Wanna take bets when the first terrabyte drive comes out?
Samsung’s Notebook SSD Hits 64 GB
Will your next laptop lack a hard drive?
Yes, if Samsung has anything to say about it. The electronics maker is looking to kick off an era of flash-based solid state drives (SDD) that approach usable capacities. That is, they can store enough for an OS and a healthy batch of applications, with some room left over for assorted files.
The company today announced a 1.8-inch, 64 gigabyte (GB) flash hard drive replacement that offers twice the capacity of the SSD Samsung debuted last year.
This has been a busy month for flash memory makers.
SanDisk took the wraps off a 32 GB, 2.5-inch model as a follow up to a 1.8-inch version they debuted in early ’07. Intel also dipped its toes into the space with ultra-small flash memory modules.
Samsung’s drive is built using 8 Gb single-level-cell (SLC) NAND technology, which the company credits for the drive’s improved performance, not only over traditional disk-based storage, but over its predecessor as well. Samsung’s 64 GB SSD can achieve read speeds of 64 MB per second and write speeds of 45 MB per second while drawing half a watt of power during drive activity. The unit draws just 0.1 watts at idle, or 1/15th the power required for a conventional 80 GB hard drive.
For comparison’s sake, the company’s 32 GB SSD putters along with 53 MB per second read and 30 MB per second write speeds.
Beyond portable PCs, the Samsung envisions its SSD technology making its way into other electronics, including GPS devices and camcorders. More tantalizing, however, is the prospect of “hundred GB-level flash-SSDs for use in the server market.” In any case, the firm is showing its willingness to serve the burgeoning market.
Samsung’s forecasts calls for an SSD market that reaches 9 billion units in 2010, compared to 2.2 million units in 2006. In monetary terms, the storage technology is expected to generate $6.8 billion by the end of the decade.
Mass production of the Samsung 64 GB SSD is scheduled for 2Q 2007.
Notice there was no mention of price? If you have to ask, you can’t afford it.
My understanding is that these things are available to system builders at the moment.
Nevertheless, these devices are the reason the buzz about hard drives with a flash buffer will fizzle out soon.
See, this is the kind of technology that really blows me away, even more so than really fast processors, or awesome video cards. The fact that I can store a gig of data on a postage stamp sized SD card is so damned cool to me. I yearn for the day when I can keep the entire library of congress in the coin pocket of my jeans.
Nice, I just would like to know more about the loss of storage capacity over time on this kind of “drives”.
#1
Just compare it with similar 64 GB flash memories and you know that you won’t buy one anytime soon… unless you’ve got money to burn. 🙂
Think of how easy it would be to create a RAID array with these and use it for a backup device. This ought to be fun once prices become reasonable.
The iPhone is looking pretty puny at 4 & 8 GB. Stick one of these suckers in there, Mr. Jobs.
Fast, Good or Cheap. Pick two.
Hopefully by the time it’s good and cheap apple can finally start integrating SSDs into full iPods. Us Nano-haters want to be able to take our pods on a run, too!
$5,600 bucks for a 64Gb flash drive? Guess I’ll stick with the old platters for now. Good Grief !
There’s people who will pay plenty for 10 times the battery life in a laptop that’s 0.25 the weight of the average now. And about twice as fast too.
32 GB storage laptop for $3700 American.
http://tinyurl.com/o4vk7
Blue Ray can suck on it!
I did a fresh XP ( sp2) install with only the OS on the PC including all the updates, critical and optional, from the Windows Update website. That alone is taking up 15GB of hard drive space. What is Vista going to take up? Double? Throw in a few dozen movie files and a hundred mp3s and the whole 64GB is used up. We’re talking about TB today. GB is the MB of yesteryear.
You also want to consider the life span of the drive
Guys, it’s new. Of course it’s still expensive. But, look at what this means for the long term. The price of a 16GB CF card is down to $300. It doesn’t take much to imagine a price drop that would allow for high end laptops to have dramatically longer battery life. You think they wouldn’t sell? Even with less disk space than cheaper models? I bet they would.
What if they can give you 8 or 10 hours of battery life? Or, even at only 2 hours, what if they could do it with a much lighter battery pack and lighter charger, say a 2lb 15″ laptop? Wouldn’t that make you want one? Think a year or two down the road. It’s not that long to wait. I’m going to squeeze as much life out of my current laptop as I can in hopes of getting one of these. The reduced power gives longer life and helps the environment. It’s a win all around.
How big are your MP3s?? My girlfriend has a 60GB HD on her iBook with no complaints. Geeks always complain the loudest.
I’m amazed it’s already on the market at a price that makes sense for some applications (think: gathering remote environmental data in Antarctica over a whole winter, for example). The first I recall reading about this tech was in December, in the Intel CTO’s blog at ZDNet – http://tinyurl.com/y3ymm7 . He said Intel would introduce new platform NAND this year, but he wasn’t talking about HDD replacements.
12 – He did address the limited-write problem of NAND memory – said the answer is write-leveling algorithms to spread block erasures evenly. He aid it would give NAND flash memory a service life consistent with the rest of the platform Intel was working on.
Prices are going to come down fast on this technology, I bet.
“I will be watching the career of this technology with great interest”. If only they could take the price down by a factor of 10 … just 10 … I’d be all over it. I would pay $500 to stick one of these in my laptop now. The weight and battery life savings are definitely worth it. Of course, they keep improving disc based memory too, so solid-state never quite gets price competitive for mass storage. (Case in point – they could build a 4GB version of this cheap – it’d be the greatest thing to hit 10-year-old laptops in 10 years, long as they put out drivers for Win 98 and 2K)
When I worked at Radio Shack we sold a 64K RAM portable. It ran on 4 AAs because it drew very little power. You could get new batteries for it at the 711 at 3 am!
4GB thumb drives are down to 30 bucks now. This thing is going to get cheap cheap fast fast.
$5,600? Must be those fat C.E.Os getting rich again. We must set price controls on these flash drives. That way starving Ethiopian kids can have the latest in hard drive technology. They don’t have much space on their $100 laptops. Lets regulate the computer market so prices can be fair. Think of the children.
Give it a few years and we will all be using these in our laptops.
#11
What are you smoking? I just did a fresh XP w/SP2 and all updates install last night, and my HD clocks in at 3.5 GB used.
Why not four 16 GB flash drives instead for around $1000.