Samsung doubles its solid state drive capacity

 

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By Alun Williams

Posted on 28 Mar 2007 at 12:37

Aimed at compact laptops, personal navigation systems and digital camcorders, Samsung has doubled the capacity of its solid state drives (SSDs) based on NAND flash memory. It has unveiled a 1.8in 64GB model.

The drive is based on 8Gbit single-level-cell (SLC) NAND technology, and will - claims Samsung - provide significantly higher performance over conventional SSDs.

According to the company, the read and write performances of the new SLC flash-SSD have also been increased (by 20 percent and 60 percent respectively) over the 32GB flash-SSD Samsung introduced last year.

Specifically, Samsung states a read and write speed of 64 MB/sec and 45 MB/sec, respectively, contrasting it with a 15MB/sec and 7MB/sec performance of a traditional 80GB hard-disk drive.

Pricing for the drive, which weighs 15g, has not been announced.

The general advantages of a solid state drive include increased reliability (no spinning platter), quieter operation and quicker data access, and Samsung describes its drop-in replacement for a hard disk drive as a 'secure and reliable means of storing personal or work-related data'. The downside has been cost, but as memory prices have tumbled this has become less of an issue.

It was back in May 2005 that Samsung announced the creation of its first solid-state disk drive based on NAND Flash memory technology. At the time, 16GB was the maximum capacity.

Note that back in January, Sandisk announced a 1.8-inch solid state drive (SSD), which was also touted as a replacement for the standard mechanical hard disk drive. This, however, had a 32GB capacity.

Sony and Fujitsu, as well as Samsung, have already launched laptops that use solid state storage instead of traditional hard disk drives.

In related news, for flash memory and hard drives, Fujitsu, Hitachi, Samsung, Seagate and Toshiba earlier this year announced the formation of the Hybrid Storage Alliance. This is intended to 'promote and educate industry enablers and influencers about the benefits and advantages of Hybrid HDDs', which employ a flash memory buffer to take the load off the disk platter.

Samsung has scheduled mass production of its new SSD drive to begin before the summer of this year. It was announced at the company's annual Mobile Solution Forum in Taipei.