Samsung Announces 256 GB MLC SATA II SSD
Samsung announced yesterday, at its fifth annual Mobile Solution Forum, the company’s development of the world’s fastest, 2.5 inch, 256 GB MLC SSD with a SATA II interface.
At 9.6 mm thick and measurements of 100.3x69.85 mm, Samsung’s new 256GB SSD is also the slimmest SSD with the largest capacity to be offered with a SATA II interface. With sequential read and write speeds of 200 MB/s and 160 MB/s respectively, Samsung’s latest addition to the SSD family is roughly 2.4 times faster than your bog-standard HDD.
MLC memory SSDs are known for not having write speeds that match up to those that incorporate SLC memory but it seems Samsung has had a breakthrough in “proprietary controller technology”, which VP of Memory Marketing, Jim Elliot claims will see a change in the notebook PC comparable to “the evolution from the Sony Walkman to NAND memory-based MP3 players”.
Aside from being comparable in speed to an SLC-based SSD, Samsung claim the 256 GB boasts reliability equal to that of SLC SSDs, with a mean time between failures of one million hours, while costing considerably less and using less power (0.9 watts in active mode).
Samsung is expected to begin mass-producing the 256GB SSD by the end of the year, with customer samples available in September. A 1.8-inch version is expected to be available in Q4.
Samsung revealed little or nothing with regard to the price of either the 256 GB version or the 1.8-inch version, however, the company claims that the 256 GB "will mark the largest capacity SSD from the global market leader in SSD sales, effectively eliminating density as a barrier to SSD adoption in the consumer space."
- PhD Student Makes World's "Most Advanced" Walking Robot
- HP Pitches Green Printers, Samsung Green Hard Drives
- Core Security Publishes Apple iCal Vulnerabilities After Apple Fails To Patch
- Five Reasons Why An Apple Tablet Makes Sense Now
- Nvidia To Acquire Ray Tracing Company
- Alienware Relaunches Flagship ALX Desktop With 4 GHz Quad-core Processor
- 16:9 Ratio Notebook Panels To Become Mainstream In H2
- Osram Introduces LED For Use In Thin Displays
- Magnesium-aluminum Alloy Notebook Chassis Pricing To Rise More Than 10% In Q2
- AMD To Roll Out Griffin Processor As 'Turion Ultra' At Computex
- Criminal Ordered To Not Post Any Illegal YouTube Videos
- Large-sized LCD Panel Market Set For Nearly 18% Growth In 2008
- NASA Preps Phoenix To Dig On Mars
- NAND Flash Makers Progressing On Advanced Node
- Intel Desktop IGP Chipsets To See Shortages In Q3
- MSI Brings Back the Turbo Button
- Apple Working On Solar Panels For Mobile Devices
- Lacie Announces External 4x Blu-ray Writer
One difference on MTBF (not being a guarentee that your SSD will not fail within minutes of being switched on!) between classic hard drives and SSD, is that if an SSD does fail (assuming the failure is in the storage rather than controller), you will likely loose all data. There is little chance of data recovery as classic data recover techniques of dealing with bad sectors, head crashes etc can not be used with SSDs. Perhaps the only way that might help with data security is to apply RAID techniques internally to an SSD to allow for some aspects of component failure - a neat side effect here is that performance would potentially increase if RAID modes such as 3,5 or 6 are used!
I would be curious before investing in such expensive technology as to how (apart from backup to a classic hard drive) data is currently protected from failure - say in a laptop - where RAID and multiple SSD's could not be used?