LaCie, Samsung Team on Tiny Hard Drives
686067
Hard drives store 30GB and more in 1.3-inch packages.
690459
(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.
417448
On-board drive controller for speed LaCie has begun shipping its 2TB Biggest FW800 storage box, a unit that packs in four lock-in-place hot-swappable 500GB SATA drives and a dinky LCD status panel.â¦
672682
Tiny computer chips used for tracking food, tickets and other items are getting even smaller.
268608
A little over a year after it premiered the first commercially available solid-state hard disk drives at about 32 GB capacity, Samsung said it's now mass-producing a package announced last March at an electronics show in Taiwan, that clusters eight 8 GB flash components together, while still maintaining the 1.8-inch form factor needed for portable devices.
377985
While most mobile phones are lucky to have 4 MB of RAM to store user data, Samsung&#39;s new SPH-V5400 phone offers a whopping 1.5 GB of storage courtesy of its integrated mini-hard drive.
595895
SEOUL, South KoreaâSamsung Electronics Co. Ltd. announced plans to launch the SPH-V5400, a mobile phone that includes a tiny hard disc drive to expand available memory capacity.
584869
Clever 'perpendicular recording system' boosts storage capacity
172084
Apple will be getting some stiff competition in the coming year. A slew of manufacturers will soon offer players utilizing small 1&quot; hard drives that help propel the iPod and allow them to compete more favorably in the market.
377898
The chip maker has announced a tiny drive that could help bring the power of desktop computers to handheld devices.
472147
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.
475905
Taiwanese company, trying to up its market share, unveils tiny NanoBook, plus hardware for smart phones.Photos: Via's little mobos
251290
Despite a few rough edges, the SimpleDrive represents a good overall value. It packs a large amount of storage into a petite, classy-looking package, though the USB-only design limits its performance.
681917
Fujitsu Siemens readies storage area network bundle for small businesses.
210081
Samsung Electronics is showing off a new 128GB flash-based SSD (solid-state drive) at the International Consumer Electronics show in Las Vegas, one of the largest such drives shown to date.The drive is another blow to HDDs (hard-disk drives) in laptop PCs. 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.The only trouble is&#160;SSDs are a lot more expensive than HDDs. But that&#39;s why SSD makers, including Samsung, SanDisk, and others,&#160;aim the devices at the business laptop market, where users are willing to pay more for performance and reliability.Samsung&#39;s 128GB SSDs will be available to laptop makers in the first half of this year, said Jim Elliott, director of flash marketing for Samsung. He declined to discuss pricing, but pointed out that the 128GB model won&#39;t carry quite the premium over HDD technology that Samsung&#39;s 64GB SDD does.The company used a lower-cost type of flash memory chip to develop the 128GB SSD to keep costs down and put an SSD with greater storage capacity on the market, he said. The flash memory, called MLC (multi-level cell) NAND flash isn&#39;t as powerful as the SLC (single-level cell) NAND used in most SSDs, nor is it as power efficient. The main difference is that SLC NAND flash lasts 10 times longer than MLC NAND flash, 100,000 write cycles compared to 10,000 write cycles in general.Samsung believes users won&#39;t find the difference to be much of an issue. It put a controller chip on the SSD drive that spreads information out across the 128GB of space on the drive to increase longevity.&quot;It&#39;s a trade-off,&quot; said Elliott. Write endurance is slightly lower on MLC-based SSDs, but the market is looking for larger capacity sizes without the heavy price premiums.The 128GB SSD is available in 1.8-inch and 2.5-inch versions for notebook and desktop PCs, as well as other possible mobile devices such as ultramobile PCs.The company used the high-speed SATA II interface on the drives to ensure speedy reading and writing. The 128GB SSDs have a sequential write speed of 70MBps, but the speed highlights the difference between MLC and SLC. Samsung offers 64GB SSDs based on SLC NAND that use SATA II with sequential write speeds of 100MBps and sequential read speed of 120MBps second.&#160;
503675
Western Digital's latest external drive tops out at 1 terabyte. Plus: Handy tool kit keeps road warriors connected. In Gear Factor.
256153
Intel will embed solid-state storage drives in its upcoming platform for ultramobile PCs, aiming to meet increased storage requirements for users on the go.The Z-P140 PATA solid-state storage drives (SSDs) will be provided as an optional module to OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) to embed on motherboards made for the Menlow platform. The platform, designed for ultramobile PCs, also includes the Silverthorne processor and Poulsbo chipset. Menlow-based devices will ship in the first half of 2008, product line manager Don Larson said Friday at an event in San Francisco.The tiny SSD chip, which weighs only 0.6 grams, will be available in capacities of 2G bytes and 4G bytes. The on-board storage capacity will be expandable up to 16G bytes with four SSDs connected to a standard PATA (parallel advanced technology attachment) interface that links the drives, Larson said. SSDs consume less power than hard drives because they have no moving parts, so they are ideal for mobile devices, Larson said.The storage capacity of the storage modules could grow to 64G bytes in two years, said Troy Winslow, marketing manager at Intel.Intel said it will display ultramobile PCs based on the Menlow architecture from vendors including Asus, BenQ and Lenovo at the Consumer Electronics Show at Las Vegas in January. The Menlow platform, announced at the Intel Developer Forum in Beijing in April, will be followed in 2009 by the Moorestown platform, which Intel detailed in September.Moorestown will be an SOC (system-on-chip) design that packs a CPU, graphics processor, video, and a memory controller into a single chip. It will be more power-efficient than Menlow devices, according to Intel.The company also previewed the next-generation Centrino platform, which will include a power-efficient Core 2 Duo processor manufactured using the 45-nm process, and Intel&#39;s GM965 Express chipset. The new mobile platform will deliver better processor performance and include new instruction sets to enhance the video-viewing experience on notebooks, Intel said.