When it comes to storage technology on computers, hard drive
technology has advanced the slowest as far as performance is concerned. Companies
like Samsung are looking to Flash Solid State Disks (SSDs) to replace the
spinning disk and reduce loading times for applications.
SSDs have the advantage of rapid response times without
having to wait for a hard drive to spin up/seek and have drastically reduced power
consumption compared to traditional hard drives. SSDs use zero watts when not being
accessed, and as little as 200 milliwatts during
read/write activities.
Given the lower power requirements, company’s like Sony and Fujitsu are looking to
Samsung to provide SSDs for their mobile computers. Samsung also uses its SSD
drives on the Q30
notebook and Q1 UMPC.
Samsung announced today that it has produced samples of the
world's first 16Gb NAND flash memory device built on a 50 nanometer process.
The multi-level cell (MLC) design uses a 4KB page size instead of the 2KB used
in competing designs. As a result, read speeds are double that of 2KB designs
while write speeds are increased by 150%.
The increased storage capacity and faster write speeds will help Samsung reach its goal of producing 128GB SSDs by the
first half of 2008.
Samsung will begin mass production its new MLC 16Gb NAND
flash memory chips in Q1 2007.
