What are you looking for ?
Infinidat
Articles_top

2.5-inch MLC SSD With SATA II From Samsung at 256GB

Challenging SLC SSDs with 160MB/s in write, 200MB/s in write, and one million hour MTBF

Samsung Electronics has developed the world’s fastest, 2.5-inch, 256 Gigabyte (GB) multi-level cell (MLC) based solid state drive (SSD) using a SATA II interface. Samsung’s new 256GB SSD is also the thinnest drive with the largest capacity to be offered with a SATA II interface.

With a sequential read speed of 200 megabytes per second (MB/s) and sequential write speed of 160MB/s, Samsung’s MLC-based 2.5-inch 256GB SSD is about 2.4 times faster than a typical HDD. Furthermore, the new 256 GB SSD is only 9.5 millimeters (mm) thick, and measures 100.3×69.85 mm.

Once introduced, the Samsung’s 256GB SSD will mark the largest capacity SSD from the global market leader in SSD sales, effectively eliminating density as a barrier to SSD adoption in the consumer space.

With development of the 256GB SSD, the notebook PC is on the brink of a second stage of evolution. This change is comparable to the evolution from the Sony Walkman to NAND memory-based MP3 players, representing an initial step in the shift to thinner, smaller SSD-based notebooks with significantly improved performance and more than ample storage,” said Jim Elliott, vice president, memory marketing, Samsung Semiconductor, Inc.

Through major advancements in proprietary controller technology, Samsung’s new MLC 256GB SSD, besides being comparable in speed to an SLC-based SSD, also boasts reliability equal to that of SLC SSDs, with a mean time between failures (MTBF) of one million hours, while costing considerably less. Power consumption is also exceptionally low at 0.9 watts in active mode.

In addition, the drive offers a sophisticated data encryption process that prevents data stored on the SSD from being accessed in an unauthorized manner, even after the SSD is removed from the PC.

Overall, the number of computing units in which SSDs are being offered is expected to increase dramatically once Samsung’s previously announced 128GB SSD and the new 256GB SSD are launched. At present, Samsung is actively involved in high-capacity SSD design-in activities for all of the top PC and server manufacturers from the U.S., Asia, and Europe.

Samsung is expected to begin mass producing the 2.5-inch, 256GB SSD by year end, with customer samples available in September. A 1.8-inch version of the 256GB SSD is expected to be available in the fourth quarter of 2008.

According to a Q1 2008 report by the semiconductor market research firm iSuppli, the SSD market will grow at an annualized average of 124 percent during the four-year period from 2008 until 2012. iSuppli now projects SSD sales to increase by an additional 35 percent in 2009 over what it projected last year, 51 percent more in 2010, and 89 percent more in 2011, and continue to show dramatic increases in subsequent years.

Comments

Today, the problem is not the capacity but the price of the flash drives compared to hard disk drives. Samsung has not revealed how much will cost these 256GB SSDs to come, but be sure that it will be much more than a current 250GB HDD that costs less than $100. Ten times more for the silicon unit with about the same capacity? More expansive the the notebook that contains it??

What's is interesting here is that Samsung seems to prove that it's possible to get comparable transfer rates and reliability with lower-cost MLC than SLC technology.

Articles_bottom
AIC
ATTO
OPEN-E