Lenovo ThinkPad X300 – Benchmarked

Hothardware has benchmarked the Lenovo ThinkPad X300 against a few other laptops, and one segment focused on the speed of the X300’s 64GB Solid State Drive (SSD). The benchmarks included the Asus U6S (12.1″, Intel Core 2 Duo, Late 2007), a Dell XPS M1730 (17″), … Read more

MacBook Air and 128GB SSD: Performance/Battery Life

Anandtech has measured the performance and battery life of the Apple MacBook Air, when a 128GB Solid State Drive (SSD) is installed. Now you are saying “the MacBook Air only has a maximum size of 64GB when talking about SSDs” and normally you would be … Read more

Seagate Starts Suing Solid State Drive Makers

SeagateLooks like Seagate is starting up the lawsuits against flash memory-based Solid State Drives (SSDs, you know, the new wonderdrives going into a lot of small laptops, such as the MacBook Air or ThinkPad X300).

A few weeks ago, we ran a story Seagate’s CEO and some interesting comments he made in regards to flash-based Solid State Drives (SSD):

Realistically, I just don’t see the flash notebook sell,” Watkins says. “We just don’t see the proposition.”

But in case flash prices continue to plummet and the flash drives really do catch on, Watkins has something else up his sleeve. He’s convinced, he confides, that SSD makers like Samsung and Intel are violating Seagate’s patents.

The New York Time’s is running a story on the lawsuit::

Seagate Technology, the largest maker of computer hard drives, made a pre-emptive strike against an emerging competitor on Monday when it filed a lawsuit in federal court accusing STEC Inc. of patent infringement.

In the suit, Seagate contends that STEC’s solid-state drive products violate four Seagate patents covering how such drives interface with computers.

STEC, based in Santa Ana, Calif., makes solid-state drives for corporations and other large enterprises, a market that Seagate executives have said the company plans to enter this year. The suit was filed in Federal District Court in the Northern District of California.

STEC had this response:

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Toshiba Portege R500 – 128GB SSD

The Toshiba Portege R500 now has the storage option of a 128GB Solid State Drive. It’s one of the first to offer such a large SSD option (the R500 was also one of the first to offer 64GB SSD options). In addition to the standard … Read more

Seagate CEO Comments on Solid State Drives, Potential Lawsuit

In an interesting article over at Fortune Magazine, the CEO of Seagate, Bill Watkins, had some interesting comments about Solid State Drives (SSDs), Seagate, Western Digital, Intel and laptops like Apple’s MacBook Air: But the key thing, Watkins argues, is that SSDs are just too … Read more