News

posted on 28 August 2008 09:20

Samsung is sampling netbook solid state drives (SSD) that consign Intel's UMPC products to tortoise status.

There are three new products about 30 percent of the size of a 2.5-inch hard drive and with capacities of 8, 16 and 32GB, using 2bits per cell multi-layer cell (MLC) technology. They all use a 3Gbit/s SATA interface and have read speeds of 90MB/sec. The write speeds are slower: 25MB/sc for the 8GB product; 45MB/sec for the 16GB one; and 70MB/sec for the 32GB one; that's a feature of MLC chips; as the capacity and so the number of chips rise then writes can be parallelized across chips to increase write speed.

In comparison, Intel's mini-card format 4, 8 and coming 16GB Z-P230 UMPC products use a slower PATA interface, read at a much slower 38MB/sec and write at a stumbling 10MB/sec. It's not that Intel's designers, based in IM Flash Technologies, can't build fast chips. The company will introduce a very fast 2.5-inch SATA product with 240/170 MB/sec sustained read/write performance later this year. It looks as if the company has deliberately built a cheap low-end UMPC product.

Samsung is building NAND flash for the same market but taking a high-speed approach. It could be that someone has mis-read the market. Alternatively it is developing so fast that there are already defined fast and slow netbook types.

Ultra-mobile PCs (UMPCs) or netbooks are handheld small products like the Asus Eee , Acer Aspire and HP Mini-note, which are used for surfing the net, social networking and e-mail. Dell is going to introduce a UMPC soon, one using SSDs with STEC controllers. STEC makes the SSD's for EMC's high-end Symmetrix dri8ve arrays.

The netbook market is growing with Asus saying it will ship 5 million units this year and with 6 million Aspires shipping from Acer's plants. That's trivial compared to desktop and notebook volumes but it's ramping up very fast.

[Chris Mellor.]