Alienware, a leading supplier of high-performance personal computers for enthusiasts and gamers, announced on Tuesday that it would install solid state drives (SSDs) in certain of its powerful notebooks. The SSDs will enable extreme performance of storage on those machines.
“Alienware’s new flash-based solid state drive solutions dramatically accelerate performance for mobile storage applications. From blazing load times to rock-solid durability, all the essential features that customers look for in a notebook are maximized in Alienware mobile systems loaded with solid state drives,” said Bryan de Zayas, associate director of product marketing at Alienware.
Alienware will install solid state drives into its Area-51 m9750, Aurora m9700 and Area-51 m5550 notebooks. In addition to single drive configurations, the Area-51 m9750 and Aurora m9700 are first to market with a 2x32GB RAID 0 dual SSD configuration, while also offering dual drive options that combine a 32GB SSD and a 200GB 7200rpm storage drive.
Alienware Area-51 m9750 is a 17” wide-screen notebook powered by Intel Core 2 Duo processor, up to two Nvidia GeForce Go 7950 GTX graphics cores in SLI mode, up to 4GB of memory and so on. When equipped with top-of-the-range hardware and 2x32GB SSD in RAID, with a Blu-ray disk drive and Windows Vista Ultimate operating system, the machine costs $6648, whereas with a 32GB SSD and a 200GB HDD, the notebook costs $6348.
Alienware Aurora m9700 is a 17” wide-screen notebook powered by AMD Turion 64 X2 processor, up to two Nvidia GeForce Go 7900 GS graphics cores in SLI mode, up to 2GB of memory and so on. When equipped with top-edge hardware and 2x32GB SSD in RAID, with a DVD burner and Windows Vista Ultimate operating system, the machine costs $4562, whereas with a 32GB SSD and a 200GB HDD, the notebook costs $4262.
By not utilizing any moving parts and not needing to spin up to search for data, solid state drives run quieter, consume less power and find data more quickly than traditional spinning hard drives. But the main advantage of SSDs is its much higher performance compared to typical hard disk drives, something, which clients of Alienware are looking for on the first place.
Comments currently: 5
Discussion started: 07/26/07 09:07:50 AM
Latest comment: 07/30/07 07:00:47 PM
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1.
PATA or SATA connection?
[Posted by: Joz | Date: 07/26/07 09:07:50 AM]
2.
Alienware is way overpriced for the performance. Yeah, top of the line blah blah, but if you build a system youself, you can save a s*itload of money instead of buying their pimped systems.
[Posted by: nuff | Date: 07/26/07 01:43:55 PM]
3.
I guess they are doing it to increase capacity.
Or are there really any performance benefit to raiding SSD ?
[Posted by: silver | Date: 07/26/07 11:52:50 PM]
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SSD's should do amazingly well in RAID.
They perform near their max no matter what the pattern (high or low I/O, random or sequential, etc) where as mechanical drives really only shine with large sequential reads. When two mech drives are in RAID-0, you're really just upping the high-end of the drive as they still can perform poorly with random reads.
SSDs - good performance across the board, and two of them just makes it better :D
[Posted by: Jizzler | Date: 07/30/07 08:02:56 AM]
4.
People do not understand that throughput and accessing times are two different things. People always think throughput, but accessing times provides better performance on terms of loading programs faster. SSD will load programs significantly faster, but their throughput will be lacking. Consumer grade SSD has problems that is not counted for such as power being disconnected sooner than expected or cell damage from too much use. NAND Flash chips have limited writes, so SSD is not ok for computer users. Good SSD cost thousands of US dollars, so the versions that Alienware is including in their selected notebook computer models will be of poor quality. SSD from bitmicro are a lot better because they have been spending their efforts to provide SSD to governments. SSD is ok, but the quality of the device needs to be looked at better instead of drooling over the spec.
I recommend do not get it unless you do not mind backing up your SSD every day to a mechanical drive which is a lot easier to extract data if it fails.
I do not work at bitmicro or getting paid to say their name. I just know which one is better and which is not.
[Posted by: linuxnerd | Date: 07/30/07 07:00:47 PM]
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