Samsung hypes 16Gb NAND Flash hard drive killer

Stan Beer
Thursday, 04 January 2007 10:29

Your IT - Home IT

Samsung is making no bones about the fact that it is in the game of finding a flash memory based solid state replacement for traditional hard disks. The Korean electronic giant has taken another step in that direction, announcing that it is now sampling 16Gb NAND flash memory with customers, using 50nm process technology.

According to Samsung, the first samples of its new high density NAND flash memory have a multi-level cell (MLC) design with a 4KB page size. Samsung claims the new 4KB page function improves the conventional 2KB paging system for MLC NAND flash to double the read speed, while increasing write performance 150%.

Since PCs hit the mainstream more than decades ago, despite massive improvements in processor and memory access speeds, performance improvements have been constrained by the physical limitations of hard drives.

The necessity of storing and accessing data on a spinning magnetic disk has created a storage access bottleneck orders of magnitude slower than solid state memory - resulting in the inevitable comparatively slow loading times for programs and operating systems.

Samsung intends to change all of that by introducing flash solid state disks, which is really a misnomer because the Samsung storage devices are not disks but high capacity flash RAM chips with no moving parts.

Although not as fast as the DRAM used in computer memory, NAND flash memory is still way faster than hard disks. Unfortunately Gbyte for Gbyte, flash is also still way more expensive than hard disks. However, the cost gap is narrowing in line with the ability of NAND flash to withstand comparable numbers of read/write cycles to hard drives.

Samsung intends to have 128GB NAND flash solid state storage devices on the market by the first half of 2008. As a step in that direction, Samsung plans to begin mass producing its 16Gb NAND flash memory in the first quarter of 2007.