Flash-memory maker Samsung is trying to drive a new kind of disk for PCs.
The company announced Monday that it has developed a "solid-state disk" using flash memory for PCs. The 1.8-inch NAND flash-based disks, which will be available in August, will have a capacity of up to 16GB. The first disks will target sub-notebooks and tablet PCs.
Pricing hasn't been announced yet.
The move to a flash-based disk comes as Samsung, a leader in the flash memory market, tries to double the density of flash memory year by year while driving down cost and increasing the number of markets it can sell flash memory into. The company has been trying to expand the reach of its flash memory business. One target is the consumer electronics market, which is a high-volume but low-margin business. Reaching high densities and volumes of flash memory chips will help to lower costs and make it more feasible to include them in more electronics devices.
The company said the solid state disk is made up of 8Gb chips and consumes power at a rate of less than 5 percent of current hard-disk drives. The challenge is to offer capacities in the same range of current mobile hard drives, such as those used in iPods, which currently top out at 60GB.
The solid-state disks also weigh less than half of what comparably sized hard drives weigh, according to Samsung. Solid-state disks also don't use moving parts, making them less prone to skipping and also allowing them to be nearly silent.
The disks will read data at 57MBps and write at 32MBps, according to Samsung.
The disks will also come with a hard-drive style interface, making it easier for manufacturers to use them in PCs.
Talkback
The death-knell for traditional hard disk storage. The beginning of the HDD version of CRTs vs TFTs. It took a few years of development, and economies of scale, but buying a TFT today instead of CRT is a no-brainer. IMO this will go similarly, and a smart-move making the interfaces easier to assimilate into existing architecture - in a few years the noisy, failure-ridden, power-hungry HDDs will be museum pieces....
Hang on a sec. What about the fact that flash disks have a prohibitively finite lifespan? I'd be using a flash disk in my laptop now if it was likely to last as long as a hard disk. I didn't notice any mention of this in the article.
This is in reply to Mark Ellerby's concern. Well i have not yet heard of flash disk failure, may be we got to wait and watch before we hear anything. But, the companies must have done research before they introduced these flash drives in mass scale
Rajan