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Fuzzy Logic Samsung joins 1.8-inch 64GB SSD club
Fuzzy Logic Samsung joins 1.8-inch 64GB SSD club | Samsung joins 1.8-inch 64GB SSD club |
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| by Alex Zaharov-Reutt | |
| Tuesday, 26 June 2007 | |
  
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Still, that hasn’t stopped Samsung from bringing their own 1.8-inch 64GB SSD to market, a mere 20 days after SanDisk made a similar announcement with 2.5- and 1.8-inch SSD drives, as we reported earlier at iTWire. With the introduction of their 64GB SSD now in mass production, Samsung claims it the largest producer of high-capacity SSDs in the world, outstripping all competitors. Jim Elliot, the Director of Flash Marketing at Samsung Semiconductor said that: "We see sharply increasing interest in SSDs among OEMs worldwide amid a growing push to launch premium SSD-based notebooks, particularly in the ultra-mobile category”. And why not? Although SSDs are still costlier than larger sized hard drives, they are much more reliable, able to withstand drops and great temperature variances that could cause hard drive technology to be damaged, promise faster boot times and program start-up times, generates less heat than hard drives and thanks to a lower power requirement promises to boost notebook battery life by ‘up to’ 20%. Samsung explains that their new 64GB SSD consists of “64 eight Gigabit (Gb) single-level cell flash memory chips. Use of 51nm process technology permits fabrication of much smaller components, with each chip having circuitry 1/2500th the width of a human hair”. Although ultra portable notebooks are an obvious fit for an SSD, Samsung sees the market growing considerably beyond notebooks as well. Already, existing 5G iPods use 1.8-inch hard drives to deliver 30Gb or 80Gb of space. 1.8-inch drives are also in use in a number of hard drive camcorders, while some printers also use hard drives internally to store information, especially if they are the large and fast printers used in office environments. Even the Xbox 360 and PS3 games consoles use hard drives to store gigabytes of data within. All of the speed and power saving benefits seen in the notebook apply to these and other categories, helping them with heat, speed and power issues. As soon as SSDs come down in price there is no question we’ll start seeing them being used in these devices en masse, or at least offered as a ‘premium option’ to start with, and at sizes from 4GB to 64GB, offer users as much or as little storage space as they need for now, with larger SSD sizes on the way in the future. Samsung is also predicting that 2.5- and 3.5-inch SSDs will displace their hard disk cousins for the same reasons. Although Samsung doesn’t say it, they know that hard drives will eventually only be used because they will offer mammoth capacities at very cheap prices – and given they manufacture hard drives, they know the timelines of expected technology developments. To conclude, Samsung quotes figures of a sales increase of SSD at “a rapid 270 percent pace industry-wide between now and 2010 to become the largest growth segment in the NAND flash industry”. Given the rapid evolution of today’s gadgets, from the iPhone down, the need for larger size flash memory capacities at ever cheaper prices to store all our digital memories and data without adding to power drain will be absolutely immense. Put another way, by 2010, 64GB will be as cheap and as common as 1GB, 2Gb and even 4GB memory sticks are today. Until some bright spark discovers something better, a high capacity solid state drive is definitely in your future! {moscomment} |
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