New Acer models (10-inch D150 and 11.6-inch one) will be made available under Packard Bell brand at the end of April. It is definately good to see Packard Bell coming up with new netbooks as Packard Bell stopped selling 8.9-inch Aspire One netbook sometime back.
The 10 inch model will known by DOT S and 11.6-inch model will be known by DOT M. The DOT S and DOT M will be priced at 299 Euros and 399 Euros respectively.
[via electronicpulp]
Sandforce unveiled SF-1000 SSD, which employ Sandforce’s new processor that is going to provide consumers cheap and reliable way of storing data on their computers. Thanks to its new Duraclass technology, the company is confident that it will blur away all the doubts that some people have developed about the MLC SSDs regarding their endurance, reliability and data retention issues.
They claim that their controller technology will allow the MLC (Multi Layer Cell) to be used in place of SLC (Single Layer Cell). This would reduce the cost nearly 4 times as compared to what the SLC used to cost. The company also claims its controller can improve MLC sequential read/writes to 250MB/sec. or 30,000 I/Os per second using 4k random writes.
If you do not know the difference between the SLC and MLC. Do not panic. Basically, SLC is superior to MLC as they promise better performance and more write cycles. MLC, on the other hand cost less than the SLC and generally come with higher storage capacity.
Here is the actual press release:
Breakthrough DuraClass Technology Sets New Standards for SSD Reliability, Performance and Energy Efficiency
SARATOGA, CA. – April 13, 2009 – SandForce™ Inc., the pioneer of SSD (Solid State Drive) Processors that enable commodity NAND flash deployment in enterprise and mobile computing applications, today emerged from stealth mode and unveiled its first product, the SF-1000 SSD Processor family. These highly-integrated silicon devices address the inherent endurance, reliability, and data retention issues associated with NAND flash memory, making it possible to build SSDs that deliver unprecedented performance over the life of the drive with orders-of-magnitude higher reliability than enterprise-class HDDs (Hard Disk Drives).
The SandForce patent-pending DuraClass™ technology promises to accelerate mass-market SSD adoption. Leading OEMs are expected to release both SLC (single level cell) and MLC (multi-level cell) flash-based SSDs using SandForce single-chip SSD Processors later this year. IDC expects worldwide shipments of SSD’s in the Enterprise and PC markets will exceed 40 million units in 2012, representing a CAGR of 171% from 2007-2012. (IDC, Worldwide Solid State Drive 2009-2012 Forecast Update, Doc # 216054, January 2009)
“The SF-1000 SSD Processor Family promises to address key NAND flash issues allowing MLC flash technologies to be reliably used in broad based, mission critical storage environments,” said Mike Desens, Vice President for System Design, IBM. “These innovations can be truly disruptive and will accelerate the adoption of Solid State technologies across the data center.”
DuraClass is the Difference
DuraClass technology represents a set of flash management features that work in tandem to deliver world-class SSD reliability, performance, and power efficiency that differentiate SandForce SSD Processors from standard flash controllers. These features include:
* DuraWrite™, which optimizes the number of program cycles to the flash effectively extending flash rated endurance by 80x or more when compared to standard controllers.
* Powerful flash media error correction (ECC) and RAISE™ (Redundant Array of Independent Silicon Elements), which deliver an orders-of-magnitude improvement in drive reliability versus today’s SSDs and enterprise HDDs. The result is single-drive RAID-like protection and recovery from a potentially catastrophic single flash block or die failure – all while avoiding the inefficiencies of traditional RAID.
* Wear Leveling and Monitoring, which provides monitoring of flash block operational metrics to optimize wear leveling algorithms, further extending flash endurance.
* Advanced Read/Program Disturb Management, which safeguards against errant re-programming of cells during read and program cycles and unexpected power loss.
* Recycler, which intelligently performs garbage collection with the least impact on flash endurance.
