AMD Enter SSD Market

Semiconductor manufacturer Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) have partnered with OCZ Storage Solutions to create new AMD Radeon-branded Solid State Drive (SSD) it has been revealed.

The AMD Radeon R7 is currently available to purchase in the US and is available in 120GB, 240GB or 480GB capacities. UK consumers will be able to purchase the drives from various online retailers from the end of August.

The 120GB model is expected to retail at £74.99 with the 240GB and 480GB models expected to cost £124.99 and £224.99 respectively.

It has been rumoured that AMD would be entering the SSD market for some time but their decision to produce a solid drive in conjunction with OCZ Storage Solutions (themselves part of the Toshiba group of companies) was only recently confirmed.

AMD’s SSD uses Toshiba’s A19 MLC NAND flash process and boats a write endurance of 30GBs per day. The drive is also able to write data at an impressive 530MBs per second and read data at 550MBs per second.

Roman Kyrychynskyi, AMD’s director of memory, appears certain that the drive will be a success noting that his employer’s Radeon brand is already ‘synonymous with quality and performance amongst PC gamers,’ going on to add that AMD will bring this reputation to the SSD market and that the company’s latest drive offers a perfect blend of ‘performance, reliability and affordability.’

Why is my Hard Drive Clicking?

When a hard drive begins making any kind of noise other than a reassuring and subtle whir, it’s safe to say that there’s a problem that needs to be addressed. When a drive makes an audible clicking sound, however, the problem is also likely to be significant. Why is this?

In order to write and read data, all hard drives use what are known as heads. These write data on to what is referred to as a platter (essentially a disk covered in a magnetic surface) when you save it and read it from the platter when you want to view it. If a hard drive begins to click, it almost certainly means that these key components are not functioning correctly meaning that your hard drive can no longer read the data that is stored on it.

Sometimes the clicking can be ascribed to a failed circuit board. On other occasions, these sounds can be down to a series of errors having resulted in the drive attempting to ‘reset’ itself and the heads repeatedly loading and unloading or the actuator (the device that moved the drive’s head) frequently stopping the head from moving. Under such circumstances, it is generally possibly to recover the data held on the drive.

Unfortunately, clicking can also be a symptom of the far more serious problem of a head crash. Under these circumstances, the drive’s heads come into direct contact with its platter. As discussed previously, the top layer of the platter is comprised of a magnetic material and it is in this material that data is stored. As the platters in modern hard drives spin at speeds of up to 75 miles per hour, the contact between the two creates friction which, in turn, produces a significant amount of heat that will, over time, damage the magnetic material that coats the platter and on which the drive’s data is stored.

Put simply, if your drive is clicking you should contact Fields Data Recovery today.

HGST Create the World’s Fastest SSD

A subsidiary of Western Digital, HGST, have unveiled the world’s fastest SSD at this year’s Flash Memory Summit.

The drive utilises architecture not seen in any previous solid drives. A PCIe interface is used to deliver superior performance which, HGST have claimed, is unprecedented within the SSD sector. The drive is able to deliver three million random read I/Os per second (IOPS) of 512 bytes each, with a random read latency of 1.5 microseconds.

HGST’s chief technology officer Steve Campbell has claimed that the company’s latest SSD serves as proof of that fact that HGST ‘sets the pace of the rapidly developing storage industry.’

Campbell also noted that this super-fast SSD has come about because of years of research and the development of more advanced technologies which have been designed specifically to speed up enterprise applications.

The drive’s speed is not only attributable to its PCIe interface, though, but also improved volatile memory.

The volatile memory used within HGST’s SSD consists of what is known as Phase Change Memory and boasts a capacity of 1GB. Phase Change Memory is a high-density form of volatile memory that is significantly faster than the NAND flash memory that is currently used in the vast majority of SSDs available today.

Neither the price of the drive or a release date have been made available though reports indicate that it is likely to cos t in the region of £600 and is due to be released in the third quarter of 2014.