Samsung 512GB SATA SSD

Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. introduced the first solid state drive (SSD) utilizing high-performance toggle-mode DDR NAND. The new 512GB SSD provides electronic data processing application designers with advanced performance and reliability for notebooks with premium value.

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“The highly advanced features and characteristics of our new SSD were obtained as a direct result of an aggressive push for further development of our NAND flash technology, our SSD controller and our supportive SSD firmware,” said Dong-Soo Jun, executive vice president, memory marketing, Samsung Electronics. “Early introduction of this state-of-the-art toggle DDR solution will enable Samsung to play a major role in securing faster market acceptance of the new wave of high-end SSD technology,” he added.

The new 512GB SSD makes use of a 30 nanometer-class 32 gigabit chip that the company began producing last November. The toggle-mode DDR structure together with the SATA 3.0Gbps interface generates a maximum sequential read speed of 250 Megabyte per second (MBps) and a 220MBps sequential write speed, both of which provide three-fold the performance of a typical hard disk drive. At these speeds, two standard length DVD movies (approximately 4GB each) can be stored in just a minute.

Samsung provides further gains in power efficiency by having developed a low-power controller specifically for toggle-mode DDR NAND. The resulting power throttling capability enables the drive’s high-performance levels without any increase in power consumption over a 40nm-class 16Gb NAND-based 256GB SSD. The controller also analyzes frequency of use and preferences of the user to automatically activate a low-power mode that can extend a notebook’s battery life for an hour or more.

The Samsung 512GB SSD makes use of reinforced 256bit AES (advanced encryption standard) encryption to ensure higher security, protecting personal data against online hackers or undesired access when its host PC is misplaced and lost.

Samsung also provides streamlined boot time and application access with this new SSD, showing an approximately nine-fold improvement in random performance over HDDs. Also, an intelligent operation management function optimizes the SSD’s background working environment. Coupled with the popular Windows 7 TRIM feature the operation management function secures the reliability of the drive in write mode.

Samsung plans to begin volume production of the 512GB SSD next month. The new capacity extends Samsung’s range of SSD densities from 64GB to 512GB.

Comments

Flash is a huge market and the chip maker's R&D teams, heavily financed, seem to work days and nights to push the technology.

First example here is Samsung that quadruples the capacity of its SLC 2.5-inch SATA flash drives in only two years, much faster than HDDs. The 128GB unit was in production in July 2008, 256GB in November 2008 and 512GB coming in July 2009. This latter is packed in the regular 2.5-inch form factor 9.5mm high where the maximum capacity now available is 750GB for a magnetic disk drive. Also impressive is the evolution of the transfer rates of the flash devices: 70MB/s in read 90MB/s in write for 128GB, 220MB/s and 200MB/s for 256GB (using 40nm 16Gb chips), and 250MB/s and 220MB/s or 512 GB (30nm 32Gb chips).

Toggle-mode NAND integrated by Samsung and others use a dual-date rate interface to substantially increase read and write performance of NAND flash memory. An asynchronous technology, Toggle-mode DDR products perform a dual-edge operation for data input and output, using a bi-directional data strobe to effectively align data, with backward compatibility to legacy NAND.

Here HDDs cannot compete anymore in access times and transfer rates. Once more SSDs are superior in every categories but the prices.

Other companies already into SATA 512GB flash SSDs include A-Data (Intel-based), Apro, Foremay, Intel, OCZ, Stec, Super Talent and Toshiba.

The second example is Toshiba with its new 128GB NAND Embedded Module (see today's news) that doubles the capacity of its embedded NAN memory module in less than one year. The 64GB one was in production from 1Q10. 128GB is supposed to be in production in 4Q10.

For both capacities, 32nm process is used with chips that are 30 micrometers thick. The 128GB module (17x22x1.4mm) is just a little bigger than the 64GB device (14x18x1.4mm) but is much faster in read (55MB/s vs. 22MB/s) as well in write (21MB/s vs. 9MB/s) in sequential/no interleave mode.

It's quite incredible to have the possibility to record 16.6 hours of HD video in such a tiny storage devices like this new 128GB NAND flash module.