Samsung goes big, small, green and fast with 100GB SSD

Davey Winder
Thursday, 08 January 2009 17:26

Science - Energy

Pop Quiz: what is the most environmentally friendly drive for data centres today? Samsung reckons it has the answer in the biggest little speedy green SSD yet.

Lots of interesting IT stories are coming out of Vegas right now, such as the first AMD Yukon powered notebook and the Eee PC inside a keyboard.

However, Samsung chose to announce the arrival of a 100GB solid state drive not at CES Vegas, but at the Storage Visions 2009 conference taking place just before it in order to perhaps stand more chance of getting noticed.

I suspect it need not have worried, after all when you throw in such keywords as enterprise, data centre, virtualisation, green and reduced power consumption, the last thing the media is going to do is ignore you.

The new Samsung SS805 Enterprise drive is small at just 2.5 inches, but at the same time big with a whopping 100GB capacity.

It is also fast, having been performance-optimised to process IOPS (input/output per second) at a rate of at least 10 times as fast than the fastest 15K rpm SAS HDD which is currently available for transactional data workloads.

The SSD has been designed to remove system performance bottlenecks found in enterprise storage applications, and can read data sequentially at 230 megabytes per second while writing  sequentially at 180 MB/s.

As far as being green is concerned, well Samsung claims it can process 100 times the number of IOPS per watt as a 15K rpm 2.5-inch SAS HDD for applications where higher performance and lower power consumption are required.

The SSDs use 1.9 watts of power in active mode and 0.6 watts in idle mode compared to typical 15K HDDs consuming between 8 to 15 watts in active mode and 1 to 2 watts in idle mode.

Jim Elliott, Samsung vice president of memory marketing, says "Our new enterprise SSD offers CIOs and IT managers the ability to greatly improve storage reliability and capacity while avoiding costly power and AC infrastructure upgrades in data centers at or near capacity."

Pricing and availability have yet to be confirmed.