Samsung's SSD Drive is the Fastest Yet
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Producing a 100-percent solid state drive is a gamble for Samsung, but the benefits include power savings and stability.
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Samsung has begun shipments of the first hybrid flash memory hard drive to its OEM partners. Retail shipments are expected to begin soon, however the company has not specified a date.
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A massive decline in the price of NAND flash memory, the chips that store photos in digital cameras and music in iPods, is prompting innovation among companies trying to increase sales.A few of the items users are likely to see more widespread in gadgets this year include greatly expanded storage capacity in SD (secure digital) cards, USB (universal serial bus) flash sticks and internal storage, as well as new, lower-cost SSDs (solid-state discs) in notebook computers.The price of mainstream 4Gb SLC (single-level cell) NAND flash memory chips has fallen 73 percent since mid-August to $4.96 late Thursday, according to DRAMeXchange Technology, which runs an online clearinghouse for the chips. The chips hit a high of $18.50 on Aug. 14. The price of 4Gb MLC (multi-level cell) NAND flash chips have taken a slightly worse dive, 75 percent down to $2.23 on Thursday, compared to its summer high of $8.85 per chip.The difference between SLC and MLC is cost and life span. SLC normally costs about three times more than MLC, and has a lifetime of 100,000 write cycles. MLC has a lifetime of only 10,000 write cycles.Toshiba and Samsung have both developed new 128GB SSDs based in MLC NAND to expand their use in notebook PCs. The new SSDs are less expensive, giving notebook PC designers more choices in storage.&quot;At 128G bytes, you&#39;re giving consumers the kind of storage space they expect in a notebook,&quot; said Jim Elliott, director of flash marketing at Samsung, in an interview.To work around the lifespan issue, Toshiba and Samsung use controller chips to spread writes across the drive to avoid wearing out any one portion too quickly.The new MLC-based drives are an important step forward for SSDs in the battle against hard disk drives (HDD). At 128GB, an SSD stands are far better chance of replacing an HDD in laptop computers because it removes some of the high-capacity advantage HDDs hold.SSDs have several advantages over HDDs; they&#39;re lighter, more rugged, consume less power, make no noise and enable a computer to start up and load software faster than HDDs. But SSDs are a lot more expensive than HDDs, which is why they&#39;re mainly used in the business laptop market, where users are willing to pay more for performance and reliability.Elliott believes SSDs for PCs will account for 27 percent of NAND consumption by 2011, particularly in business laptops and mobile devices.SanDisk has taken a slightly different route in SSDs than Toshiba and Samsung. The company made a 72GB SSD in a thinner form factor aimed at mobile devices. The drive takes up less space, so it could be used in a range of mobile devices, said Iri Trashanski, director of strategic business development at SanDisk.He doesn&#39;t believe there will be a market for 128GB SSDs for a while.Brian Kumagi, senior business development manager NAND flash memory business at Toshiba, believes the lower cost of MLC NAND chips will play a major role in seeing 128GB SSDs gain market share.Toshiba is also offering MLC NAND SSDs in 32GB and 64GB capacities to entice laptop PC makers and makers of digital music players and other devices requiring more storage.There are several other products where companies are adding NAND flash to increase storage capacity and improve devices. One, thanks to the iPhone, is handsets, said Elliott.Multimedia handsets will likely see 8GB of embedded flash memory become the standard this year, and card slots are being added to a host of mobile phones to increase storage and for added content delivery, including movies, games, software and more.Plus, low prices are encouraging new innovation, just as low NAND prices helped put the chips into more iPods earlier this decade. One area is in video cameras, namely, Flip video and similar devices.For $119.99, users can buy a Flip video camcorder that uses NAND flash memory to store 30 minutes of recordings.In addition, devices such as GPS (global positioning system) for cars will need more flash when 3D (three dimensional) digital maps start replacing 2D maps.The good news for users is that there are so many NAND flash memory makers in the world today that prices will remain low or at least reasonable for a long time.In a report titled &quot;Flash to crash,&quot; Macquarie Securities chip analyst Warren Lau wrote that NAND flash memory prices will likely remain low throughout the first half of this year, with little room for upside until the third quarter.&quot;We continue to warn that NAND flash will see excess supply in the first half of 2008 owing to aggressive production ramp (at IM Flash and Toshiba) and the seasonally weaker period for consumer products (digital still cameras, handsets and MP3),&quot; he wrote.Much of the possible price movements in NAND flash actually depend on Apple because of the widespread popularity of the iPod and iPhone.The company announced it has already shipped over 4 million iPhones and continues to ramp shipments. iPod shipment growth has dropped a bit, according to market researcher Gartner, but higher capacity iPod products such as the Touch have done well in the market.&quot;Apple is a critical driver of NAND flash consumption and will continue to yield great influence on NAND flash vendors,&quot; Gartner said in a report on Monday.
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A cache of flash in a new Samsung notebook hard-drive series will halve boot times and slash power usage, giving battery life a nice bump, the company says. In Gadget Lab. In Gadget Lab.
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New drive crams enormous storage capacity into standard 3.5-inch format, but it's not ready for delivery just yet.
