Samsung Shows Off 128 G-Byte Solid State Drive
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Samsung is showing off a new 128G-byte flash-based SSD (solid-state drive), one of the largest such drives shown to date, at CES.
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Samsung Electronics has succeeded in developing an 8-gigabit flash memory chip, breaking another world record in semiconductors, the company announced yesterday.
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Over the several months, Computerworld has reviewed the latest in hard disk drive technology, from 1TB models and energy-efficient "green" drives to solid-state disks that outpace their spinning disk counterparts on every dimension of speed and power consumption.
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Samsung Electronics has begun shipping a flash memory-based solid state disk drive (SSD) that offers better performance than many of the flash drives currently available, the company said.The 64GB drive has a SATA II interface that can support data reading at speeds of 100MBps and writing at 80MBps. That makes it 60 percent faster than SATA I drives of the same type and two to five times faster than conventional hard-disk drives, according to Samsung.SSDs use flash memory rather than magnetic storage, which means faster reading and writing of data, lower power consumption and zero noise. They&#39;ve been around for several years although it is only recently, after flash memory chip prices fell, that they have become practical for use in laptop computers.The drives were announced back in November when Samsung started supply samples of the drives to PC makers. Commercial versions of the drive are now available and will be offered as options on some Dell and Alienware laptops in the coming weeks, said Samsung. Prices were not announced.Samsung is also planning to target the enterprise server market and other applications that demand high-speed data transfer.Despite their advantages over hard-disk drives, SSDs are only taking off slowly because they are much more expensive. To get around this problem Samsung showed a 128GB SSD based on MLC (multi-level cell) NAND flash, at the recent International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. It&#39;s a cheaper but not as powerful or efficient version of flash chip than the SLC (single level cell) used in most SSDs drives until now. The SLC-type memory chips last about 10 times as long as MLC chips.&#160;
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(InfoWorld) - Samsung Electronics showed off its first 40-nanometer chip, a 32Gb NAND flash memory that can be used in memory cards able to store up to 64GB of data, or 40 movies. The latest step into smaller chip manufacturing methods brings Samsung to the forefront of chip production putting it ahead of other bit manufacturers, including Intel, which has onlyÂ announced chips built at 45nm. The chips are also the seventh generation of NAND flash memory to follow in a Moore's law-type theory posited by Samsung, that the company will double the capacity of NAND flash every 12 months. Such advances are vitalÂ to the consumer electronics industry. Users are demanding ever smaller devices that can do more, such as handsets with built-in mobile phone, computing, camera, and digital music playing functions. Demand for more storage to keep photos, videos, songs and other data has expanded rapidly over the past few years, and analysts expect the trend to continue. The 40nm chip production technique is key to making chips smaller, faster, more powerful, and cheaper to produce. A nanometer is a billionth of a meter, and the measurement is a guide to the size of the transistors and other parts that are etched onto the chips. Typically, the more transistors, and the closer they are together, the faster the chip can perform tasks. The company also revealed a new design technique, Charge Trap Flash (CTF), that will allow it to eventually shrink NAND chip features to 20nm, and produce 256Gb chips. In the 32Gb chips, the control gate in the CTF is only a fifth as big as conventional control gates on chips in a typical floating gate structure. With CTF, there is no floating gate. Instead, data is temporarily placed in a holding chamber made of silicon nitride. Samsung also released a new chip for its hybrid drives, a kind of hard disk drive aimed at laptops that uses NAND flash as a disk cache, to speed boot-up times and reduce power consumption The new chip, dubbed an SoC (system-on-chip) because it does the work of several chips, incorporates up to 4GB of NAND flash as a data buffer and helps further speeds boot-up times while lengthening battery life, the company said. The chips will be in mass production in November. Samsung is one of several companies working on hybrid drives. Seagate TechnologyÂ and IntelÂ are also developing the technology for notebook computers.
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Samsung's new SPH-V5400 mobile phone sports a built-in 1-inch, 1.5-gigabyte hard disk that can store about 15 times more data than conventional handsets, Samsung said.
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Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., the world's third-largest handset maker, said on Tuesday it was launching the first mobile phone with a stamp-sized hard disc drive this month that would expand the memory capacity by 15 times.
