Samsung announces a Flash storage device that aims to completely replace the traditional hard drive in some mass market mobile computers. The 32 GB solid state disk (SSD) drive comes in a 1.8" form factor and reads data at more than twice the speed of hard drives.
While the SSD's capacity of 32 GB cannot compete with traditional hard drives that currently offers up to 80 GB space, it offers superior performance and power consumption features that are likely to make the device the ultimate storage solution in some applications such as ultra-mobile computers, Tablet PCs and performance notebooks.
Advantages Of SSD :
The SSD technology has three major benefits over hard disks. The first is that data access is faster. This could be seen when the SSD-based laptop was booted up alongside the same-model machine with a hard disk. The desktop appeared on the screen of the SSD laptop in about 18 seconds while the hard-drive-based computer took about 31 seconds to reach the same point.
The second advantage comes in durability. Because there are no moving parts in the SSD, it is much better at withstanding shock and much more unlikely that data will be lost if the laptop is dropped.
The third major advantage is that it works silently, said Yun. However there is a downside.
Salient Features :
The SSD will read and write data at 57 MB/s and 32 MB/s, respectively. The Flash disk would be about twice as fast as the latest 1.8" hard drive generation, which was measured at a read speed of 24 MB/s.
The acceleration is most likely not enough to enable instant-on computers, but we would expect Windows computers to cut the system boot time at least in half.
Pure performance is only half the story of a SSD; the drive's light weight (15g), noiseless operation and a reduced power consumption may be even more important in most mobile applications.
Samsung says that the Flash disk consumes only 0.1W when not in use and just 0.5W under load. For comparison, a typical mobile hard drive consumes somewhere between 1W and 2W of power in seek, read and write processes and between 0.2W and 0.8W when idle.
The SSD is promised to consume 95% less power than a hard drive. In a common model that assumes that a hard drive consumes about 10-20% of the battery power, the SSD could add about 20-40 minutes of operating time in a notebook that runs about 4 hours on one battery charge.
Pricing & Availability :
Don Barnetson, director of Flash marketing at Samsung said that "pricing of Samsung's SSDs will be market determined, based on the cost of the underlying flash components at time of shipment. The assembly cost of the SSD is very small in comparison to the flash component cost, thus we believe it to be an attractive medium for customers who choose to take their notebooks to the next level and go entirely solid state."
He mentioned that Samsung "does not expect to replace 50 - 60 GB hard drives with SSDs soon, due to flash's price premium." Intstead, the company is aiming for the sub-notebook market that typically requires 8 - 16 GB capacities. In this segment, SSDs are believed to "be cost effective over the next 12 months," he said.
Flash memory costs around $30 per gigabyte; the memory needed for the 32GB SSD drive works out to about $960, before any other costs are taken into account. Samsung thinks there are some military or industrial customers that have specialist applications that would benefit from the SSD and so might be more willing to pay a premium.
Samsung did not provide a specific introduction date of the drive, but mentioned that it would offer 32 GB SSDs "soon." There was no detailed information on how much the drive will cost.