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Please, please, please say I didn't hit 'Quick Erase'... Hitachi Global Storage Technologies has begun volume shipment of the Travelstar 7K200, a high-capacity, high-performance laptop hard drive with new optional data encryption technology. The new drive features up to 200GB capacity, a 22 per cent overall performance improvement over its predecessor, and improved shock tolerance, among other technical improvements. The 7200RPM Travelstar 7K200 has power consumption, heat emission, and acoustics comparable to its 5400RPM counterparts and features a Serial ATA 1.5GBps, 1.5GBps encrypted, or 3GBps interface.â¦
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South Korea's Samsung Electronics has said it has developed a chip with enough capacity to store 36,000 high-resolution photographs or 40 movie files.
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Samsung Electronics is shipping hybrid hard-disk drives that mix conventional magnetic storage with flash memory. The company claims that the system delivers a 70% to 90% cut in power consumption thanks to its ability to use NAND for caching data.
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Upcoming SSDs will feature maximum sustained read rates of up to 120MBps and capacities of up to 128GB.
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Blog: Samsung announces a 1.8-inch, 120GB drive, a 2.5-inch, 120GB hybrid drive and a 3.5-inch 1-terabyte drive, while Seagate goes rugged with an 80GB model.
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swight1701 writes &quot;It is being reported that Samsung has shown what it claims is the world&#39;s first mobile phone that incorporates a hard drive.
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Solid-state drives may replace hard drives as future storage devices on computers, but not until their price plummets. Alienware has SSDs and other cool hardware on its latest PCs, the Area-51 ALX and Aurora ALX desktops, but its prices rise with the SSDs. Innovation is also the appeal of Plantronics&#39; Calisto Pro Series, a sophisticated hands-free telephone system that merges wired, wireless, and online communications into one system. Moving to the kitschy, Saitek allows users to personalize PC scrolling by inserting a printed picture on a mouse top.The future of PC storageAlienware provides a glimpse of future PC storage with its Area-51 ALX and Aurora ALX desktop PCs, which come with 64GB SSDs (solid-state drives).Boot and program load times are quicker with SSDs and they are more reliable, Alienware says. They also consume less power than hard drives, the company says.However, SSDs are expensive. An SSD-free Aurora ALX system with Windows Vista Ultimate, running Advanced Micro Devices&#39;s Athlon 64 X2 6000 64-bit processor, a Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX graphics card, 2GB of memory, a Logitech gaming keyboard, and a 320GB hard drive costs $4,099. The price jumps to $5,799 when the hard drive is replaced with two 64GB SSDs.Hard drives provide more storage capabilities than SSDs, so it&#39;s smart to hold off until SSDs become competitive on price and storage capacity.Both PCs are available at Alienware&#39;s Web site.AAA to the rescue, againThere may be a Chinese restaurant a few blocks away, but is it good? AAA Mobile&#39;s GPS-based travel guide for mobile phones not only provides directions to the restaurant, but also shows how it rates. The ratings feature gives it a leg up over GPS services that provide only locations and directions.The service also gives hotel ratings and point of interests recommended by the AAA service. That is helpful for tourists and pedestrians wiggling around big cities in search of places to eat and sleep. Users can bookmark the locations.The 100,000 listings provided by the service may be tiny, but it could start a trend of more GPS systems adding recommendations and ratings.It works only on mobile phones in the United States with Verizon Wireless&#39;s service and is available for $9.99 a month.Make the mouse your ownInnovation on mice hasn&#39;t hit a wall -- Saitek&#39;s Photo Mouse lets people customize the top of a mouse with printed pictures, making it fun to use. A hatch on the top of the mouse opens up, where a picture can be inserted. The idea is to personalize a mouse, said Mark Starrett, Saitek&#39;s director of marketing, in a statement. But then pictures of loved ones can be placed on a mousepad or as PC wallpaper too, so pick your choice. The kitschy $19.95 wired optical mouse works with Windows and Mac systems.Converged communicationsPlantronics&#39; Calisto Pro Series is a hands-free telephone system that combines wired, wireless, and online communications into one unit. The system can take landline, mobile phone or VoIP calls either through a wireless handset or Bluetooth headset.A desk-based base station houses and recharges the wireless handset and a Bluetooth headset. The handset operates at a range of up to 300 feet (91 meters), according to Plantronics. Users can also download up to 200 Microsoft Outlook contacts from a PC to the handset.A Bluetooth headset not only takes calls from landlines, it also directly connects to a Bluetooth-compatible mobile phones. A PC connects to the base station through a USB port to accept VoIP calls.Despite a clunky base station, Calisto Pro is a productive device to have for multiple forms of communication. It became available in the United States in September for $279.95.
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In three years, PRAM could become the leading storage technology for solid-state MP3 players that now use flash memory. But does Samsung, which announced a working PRAM prototype today, really want to replace its own bread-and-butter?
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A new DVD-based storage appliance is aimed at making archiving data faster and retrieving it easier.
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roundup Plus: Think local, act Google...SanDisk to supply Samsung with miniSD...Hitachi unleashes 100GB notebook drives.
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SGI's supercomputer sets a public record which has been eclipsed by a faster result yet to be announced.
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IBM has claimed unofficial bragging rights as owner of the worldâs fastest supercomputer. For three years running, the fastest supercomputer has been NECâs Earth Simulator in Japan.