also introduced a 34nm SLC Enterprise NAND device that achieves 300,000 write cycles – a 3x increase in endurance when compared to standard SLC NAND.

Additionally, leveraging the full performance capability of NAND, Micron’s newest Enterprise NAND products also support the ONFI 2.1synchronous interface, delivering a 4- to 5x improvement in data transfer rates when compared to legacy NAND interfaces. Micron’s 34nm Enterprise NAND portfolio includes a 32Gb MLC NAND chip and a 16Gb SLC NAND chip that can be configured into multi-die, single packages supporting densities up to 32GB MLC and 16GB SLC, respectively.

The new cells are an evolution of the company’s 34nm NAND technology developed in conjunction with Intel Corporation. Micron will begin sampling the new products this year, and will begin volume shipments in spring of 2010.

Reality check: Micron’s definition of “standard” MLC and SLC NAND cells is nebulous at best. For example, SSD OEM Mtron offers a 32G SLC NAND product with a 5,000,000 cycle write endurance. Put another way, that’s 100GB of data erased and written to the drive every day for 85 years. That is a complete rewrite of the disk’s contents three times a day.

Even Intel’s MLC-based X25-M G2 drive is estimated to have a 31,500 cycle write endurance, which is good for 20GB of erase/write sequences a day, every day, for five years. If that’s not enough, the company has included a 100GB/day margin of error.

So, when an OEM quotes an endurance figure at you–particularly in the funky fresh world of NAND–take a look around. It might not be as impressive as it seems.

SanDisk has released a new line of flash memory products based on an X4 MLC chip design. The new design allows four bits to be stored per NAND cell, for a total of 64Gb (8 gigabytes) per chip.

Initially revealed in February, the 4-BPC technology is a joint venture between SanDisk and Toshiba. In the future, SanDisk plans to use the new cells to produce flash memory products with capacities exceeding 64GB

As increases in bit density shorten NAND’s lifespan, data reliability has been a major concern for 4-BPC cells. However, SanDisk CEO Sanjay Mehrotra is confident that they have overcome any potential issues with their products saying,  “Our challenge with X4 technology was to not only deliver the lower costs inherent to 4-bits-per-cell but to do so while meeting the reliability and performance requirements of industry standard cards.”

Products based on the new cells, including standard SD cards and Memory Stick PRO Duos in 8GB and 16GB flavors, have already begun shipment.

Though chief rival Western Digital was the first to strike the 2TB mark, Seagate has gone a step further to kick out the market’s first drive built to the new SATA spec.

The spritely mechanical disk uses four 500MB platters and 64MB of cache to peg sustained transfer rates at up to 138MB/s. That’s no slouch for a mechanical drive, but it sits comfortably in the 600MB/s offered by SATA 6Gb/s.

The drive will be available in about a week for the surprisingly reasonable MSRP of $299.

It's $19.95 for Saturn's rings.

It costs as much as your entire desktop.

After a redesign and six months on the burner, OCZ has finally released its PCI Express SSD solution.

Dubbed the “Z-Drive,” the new SSD product comes in two flavors: The e84 series with SLC NAND cells, and the p84 series with MLC NAND cells. Both variants are mated to 256MB of onboard cache and plug into a PCI Express x8 slot.

On the SLC front, the e84 drives offer the choice between 256GB or 512GB, with sustained performance at or around 800MBps read and 750MBps write, respectively. SLC is slightly quicker on the draw, and that’s reflected in the 16k IOPS to the 10k offered by the MLC cells in the e84.

The MLC-based e84, meanwhile, comes in 256GB-1TB flavors and tops out at 870/760MBps for the 1TB model. As we mentioned above, the p84s offer a “mere” 10k IOPS to the e84’s 16k.

The drives are available on the US side of the pond from Amazon and other retailers for $1560-$3370 USD.

IM Flash Technologies, the joint venture between Intel and Micron, has announced volume production of 3-bit multi-level cell (MLC) NAND cells by the end of 2009.

While the current crop of flash drives and capacious SSDs use 2-bit cells, the 3-bit cell could improve capacities by fifty percent for the same physical dimensions.

IMFT has already released 32Gb (gigabit) evaluation chips that measure just 126mm². Each chip — about one fifth the size of your average postage stamp — contains nearly 11.5 billion of the new 3bpc cells.

“We see 3bpc NAND technology as an important piece of our roadmap,” said Brian Shirley, vice president of Micron’s memory group. “We also continue to move forward on further shrinks in NAND that will provide our customers with a world-leading portfolio of products for many years to come. Today’s announcement further highlights that Micron and Intel have made great strides in 34-nanometer NAND, and we look forward to introducing our 2xnm technology later this year.”

The 3bpc announcement comes just weeks after the introduction of 34nm cells which have slashed costs and improved storage density by over thirty percent. It is expected that these 3-bit multi-level NAND cells will get their sea legs in flash drives and flash cards.

For more information on NAND/flash memory, consider Icrontic’s primer entitled “The hows and whys of SSDs.”

Intel has halted sales of its new 34nm SSDs as a result of a firmware bug which renders the drive’s data inaccessible if users configure and then alter or disable a BIOS password.