NAND Flash-Based 32GB Solid-State

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wizzackr

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"Samsung's 32GB Flash-SSD is official


We reported earlier this month that Samsung had shown off a prototype of its new 32GB solid-state hard drive at CeBIT. Samsung has now announced that it has officially introduced the drives for the mobile sector.

According to Samsung, the 1.8" 32GB Flash-SSD weighs half as much as a comparable disk-based dives and reads data three times faster and writes 1.5 times faster. It also uses roughly 5% of the electricity needed to run a 1.8” hard drive. It is also completely silent and free of moving parts.

The commercialization of Samsung's 32GB Flash-SSD is a historic milestone for storage devices as it marks the initial entry of NAND flash memory in the mass mobile PC market. Samsung sees the overall global SSD market surging from US$540 million in 2006 to US$4.5 billion by 2010.

Pricing and availability have not yet been announced for the new drive."

sweet - can't wait. :D
 
ahhahahahha

So true

so price guesses?

$500+ ? or sub $300 ?

i would definetly like one - wonder how fast windows will boot now :)

Now, if they can make dam ROM drives faster!!!

Or start selling applications on solidstate medium's.
 
From what I'm reading about how vista is going to support things like this, I'm looking forward to seeing some pretty charts and graphs when it hits mainstream. I figure pricing has to be somewhere in the neighborhood of where the raptors are right now, but probably a tad bit higher. Other news that this type of flash memory is dropping 25% in price certainly won't hurt us any. http://www.neowin.net/index.php?act=view&id=32540
 
a quick froogle found me 4GB of Flash (CF) for a little over $100. Let's just say $100 for argument's sake. We'd need 8 of them for 32GB, hence $800. Add a bit for R&D..

I would say ~$850.

If we incorporate the flash pricedrop (25%) it'd be around 650.
 
Kind of OT, but I'm using a Compact Flash->IDE adapter to boot W98 off of a 1Gb CF card. Everything is great, but I read that the CF card has something like a 1,000,000 write cycle limit on the number of times a cell can be written.

For things like the FAT tables, wouldn't this limit get hit pretty quickly and cause issues with drive integrity? I assume this would also be a problem with the drive being discussed here unless they use some hybrid method of storing often-written sectors in battery backed RAM or something.

I guess I'll be finding this out soon anyway, but for now using a CF C: drive is a pretty amazing thing. My 140x flash card has a sustained 20MB/s transfer rate and no moving parts to slow down the random accesses.

Now all that remains is to use a 4 or 8gb CF->IDE adapter to run the XP C: drive (maybe even put 2 adapters in a stripe array for 40Mb/s sustained). Could give an i-RAM a run for it's money without all the worry of battery backup nonsense. 4GB CF's are ~$170 right now, and the IDE adapters are $14 at www.logicsupply.com so a 4GB flash solution is about 1/2 the price of the comprable i-RAM one.

Sure its prob. already been done here, but just a thought.
 
Since these also have no moving parts...is the MTBF technically "when you hit the drive with a hammer" ?

I can't wait to see some benches of these things once they're available... And even if they're $500...price out a i-RAM with 4GB of memory and that's not too cheap either and you only get a 4GB drive.
 
Volkum said:
Since these also have no moving parts...is the MTBF technically "when you hit the drive with a hammer" ?
Click to expand...

Not really. It is possible that the silicon die will eventually develop problems. Especially when you have a lot of background radiation, even solid state memory may not work forever. This is a problem in embedded systems used in space.

Additionally, it seems that there is a limited number of read/ writes that you are allowed to perform on a CF chip, see post above yours.

istymie said:
I guess I'll be finding this out soon anyway, but for now using a CF C: drive is a pretty amazing thing. My 140x flash card has a sustained 20MB/s transfer rate and no moving parts to slow down the random accesses.
Click to expand...

what benchmark did you use?
 
Sorry, I should have said "My 120x flash card's manufacturer states it has a 20Mb/s sustained transfer rate". I'm a tool. When I get a chance I'll post benches if anyone cares. Sandra? HdTach? whats the most appropriate? This is just W98 tho and running on a EPIA platform so I guess it wont be too conclusive.

As soon as I garner up $190, I'm going to go for the 4GB CF XP boot drive scenario and I'll post my results. Along that line, does anyone know how to force the default settings for C:\Program Files to the D: drive so I can run apps off of a hard disk at D: and the O/S off flash at C:?
 
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