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(InfoWorld) - Solid-state disks (SSDs) are fastÂ becoming popularÂ as drop-in replacements for hard-disk drives but they are not all alike, said South Korea's Mtron. SSDs use flash memory rather than magnetic storage, which means faster reading and writing of data, lower power consumption, and zero noise. They've been around for several years although it is only recently, after flash memory chip prices fell, that they have become practical for use in laptop computers. Major PC makers are starting to offer them as options in some laptop models, but consumers looking to SSDs for a performance boost should pay close attention to the specifications, said Sean Roh, assistant manager of the marketing department at Mtron . The company, which is based near Seoul, makes its own SSD that it claims is faster than any other on the market. It offers a sustained read speed of 100MBps and a sustained write speed of 80MBps, he said. By comparison, SandiskÂ reports a read speed of 67MBps and a write speed of 47MBps for its recently announced 64GB SSD and Samsung ElectronicsÂ said its SSD reads at 56MBps and writes at 32MBps. The faster speeds are possible thanks to the use of a custom-designed drive control chip. In a demonstration at the SEK show, which opened in Seoul on Wednesday, the company had five competing 2.5-inch drives and its own 2.5-inch drive hooked up to a personal computer running benchmarking software. The test appeared to confirm that the Mtron drive performed at around the speeds claimed and also beat out the competition. Among the competing drives, all of which had labels to cover the manufacturer's name, the slowest read data at about 28MBps and the fastest at about 96MBps, while write speeds ranged from 17.6MBps to 68MBps (the fastest read and write speeds were not on the same drive). The Mtron drive hit a read speed of 97MBps and a write speed of 72Mbps in the test, the benchmark software reported. Mtron, which is about three years old, has already signed up distributors in some markets and is looking to sell its 2.5-inch and 3.5-inch drives to PC makers for use in their machines. It isn't planning to offer the drives direct to consumers. Â
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(InfoWorld) - Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. has begun producing a flash memory-based solid-state disk drive for mobile computing applications. The drive is the latest in a growing line of products from Samsung and competitors that make use of flash memory chips instead of magnetic disc recording technology. Compared to today's hard-disk drives, SSDs are lighter, use less power and can read and write data faster. They are also more expensive but the price difference has been narrowing as flash chips have become cheaper so SSDs are now starting to appear in some laptops. The new Samsung drive has a capacity of 64G bytes and is the same size as a conventional 1.8-inch hard-disk drive. It's designed to be used in sub-notebook class computers, ultra-mobile PCs and other devices like portable media players. Samsung said it is seeing demand increase for such products, particularly from companies making ultra portable PCs. At the Computex show in Taipei earlier this month two major contract PC makers, First International Computer Inc. and Asustek Computer Inc., both showed prototype ultra portables and several other companies have already put such machines on sale. Samsung is one of the world's largest manufacturers of flash memory chips so the company has a lot to gain from SSDs becoming more popular. It estimated that the market for SSDs will increase 270 percent between now and 2010 to become the largest growth segment in the NAND flash memory market. The price of the drive, which will be sold to PC makers and not end-users, was not disclosed. Â
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Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., the world's  third-largest handset maker, said on Tuesday it was launching  the first mobile phone with a stamp-sized hard disc drive this  month that would expand the memory capacity by 15 times.
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Seagate Technology has started shipping a 400GB hard disk drive for PCs that offers performance closer to that of a 10,000-rpm drive than that of a 7,200 rpm.
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Got backup? How about a new 1-terabyte drive for $70 off the usual price?
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Load-time lowerer Samsung has begun sending out hybrid hard drives to computer manufacturers, according to a variety of reports coming out of Asia today.â¦
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Lacie today introduced a new series of external harddrives with SATA interface at the SMAU trade show in Milan, Italy. The drives are available in capacities up to 400 GByte.
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Seagate&#39;s native SATA interface technology with Native Command Queuing (NCQ) allows the Barracuda 7200.8 to match the performance of 10,000-rpm SATA drives without sacrificing capacity
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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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(InfoWorld) - Samsung ElectronicsÂ has begun shipping its first hybrid hard-disk drives that mix conventional magnetic storage with flash memory, it said Wednesday. The drives are designed for use in laptop PCs and willÂ work with the ReadyDrive featureÂ in the new Windows Vista operating system. Under ReadyDrive, the flash memory acts as a temporary cache enabling the number of disk accesses to be cut. This means the drive spends less time in motion and so uses less power. Samsung claims a 70 percent to 90 percent cut in power consumption thanks to the system. Because data can quickly be stored and retreived from the flash memory, ReadyDrive should also allow PCs to wake up faster from sleep mode. The first three drives from Samsung are 80GB, 120GB, and 160GB models and have either 128MB or 256MB of flash memory. That's the same flash capacity as prototypes Samsung unveiled at last year's Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) in Seattle in May. In July of last yearÂ Samsung followed up with a prototypeÂ that included 4GB of flash memory. Software support for ReadyDrive exists in Windows Vista only so PCs running other operating systems won't benefit from the technology. IntelÂ has a competing system that isÂ code-named Robson. It has the flash memory on the PC motherboard and will be included on Intel's new Santa Rosa laptop platform that is due in the second quarter of this year. Â