A-DATA, Toshiba Grab World SSD Capacity Lead at 512GB

HANNOVER, Germany -- Companies such as Samsung, SanDisk and Western Digital have been the usual suspects who leap-frog each other every few months as capacities continue to improve in flash memory drives. However, at least for the time being, there is a new current champion.

Flash memory maker A-DATA Technology March 4 took the world lead over all those larger companies when it announced at CeBIT 2009 here the availability of its 512GB XPG 2.5-inch SSD for laptops and netbooks.

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A short time later, Toshiba also announced the launch of its own 512GB flash drive. Toshiba’s 512GB SSD for notebooks and laptops has maximum sequential read speed of 240MBps and maximum sequential write speed of 200MBps.

A-DATA is a Taiwan-based maker of SSDs, memory cards and DRAM modules. The new 512GB SSD delivers a transfer rate of up to 230MB/s and 160MB/s for read/write, the company said.

The world's largest solid-state semiconductor maker, Samsung, last January introduced a new enterprise-level 2.5-inch, 100GB solid-state flash drive that can handle heavy-duty applications such as video on demand, streaming media content delivery and online transaction processing while consuming substantially less power than a standard spinning disk drive.

Samsung's new enterprise SS805 SSD will start shipping this month. It is designed as an alternative to traditional 15K-rpm hard disk drives.

An SSD generally can process IOPS (input/output per second) more than 10 times faster than the fastest 15K-rpm SAS disk drive available for transactional data workloads.

It can process as much as 100 times the number of IOPS per watt as a 15K-rpm 2.5-inch SAS HDD in applications where higher performance and lower power consumption are both needed.