CES: Samsung shows off 128G-byte solid state drive
Samsung Electronics is showing off a new 128G-byte 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'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 SSDs are a lot more expensive than HDDs. But that's why
SSD makers, including Samsung, SanDisk and others, aim the devices at the business
laptop market, where users are willing to pay more for performance and reliability.
Samsung's 128G-byte 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 128G-byte model won't
carry quite the premium over HDD technology that Samsung's 64G-byte SDD does.
The company used a lower-cost type of flash memory chip to develop the 128G-byte
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'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'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
128G bytes of space on the drive to increase longevity.
"It's a trade-off," 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 128G-byte 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 128G-byte SSDs have a sequential write speed of 70M
bytes per second, but the speed highlights the difference between MLC and SLC.
Samsung offers 64G-byte SSDs based on SLC NAND that use SATA II with sequential
write speeds of 100M bytes per second and sequential read speed of 120M bytes
per second.
IDG News Service
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