Samsung Announces 64 GB Solid State Drive

From: http://news.digitaltrends.com/article12556.html

Samsung is upping the ante in the solid state drive market, announcing it plans to ship a 64 GB, 1.8-inch model in the second quarter of 2007.

The market for flash-based solid state disk drives which act as drop-in replacements for traditional hard drives used in mobile and portable devices is heating up: Samsung announced today that it plans to ship a 64 GB solid state drive in the second quarter of this year. The announcement comes on the heels of SanDisk announcing a 32 GB flash drive only a couple weeks ago, and Fujitsu announcing solid state drives as an option in selected LifeBook portable computers.

Not only does Samsung's new offering increase the capacity available in solid state drives, it increases the performance as well. Samsung claims the respective read and write performance on the drive have been increased by 20 and 60 percent: the 64 GB unit can read 64 MB/S, write 45 MB/s, and consumes just half a Watt when operating (one tenth of a Watt when idle). In comparison, an 80 GB 1.8-inch hard drive reads at 15 MB/s, writes at 7 MB/s, and eats 1.5 Watts either operating or when idle.

Samsung plans to start mass production of the 64 GB solid state drive in the second quarter of 2007, although the company didn't release any estimates on the unit's price to OEMs or consumers.

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Now that transfer rates are approaching the sustained media transfer rates of mechanical drives you would think they might add some cache to increase the performance.

After all, that's how mechanical drives get higher performance figures, so it makes sense that solid-state drives should go the same way too.

Given that solid-state devices don't suffer from seek times caused by the requirement to move the heads maybe it isn't quite so important, but I'd like to see some comparative times to be convinced.

The low wattage sounds very sweet. Something like that would very nicely into something I've been wanting to build for a long time now.

Now they just have to keep the price down so I can justify getting one, if the time comes.

It's good to see these devices starting to mature; the initial offerings were pretty much a joke. I'd love to get my hands on one to drop into my laptop. Maybe when my hard drive goes bad... :D