Solid-state drives: May 2008 Archives

I've seen a few posts on Samsung's 256GB solid-state drive, which should blow the proverbial lid off of the laptop-drive market.

This post in Electronista gives some detail on the new Samsung drive, and another looks at Seagate's reversal on SSD.

According to the Electronista post, Seagate will begin shipping SSDs in 2009. Seagate is also planning a 2TB traditional spinning hard drive. That market isn't going away. Yet.

Back to the Samsung SSD. Solid-state drives have no moving parts &mdash no spinning platters or swinging arms — but many are worried about the number of times data can be written to flash media before they wear out, and SSDs can be either very fast or very slow, depending on their design and how they're used.

In the post, the 256GB drive is compared to the previous 128GB model:

The 256GB edition reads sequential data at 200MB per second, twice the rate of the original model, while also seeing an even greater increase in write speeds: where the earlier drive writes at 70MB per second, the new SSD writes at 160MB per second.

On longevity:

Rather than use costly single-level cell (SLC) technology, the company has managed to develop a multi-level cell (MLC) storage drive that transfers as quickly as the best SLC storage while costing much less to produce than past SSDs. Improvements to the storage controller have also extended the longevity to as long as SLC drives, giving the 256GB drive longevity as good or better than some rotating hard disks.

There's still a lot of controversy about whether or not solid-state drives are ready to replace traditional hard drives. My thinking is that price will be the determining factor. The technology is getting better all the time, and once prices get even close to that of regular hard drives, laptops especially (and probably desktops, too) will be making the switch.