“Samsung is first to announce a Flash storage device that aims to completely replace the traditional hard drive in some mass market mobile computers. The 32 GB solid state disk (SSD) drive comes in a 1.8″ form factor and reads data at more than twice the speed of hard drives. Best of all: The SSD is promised to consume 95% less power than a hard drive,” Wolfgang Gruener reports for TG Daily. “Samsung said it will be offering its 1.8″ NAND Flash-based SSD in the not too distant future for mass market mobile computing applications. While the SSD’s capacity of 32 GB cannot compete with traditional hard drives that currently offers up to 80 GB space, it offers superior performance and power consumption features that are likely to make the device the ultimate storage solution in some applications such as ultra-mobile computers, Tablet PCs and performance notebooks.”
“According to Samsung, the SSD will read and write data at 57 MB/s and 32 MB/s, respectively. We will have to benchmark such a drive in our test lab to verify this claim but if correct, the Flash disk would be about twice as fast as the latest 1.8″ hard drive generation, which was measured at a read speed of 24 MB/s by the engineers of Tom’s Hardware,” Gruener reports. “Samsung says that the Flash disk consumes only 0.1W when not in use and just 0.5W under load. For comparison, a typical mobile hard drive consumes somewhere between 1W and 2W of power in seek, read and write processes and between 0.2W and 0.8W when idle. Samsung may be a bit optimistic that the SSD uses just 5% of the electricity needed to power a hard disk drive, but it is clear that SSD will provide a substantial additional amount of battery time in mobile devices. In a common model that assumes that a hard drive consumes about 10-20% of the battery power, the SSD could add about 20-40 minutes of operating time in a notebook that runs about 4 hours on one battery charge. Samsung did not provide a specific introduction date of the drive, but mentioned that it would offer 32 GB SSDs ‘soon.’ There was no detailed information on how much the drive will cost.”
More details in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Imagine an Apple MacBook Pro with one of these inside! 32GB is doable for some; it would certainly make an excellent option.
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Intel demos NAND flash memory laptops – March 08, 2006
Flash memory poised to replace hard disk drives? – September 14, 2005
WELL IT”S ABOUT TIME!!!
Hard drives in laptops are seriously underperforming pieces of sheet, they slow down Mac OS X big time.
I got a RAID O pair of 74GB 10,000 Raptors in my PowerMac and I get no delay in anything,
SNAP SNAP
I see NO BEACHBALLS, except out my window when the pretty women play in the sand.
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You could actually put 4 of these in a macbook pro, given the much smaller battery needed!
;o)
maybe in the McBook. doubt the pro though.
Well 57 MB p/second reads is pretty reasonable, 32 MB p/sec writes is still horribly slow.
You see what happens if you don’t have a 64 bit processor and more than 2 GB of RAM is this, Mac OS X extensively uses your hard drive (or flash drive in this case) for RAM.
This seriously affects performance. Seriously.
I get 185 MB p/second (yes 185 MB) writes with my RAID O 10,000 pair of 74GB Raptors as boot drive.
I’m absolutely screaming. My drives get data to RAM faster than the processors can handle!
Mac mini’s, iMac’s, Macbook Pro’s etc are SLOW.
Really really slow. And fools spend $3000 for portability with a MacBook Pro when they could have a Quad and a cheap Dell/Mac laptop.
FOOLS! Drop that MacBook Pro just once. Hahaha!`
No, they’ll be put in the MacBook Pro first, because of the price and performance.
This is quite enough storage for most users, including business users; and don’t forget back-up devices are also getting cheaper as well.
I know you’re all tired of hearing me say this, but I have to mention the nanobooks again, or should I say MacBook nano. Think Reader’s Digest magazine dimensions.
At $800 to $1000 a shot, who is going to use them. (They won’t be cost effective)
MacDude –
“And fools spend $3000 for portability with a MacBook Pro when they could have a Quad and a cheap Dell/Mac laptop.”
Professional photographers need portability for location shoots, and they need every bit of speed they can get. Take your G5 out on the beach for a swimsuit shoot? I don’t think so.
