News

posted on 15 February 2008 16:07

Samsung has started 64GB flash solid state disk (SSD) mass production.

The drives come with a serial ATA (SATA) II interface, up to 60 percent faster than SATA I, and can read data at 100MB/sec while writing it at 80MB/sec. Samsung says this is two to three times faster than standard notebook hard drives. It is a single cell design.

Jim Elliott, flash (!) marketing director for Samsung Semiconductor, said: "While there will always be a market for HDDs, we see growing demand for our new SSDs, especially now that they are available with the SATA II interface. SSD technology is especially viable for the business and high-end consumer notebook markets because of its outstanding performance, as well as the added value gained from virtually no downtime and faster operating speeds."

Well, obviously, but he forgot to mention affordability. The flash SSDs also use less power than spinning disks, around 75 percent less, which is great for battery life, and are also lighter. It is also quieter; there's no listening out for the disk's head movement to detect if a file has been saved to disk.

The target market is premium laptop computers. Dell and Alienware will feature the 64GB SSD in a few weeks in their products.