New Samsung 1.8" 64GB solid-state drive a sign of things to come
The USB flash drive has almost killed the floppy disk; it’s now apparent that the flash solid-state drive (SDD) may do the same to the conventional hard disk.
Samsung is planning to start production of a 1.8″-type 64 GB flash solid-state drive (SDD) by the middle of the year. The company expects the SSD market to grow to US$6.8 billion by 2010, up from a projected US$200 million in 200.
The flash-SSD is a drop-in replacement for a standard hard disk drive. It uses instantly-accessible, non-moving NAND flash memory instead of the noisier, power-hungry, jarr-sensitive rotating disc found in conventional hard drives, allowing it to upload and download data quickly and quietly with minimal power consumption.
Samsung’s new flash-SSD is based on an eight gigabit (Gb) single-level-cell (SLC) NAND, which Samsung claims provides significantly higher performance over conventional SSDs.
Acccording to Samsung, the read and write performance of the new SLC flash-SSD has been increased by 20 percent and 60 percent respectively over the 32GB flash-SSD Samsung introduced last year, which means that the new SSD’s ability to outperform conventional rotating-media hard drives is even greater than had been anticipated.
As the flash SSD technology continues to develop it will find its way into a wide range of products.
Samsung is already predicting that 8 to 16 GB capacity SSDs will become viable solutions for use in personal navigation systems and digital video cameras. Samsung also predicts that higher capacity flash SSDs will also become a viable option for the server market.
Clearly, it seems that the days of the rotating disc hard drive are numbered.
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