Samsung announces NAND-based hard disk drive replacement

By Steve Malone

Posted on 24 May 2005 at 16:07

Samsung Electronics says it has created the first solid-state disk drive based on NAND Flash memory technology popular in consumer electronics and mobile PC devices.

The development opens the way to new storage options for PDAs, music players, digital cameras and mobile phones with the first applications likely to appear inside sub notebook PCs.

The Korean electronics giant says the NAND-based hard disk is based around the 8Gb NAND Flash devices it announced in September of last year, Samsung says it can build disk drives with a capacity of up to 16GB.

The company also recently announced a hybrid hard disk that is fitted with 128Mb of flash memory to act as a cache to a traditional hard disk drive. However, the new technology is a completely solid state affair.

The advantage of solid-state storage devices of this size is that they use less than five per cent of the power required to run a conventional spinning hard disk. Samsung says this alone will boost the battery life of the average mobile PC by around 10 per cent. Furthermore, a NAND drive will weigh less than half that of an equivalent hard disk drive.

A silicon-based device also has no moving parts and will hence be more reliable than its hard disk equivalent and will emit less heat and noise.

Finally, Samsung says the SSD's outperforms a comparably sized HDD by more than 150 per cent. The company quotes the storage disk as reading data at 57 Mbytes per second (MBps) and writes at 32MBps.

To ensure compatibility with existing operating systems, the SSDs have been designed to be a standard HDD from the outside. Therefore, no additional drivers are needed to access a NAND device.

Samsung will be marketing a range of NAND based SDDs. These include a 2.5-inch drives fitted with 16 NAND Flash devices of 4Gbit or 8Gbit density for 8Gb and 16Gb of storage respectively. At the lower end there will also be 1.8-inch drives will offer 4Gb or 8Gb capacities.

The 1.8-inch sized drive will be available in August, 2005 for sub-notebook and tablet PCs