With smaller silicon geometries and the trend toward packing more bits per cell in flash devices, there has been a dramatic reduction in the cost-per-gigabyte for NAND flash-based SSDs. However, these changes have also reduced the reliability characteristics of flash devices, i.e., lower endurance, worse data integrity, and shorter data retention. DuraClass features are architected to scale and compensate for these flash shortcomings for generations to come.
“Products like the SF-1000 Family can be major catalysts for increasing SSD adoption in the enterprise,” said Jeff Janukowicz, Research Manager, Hard Disk Drive Components and Solid State Disk Drives at IDC. “These products should have a highly positive impact on efficiency and total-cost-of-ownership when used in IT applications such as virtualization, transactional databases, and automated financial trading – applications which can immediately benefit from the dramatic increase in performance and performance-per-watt that SSDs provide over HDDs.”
Enabling SSD Mass Market Adoption
The SF-1000 Family features a standard 3 gigabit-per-second SATA host interface connecting up to 512 gigabytes of commodity NAND flash memory, and delivers 30K IOPS (random 4K read or write transfers), and 250MB/s performance (sequential 128KB read or write transfers) with 100 micro-second latency. SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) connectivity is easily achieved via a third-party SAS-SATA bridge available from multiple sources. Even more impressive, SF-1000-based SSDs can sustain peak performance for 5-year enterprise lifecycles without artificial daily usage restrictions or costly over-provisioning techniques. SandForce provides software, firmware, reference designs, and complete design kits to enable OEMs to bring SSDs to market quickly.
“In spite of a deluge of offerings, SSD growth has been hindered due to confusion and concerns regarding endurance, reliability, performance and prices”, said Joseph Unsworth, Research Director at Gartner, Inc. “Products that can alleviate these quality concerns through superior flash management will play a vital role in the enterprise-grade and PC-grade SSD categories.”
Green Computing
SSDs based on the SF-1000 Family are amongst the most eco-friendly storage drives in the world as they deliver an unprecedented 5K IOPS-per-watt for both reads and writes compared to enterprise HDDs, which deliver a mere 20 IOPS-per-watt.
“With a deep understanding of both system- and silicon-level issues, we’ve integrated the right balance of reliability, performance, power, cost, and time-to-market in our SSD Processors while supporting multiple flash vendors’ technology,” said Alex Naqvi, President and CEO of SandForce. “Our products combine key processing elements with hardware automation to efficiently address the traditional shortcomings of flash memory. This allows OEMs to provide enterprise-class SSDs to the mass-market using both SLC and lower-cost MLC flash devices while delivering peak read and write performance throughout the drive’s lifecycle.”
Product Information
SF-1000 Enterprise and Mobile Computing SSD Processors will be available in prototype quantities later in the second calendar quarter of 2009. SF-1000 Evaluation SSDs and reference designs in standard 2.5” drive form factors will also be available using multiple manufacturers’ NAND flash memory. Please contact SandForce for availability, pricing and product information.
Transforming Data Storage
President of Acer (JT Wang) himself has confirmed that the Acer has been working on touchscreen netbooks, which will be made available by the end of this year. The EEE T101 is NOT going to left alone in competition of touch screen netbooks/tablets. I hope they make them with swivel display so that they can be used as tablets
[via digitimes]
Last week, B. Lebanc at Microsoft made a post about “Windows on Netbook PCs: A Year in Review” (link), where he mentioned how the netbook scene has changed from the past couple of years. He mentions,
Not only are people overwhelmingly buying Windows, but those that try Linux are often returning it. Both MSI – a leading netbook PC OEM – and Canonical – the vendor supporting the commercial distribution of Ubuntu Linux – stated publicly they saw Linux return rates 4 times higher than Windows. Why such a disparity? Because users simply expect the Windows experience.
Ouch! Linux fans are not going to like this. Folks at Canonical disagree with the Microsoft and say that the return rate is actually similar to that of Windows based netbooks. According to them, it is the quality and out-of-box experience matters the most and is responsible for the returns.
