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Samsung unveils 32GB Flash-based HDD killer

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mouser:
This is surely the future of hard drives..

Samsung has launched what it reckons its the world's first 32GB NAND Flash-based hard disk drive replacement unit. The company claimed the so-called "solid state disk" can access data three times faster than an HDD can and write files one-and-a-half times more quickly - though we don't know what HDD spec it was comparing its product to.
The SSD is a 2.5in form-factor product that operates at 5V and connects across a 66MHz Ultra DMA parallel ATA bus. Samsung said the unit consumes just five per cent of the energy it takes to run a hard drive.

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http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2006/03/21/samsung_unveils_ssd/



from digg.com

Rover:
Cool!  I notice there wan't a projected price in the article.  I'm guessing it's not compairble to HDD prices.

The good news is that as Moore's Law takes over, prices should come down and capacities go up.  It'll be good to speed up the data access speeds, especially on laptops.  Right now the HDD is by far the slowest thing in my system.  Even more so on my laptop.  It'll be nice to have good battary life and perfomance for a change.  :Thmbsup:

jgpaiva:
This is very good news!
I'm a laptop user, so, that 5% energy use is the most interesting part for me... Of course the increase in speed is a very good bonus! ;)
In that link's page, there is also mentioned the project of having the OS booting from a flash. I had already read about it, good to know it is already out! :)

brotherS:
Great! Only 5% of the energy a regular HD consumes means not just it's perfect for mobile computing, but also a nice alternative when you want/need to go for a quiet solution or when the heat a regular HD produces is a problem.

f0dder:
Solid-state disks have been around for a long time, but at an insane cost - basically only the military and other Big Guys use them. I would really appreciate a smallish solid-state disk at a reasonable price; not only will you get better throughput, but search time should be reduced from miliseconds to micro/nanoseconds.

If the 32gig drive is at a resonable price, it would be perfect for OS + applications and things like source code and documents. Heck, even a few games for faster loading and less drive thrashing. But I bet you it's not reasonably priced ;)

Another alternative are the ram-based drives that are starting to pop up. Sure, they lose your data contents if you unplug your PC for "some amount of time" (24+ hours iirc), but with a normal poweroff the data is kept thanks to the PCI bus power. And this a lot cheaper than solid-state disks, even if 4x1GB ram modules are expensive.

The only sad thing with the "ram drives" (which paradoxically is also what really makes them useful) is that they're limited to SATA or SATA-2 speeds, limiting you to hundreds of megabytes per second bandwidth, while the RAM modules are able to transfer gigabytes per second.

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