“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