Whatever Microsoft says, they have to admit one thing that the future is very bright for Linux. Ubuntu can run on ARM processors which consume nearly 1/10th (in some cases) of what the Atom consumes. Microsoft currently has not plans to make its ‘desktop OS’ to run on ARM platform. The reason is obvious: They have Windows Mobile for that. Unfortunately, Windows Mobile is not in a situation to battle with the mighty Ubuntu.
Right now, I’m typing this post on EEEbuntu (custom UBUNTU variant) and I’m very happy with the fact that I do not have to deal with the viruses, trojans blah blah. True, the popularity of the Linux platform is not as great as the Windows platform, but it now growing at a pretty nice rate, thanks to the netbook vendors who are now supplying the certain models with some linux-distro.
Folks at pcauthority were able to get their hands on the EEE PC 1004DN, the first netbook with built-in DVD burner.
The real killer feature here is that optical drive; it’s a big departure for the netbook category, and adds backup capability and software installation possibilities that other systems lack. In addition, there’s an Eee Storage function, to wirelessly backup your system.
The 1004DN is powered by Intel Atom N280 processor clocked at @1.66GHz speed. The HDD capacity is 120GB and it comes with 1GB of RAM. Obviously, the main feature of is the DVD burner, which is surely going to catch the attention of those who did not give much attention to the netbooks due to lack of DVD burner.
Personally, I still do not see the need to have a netbook with built in DVD burner.
Click here to read the review
When we first heard about the Samsung N120’s claim that it features not 90% laptop size keyboard, but 100% laptop size keyboard, our initial thoughts were that the N120 is going to be a really wide netbook. But as per Samsung N120 official webpage, the dimensions are 10.27″(w) x 1.19″ x 7.3″ . To give you a better idea of the width, here are the dimensions of the ASUS EEE 1000H: 10.47″(w) x 7.53″ x 1.50.
This means that the N120 is infact smaller width-wise. Now, how did they manage to put in a full laptop keyboard in there? Or is it may be just a new marketing idea by Samsung.
Moblin is an open source project that is build upon the Linux platform, which is geared towards netbooks, MIDs and UMPCs. At the Linux Collaboration Summit, which was held in San Fransisco, Intel discussed its plans about the upcoming major version of the Mobilin platform. Tests of the latest Moblin 2 alpha release show that the major components (including graphics system) can start up in mere seconds. Intel is stubborn that with the new Moblin platform, 2 second boot time is infact possible.
Within last few months, we have been hearing about plethora of instant-on operating systems. But, so far no OS has been able to boot in 2 seconds. If the folks at Moblin are able to do so, it can totally change the way we perceive our netbooks. For example: People on the go will prefer to use their netbook or MID instead of using their cellphone to check their email.
Sousou, who is the managing director of the Intel Open Source Technology Center said that the aim of Moblin is to improve the quality of the Linux user experience on Atom-based devices. We say that if they can get us online in just 2 seconds, then our experience would
Visit Moblin.org
[via arstechnia]
Engadget was able to take some exclusive pictures of the Acer 11-inch Aspire one. It looks quite huge to me in pictures, much wider than I expected it to be.
Here are its specifications:
Atom Z530 + Intel SCH USW15S chipsetHere are more pictures of it:
The US release date of the EEE 1008HA is now even more closer. How can we say that? The ultra thin 10-inch netbook from ASUS has been passed by FCC. So, it will be released in the US market any day now. Although I am a huge fan of thin netbooks/notebooks, I hate the fact that there is NO user replaceable battery in the 1008HA. It just does not make sense to send the netbook back to ASUS just to get the battery replaced.
[via]
Gigabyte T1028 TouchNote netbook made its first appearance at CeBIT 2009. Its product page is now finally online at Gigabyte’s web site. The T1028 is convertible netbook or shall we say tablet, which comes with 10.1-inch screen with backlight display. You can choose between two processors: Intel Atom N270 processor running at 1.6GHz or the newer N280 running at 1.66GHz processor. It comes with 1GB RAM, an integrated 3.5G module, Wi-fi and optional WiMAX.
The Gigabyte also lets you choose higher resolution: 1366 x 768 (instead of netbook-ish 1024 x 600).
[via]
