Samsung is putting its high-speed NAND flash memory to good use with today's announcement of a 4GB solid state disk (SSD) which can be used in conjunction with traditional hard disk drives (HDDs) to increase I/O performance in Windows Vista. The flash SSD leverages Microsoft's new Windows ReadyBoost technology to improve system responsiveness and practically eliminate long load times and application delays that users have become accustomed to with HDDs.

Windows ReadyBoost caches user data to the flash SSD in the background without any user intervention. When the user or an application then requests data, it is quickly retrieved much faster than with a traditional HDD. Whereas a HDD can perform 100-200 requests per second, Samsung's SSD can service up to 5,000 requests per second.

Samsung's 4GB SSD device will be quite the versatile addition to any notebook or desktop PC. Not only can it be used in conjunction with traditional HDDs, but it will also be compatible with upcoming hybrid hard drives which will give users a second source for ReadyBoost (yet another still comes in the form of thumb drives plugged into a free USB port). And as an added bonus, Windows compresses the information on a ReadyBoost device which means that the 4GB SSD would actually cache 8GB of user data.

According to Samsung, the 4GB SSD can be incorporated directly onto the motherboard through the ATA interface or as seen on the right, in a more traditional 2.5" drive layout.