“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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Related articles:
Intel demos NAND flash memory laptops – March 08, 2006
Flash memory poised to replace hard disk drives? – September 14, 2005
Pricing won’t be that bad if Apple sets up an order for 40% of the production . . .
Freakin’ Finally! I have been wondering when an announcement like this would occur.
BTW, I posted about a flash MacBook Pro at least yesterday.
RE: MacDude’s constant assertion that an apple laptop isn’t worth the price because it may be dropped, and we should all own an inexpensive pc laptop instead.
My son dropped his 12′ powerbook TWICE this past year at college, once off of a top bunk of a bunk bed in his dorm room onto a tile floor, the second time it got the proverbial “power cord trip” launch off a desk in a class room.
Both times it landed on exactly the same spot… on it’s edge, lower left of the keyboard, where the hard drive rests inside the case.
It took some serious case damage, but continued to work well after both instances. After the second time I decided to repair it for cosmetic reasons. It still worked fine, but it had a road warrior look to it, so I ordered replacement parts from a guy on ebay, found a repair manual online, and tore it apart and put it back together.
While inside I upgraded the Combo drive to DVD, the HD to 160 gig, and the ram from 512 to 1gig. All in all I spent 500 on the repair and upgrade. I got 35 bucks for the old 512 ram stick on ebay. I bought a $5 external 2.5 usb case on ebay and use his old HD as a data back up for my documents folder here at home.
When I had it apart, I was AMAZED at the quality and care taken in routing wires and the construction of this unit. The interior frame is an amazing piece of hardware, and the chief reason the powerbook was able to take so much abuse. If you’ve never seen it, think of a roll bar inside a race car, and that’s what you have inside a powerbook.
The apple repair manual was perfect, and it’s suggestion of using ice trays to put parts into was insightful. I used 5 of them. If any of you attempt this write a note with each part with it’s name on it. I followed the instructions to tear it apart, then backwards to put it back together. I’m fairly mechanical, but this was my first time opening up a laptop. The hardest part was getting the display case back together. Seriously, you need three hands with REALLY small fingers to get everything lined up and snapped shut. It was a bit like herding cats, but it went back in, and the rest of the re-assembly was easy.
The computer booted on the first try, which was a bit of a surprise to my wife, and I installed the system os and away we went.
Not sure what MacDude is talking about when he suggests that the powerbook would be destroyed by a drop or a fall. Maybe it’s just that he’s used to replacing his dell laptop every-time if falls.
MDN word is hundred, as in five hundred bucks is a good price for an upgrade of a laptop. And it’s still an apple, not a dell.
sorry.. should have read… 500 on the upgrade and 300 on the repair.
Mechanical HDs are slowly on their way out. When the speed/capacity gets good enough, EVERY computer will have Flash HDs. Just think – no more crashes – theres nothing to crash! I’ve always wished for this on say an OS release. Have a special slot just for the OS flash card and bang – instant OS upgrade! Kinda harkens back to the days when computers had cartridge ports. This is going to be very interesting to watch over time.
Macdude fell on his head and you see what happened – never rebooted.