Samsung to ship ultra fast 256GB SSD Drive

Samsung plans to launch a flash memory based solid state disk(SSD) drive this year that has a 256GB capacity and a high speed SATA II interface. The drive's dimension match those of a standard 2.5 inch hard disk drive; it's designed to be a drop-in replacement for a laptop hard drive.

Solid state disk drives use a flash memory chips in place of spinning magnetic disks that hard disk drives use. The chips make the drives sturdier and faster but the per gigabyte cost is much higher too.

Samsung's is the second recently announced 256GB SSD drive. The other from US based Super Talent, is thicker than Samsung's, at 12.5 millimeters compared to Samsung's 9.5millimeters. That drive has a SATA I interface with read speed of 65mbps(megabits per second) and write speed of 50mbps. Samsung's SSD drive has a read speed of 200mbps and a sequential write speed of 160mbps.


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. Power consumption is also exceptionally low at 0.9 watts in active mode.

In addition, the drive offers a sophisticated data encryption process that prevents data stored on the SSD from being accessed in an unauthorized manner, even after the SSD is removed from the PC.

Once introduced, the Samsung's 256GB SSD 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. Samsung expects its new drive to be sampling for computer manufacturers by September and shipping to those clients by the end of the year; this applies to both a 2.5-inch drive for more traditional notebooks and a 1.8-inch drive for ultraportables and other much smaller devices. Costs haven't yet been announced.

Hitachi introduces second generation 1TB Drive

Hitachi was first to announce 1TB hard drive in January 2007. Now they announced second generation 1TB drive Deskstar 7K1000.B which used 43% less power than first generation. The 7K1000.B also offers users the option of bulk data encryption (BDE) for the entire contents of the drive.

Instead of five 200 GB disks, the new drive has three 333 GB disks. Hitachi representatives told us that the 5-disk model will continue to be available through 2009, but the 3-disk version will ramp quickly and replace the old drives. What makes the new 7200 rpm drive interesting is not its performance or capacity, but its power consumption.
The 7K1000.B makes use of perpendicular magnetic recording and the drive’s BDE option uses AES encryption certified by the National Institute of Standards and Technology to deliver the strongest commercially available levels of security for data.

Power requirement for the 7K1000.B is 5.2W at idle and the drive uses a 16MB cache. And if power consumption is the primary concern of the user (such as data storage facilities), the drive supports a “reduced power idle state”: The disk rotation speed can be dropped via HDD commands to less than 5000 rpm, which will take the idle power consumption down to 2.4 watts That is close to 2.5” territory (about 2 – 2.2 watts) and could make these drives an interesting option for any environment that does not depend on maximum data transfer rates. The drive has a maximum media transfer rate of 1388 Mbits/s. For enterprise users needing a high mean time between failure (MTBF), a DeskstarE7K1000 drive is also being introduced that has up to a 32MB buffer and a 1.2 million hour MTBF featuring the same low power requirements and optional encryption technology.