The SSD Review @ CES – Day One Summary

Its about 7:30am and the start of Day 2 at CES and I am sitting in the room with very little sleep. For anyone who has never experienced CES or even Las vegas previously, much like I, there is simply no way to describe it.

We began yesterday bright and early with registration at CES followed by our attendance at Storage Visions and a great meet with the Reps from Crucial/Micron/Lexar.

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While there, Peter Carcione from Super Talent made his way down and we sat and talked about some very exciting stuff of which we our readers will be in for a great surprise in the very near future.

We also met with Hitachi, Viking Storage, and OCZ while there before rushing off to a meet at the Venetian with a case company brand spanking new to the US named Fractal Design. I have to admit that this meeting shocked the heck out of me because they take their business seriously starting from the ground up. They are a Swedish company and the framework of their cases is of Scandinavian design from the ground up.

From there, we rushed to the ‘Invite Only’ Samsung Press Conference where there was a line up of hundreds outside and I have to admit there was just a tinge of relief being escorted in to such a meeting and seated only a few rows from the stage. It gives us just a bit of confidence that things are moving in the right direction and, in fact, our first meetings today are with Samsung once again.

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From there, we rushed to the Corsair Press meeting where we learned of the soon to be released Marvell controlled SSD and got some piks of the Corsair Team. Then it was off to the Gigabyte Press Conference and this was a war zone.

Do you think we are kidding? Take a look at this! This was one heck of a party although we didn’t win one of the two grand prizes of the G-1 Killer or P67A-UD7 motherboard.  Thank you Irene! The goodies they threw out were absolutely amazing along with the food and company.

Our last stop of the evening was at the Zotac/Kingston/Zalman/OWC Party in the penthouse of Palms Place and the view was breathtaking as was the food and company! We had a great talk with the ‘big Chief’ of OWC and their staff and expect some exciting things from this area in the near future.

We couldn’t close this off without out speaking of the unspoken; those silent moments after you ask a question and it everyone is scrambling for just the right answer. LET ME SAY IT HERE!!!! This is going to be a very exciting year in the SSD world and the entry of the Marvell controller from two oems yesterday was just a start.

Pair this with the SandForce recently delayed release of the SF-2000 which has been just slightly released and we can definitely say that March is going to be a much more important time in the world of SSDs than CES is here today. let me throw out one other little teaser. Intel has definitely NOT let the cat out of the bag yet! Their future release is as closely guarded as the Gigabyte G-1 was here.