Also, your Raptor RAID is great for a desktop, but it’s utterly irrelevant for the use under discussion – storage in a laptop. Report back when you’ve figured out how to squeeze your RAID into a laptop. In the meantime, Samsung’s SSD does offer better performance than current laptop storage solutions, and pros who need performance and portability will welcome it.
Your pooh-poohing is misplaced.
“FOOLS! Drop that MacBook Pro just once. Hahaha!`”
Can’t speak about the MacBook Pro, but my Powerbook G4 survided a 3 foot drop to a hardwood floor. The latch broke off, but NOTHING else. Everything performed flawlessly. I was actually expecting worse, MUCH worse, as the drop sounded pretty horrific. None of my PeeCee friends are willing to drop their laptops 3 feet to hardwood floors. Another of my friends Sony Vaio broke carrying it around in a laptop bag, and he babied that thing. EVERY PC Laptop owner I know of EVERY ONE has had some kind of mechanical problem with their laptops. I’d never buy a PC laptop even if I switched to PC.
My 12″ powerbook fell off a 7 foot high ladder (open) and is still running just fine.
and that was on concrete!
This is awesome.
And it really isn’t a limit at all at 32gigs.
Just put two of those sucks in there.
I can only imagine the iPod possibilities…
all that amazing performance , macdolt , and all you can do with it is troll on here
you sad little man
Slipped on ice with my 15″ Powerbook, and landed on top of it. So – 5 feet, landed on ice/asphalt, then 200 pounds of falling human on top. One corner did a soda-can crush. Still working fine, though, a year+ later.
While we’re talking about PB war wounds, my 12″ PB fell out of my backpack while running up an escalator at Manchester Piccadilly train station (I was badly hungover and had forgotten to zip up my bag properly). It fell about 4 feet onto a metal stair — in sleep mode — and survived with only a few small dents. Hurrah, etc.
i was entering a plane via those external staircases they have to commute passengers into commercial airplanes and my powerbook fell out of my backpack down the side of the staircase onto the tarmac, i could hear the crack over the jet engines, i thought id definately screwed it. there was a hairline crack along the side, but it worked fine when i tried it inside the plane, that was a year and a half ago, still working fine. no worries!!
Put a couple of them in and you’ll have something that beats ordinary harddrives in terms of speed (not storage/price though). Would be ideal for portables!
for ipods perhaps?
It would be ideal for anything… Or… Maybe not this time. Considering the $6400 price tag. :/
My PowerBook G4 fell more than 700 ft. into a flaming hot crevace of molten lava. That thing floated downflow until it slipped out onto the dead lava sheet, a distance of about half a mile.
Sure, it was a little burned here and there. But, man, I gotta tell ya — that thing still runs like Drake’s cakes! Just a little whine now and then from the DVD drive and you have to get used to a black TiBook, but still . . . that’s one tough mother!
PowerBook from Apple. Survives 10,000 degrees and doesn’t blink.
Is there a read/write cycle limit on flash still?
Didn’t Apple invest heavily in a Flash memory company or something a little while ago? Looks like the future of hard drives is gonna be flash memory, doesn’t it…
In a few years these things will have more capacity, be faster, smaller and cheaper. If several could be daisy-chained together in a MacBook Pro, it could certainly alter the form factor considerably, although we’d still be stuck with bulky optical drives.
Better yet, bring back the PowerBook’s hot-swappable drive bay, but use these little suckers instead. If Apple used, for instance, the iPod’s universal connector, or something with more bandwidth, it could make things extremely interesting… AND more customizable. Think of the peripheral possibilities. Extra hard drives, media readers, high-end audio/video cards, FireWire 800 ports, etc., etc., etc..
Yeah, the MacBook Pro has the new card slot thingie, but the size is a bit limiting… more cables snaking around.
“My 12″ powerbook fell off a 7 foot high ladder (open) and is still running just fine. and that was on concrete!”
Whatever – You should consider getting a computer desk. ;-D whawhawhawhawhaaaa
‘was at a party recently, and some anonymous person knocked a domestic beer over onto my PB 12″. When I retrieved such from the swilling pool of suds, it was running out of the battery compartment.
And was dead.
Later that evening, I opened up the access panels, and let the sea breeze course through the machine. Worked great in the morning, thought the persistent smell of cheap beer haunts its operation.