Samsung doubles solid-state drive capacity

Samsung has announced the first 64Gb solid state disk drive (SSD) which will
hit the market this summer.

The company, which already offers 16Gb and 32Gb versions, said that the 64Gb version is the same size as a 1.8in hard disk drive (HDD) and is aimed at
notebook manufacturers.

SSD technology is based around NAND flash memory and offer significant
advantages of traditional hard disk drive technology. These include speed of
data access, faster boot-up times, greater power efficiency, silent running
and better reliability. The disadvantage is that they cost significantly
more than HDDs but prices will fall once more notebook vendors start using
them.

Samsung claimed the new drive will be a lot faster than existing SSDs,
thanks to the use of 8Gb single-level-cell (SLC) NAND. The read and write
performance of the drive will be 20 per cent and 60 per cent faster,
respectively, over the 32GB SSD drive the company announced last year.

The memory giant also said that it expects 8GB and 16Gb versions of the
drive to be suitable for use in digital camcorders and portable navigation
devices. There are also 100GB SSDs planned for the server arena.