Samsung launches 32 GB Flash disk for mobile computers

Wolfgang Gruener

March 21, 2006 05:07

Taipei (Taiwan) - Samsung is first to announce a Flash storage device that aims to completely replace the traditional hard drive in some mass market mobile computers. The 32 GB solid state disk (SSD) drive comes in a 1.8" form factor and reads data at more than twice the speed of hard drives. Best of all: The SSD is promised to consume 95% less power than a hard drive.

Apple's decision to replace the 1.8" hard drive with a Flash memory device in the iPod Nano last October sparked a discussion whether Flash memory could soon replace hard drives in more applications than just MP3 players. We did not have to wait for an answer very long.

Samsung said it will be offering its 1.8" NAND Flash-based SSD in the not too distant future for mass market mobile computing applications. While the SSD's capacity of 32 GB cannot compete with traditional hard drives that currently offers up to 80 GB space, it offers superior performance and power consumption features that are likely to make the device the ultimate storage solution in some applications such as ultra-mobile computers, Tablet PCs and performance notebooks.

According to Samsung, the SSD will read and write data at 57 MB/s and 32 MB/s, respectively. We will have to benchmark such a drive in our test lab to verify this claim but if correct, the Flash disk would be about twice as fast as the latest 1.8" hard drive generation, which was measured at a read speed of 24 MB/s by the engineers of Tom's Hardware. The acceleration is most likely not enough to enable instant-on computers, but we would expect Windows computers to cut the system boot time at least in half.

Pure performance is only half the story of a SSD; the drive's light weight (15g), noiseless operation and a reduced power consumption may be even more important in most mobile applications. Samsung says that the Flash disk consumes only 0.1W when not in use and just 0.5W under load. For comparison, a typical mobile hard drive consumes somewhere between 1W and 2W of power in seek, read and write processes and between 0.2W and 0.8W when idle. Samsung may be a bit optimistic that the SSD uses just 5% of the electricity needed to power a hard disk drive, but it is clear that SSD will provide a substantial additional amount of battery time in mobile devices. In a common model that assumes that a hard drive consumes about 10-20% of the battery power, the SSD could add about 20-40 minutes of operating time in a notebook that runs about 4 hours on one battery charge.

Samsung did not provide a specific introduction date of the drive, but mentioned that it would offer 32 GB SSDs "soon." There was no information on how much the drive will cost. However, the fact that Samsung aggressively moves into the mass storage space (see: Hybrid hard drives: Can Samsung and Microsoft invent a new market for 2007?) and Flash prices are forecasted to experience sharp drops, leads us to believe that the device will be priced significantly below (commercial grade) SSDs and hit the market in a price range between $750 and $1000 when introduced.

Flash disks that are offered today are almost exclusively sold into enterprise, military and government markets and offer higher performance and often more extreme temperature ratings than Samsung's mass market SSD. One of the few 32 GB Flash disks on the market is currently sold by Silicon Systems: The device comes in a PCMCIA form-factor and is priced around $6400. Other commercial SSDs include Adtron's (2.5") Flashpak, which is available in a 4 GB version for $546 and in an 8 GB variant for $1900.

Not that it should come as much of a surprise that the largest flash memory manufacturer in the world would be dabbling in solid state disk drives (SSD), but once Samsung gets their legal ducks in a row we don't have any reason to believe they won't make good on taking that 32GB NAND SSD we saw appear at CeBIT to the consumer market. The demand is obviously there for a laptop drive that, according to Samsung, would consume less than 5 percent of the juice of regular hard drives, and weigh less than half, not be nearly as susceptible to shock or climate, or emit the same heat or noise . No, it won't be cheap (yet), but sooner or later flash memory will be the only thing anyone uses, and Samsung really wants to get this show on the road already.

SanDisk wants to replace the hard drive in notebooks with flash memory, a swap that it says will make thin laptops faster and more reliable.

The switch, however, will cost you a few hundred dollars more.

SanDisk on Thursday released a 32GB drive for commercial notebooks that stores information on flash memory chips rather than the magnetic platters that make up a traditional hard drive. The drive is available only to manufacturers, and the company declined to give out pricing or identify any notebook makers that will adopt it, but SanDisk said notebooks sporting the drive could come out in the first half of 2007.

For the past year or so, flash memory makers have promised to come out with products that will challenge hard drives in notebooks.

The debate between flash makers and hard drive manufacturers will be one of the big topics at the Computer Electronics Show and Storage Visions, which both take place next week in Las Vegas. While SanDisk shows off its flash drive there, drive makers will be touting hybrid hard drives.

Unlike traditional hard drives, flash memory drives do not contain moving parts. As a result, flash devices are less prone to breaking down — flash cards can survive drops from research balloons — and consume less energy. SanDisk's flash drive can increase battery life by about 10 percent, said Doreet Oren, director of product marketing for SanDisk.

Flash also can retrieve data faster. In its own tests, SanDisk says its flash drive can boot up Windows Vista — the next version of the Windows operating system — in 35 seconds, 28 seconds faster than the 55-second boot-up time required with a conventional drive.

Military and aerospace customers have been buying so-called solid state flash drives for about a decade. Some have capacities of 256GB and are quite sophisticated.

"They are in data recorders in aeroplanes," Oren said. "Breakage sometimes happens with military targets."

SanDisk gained the bulk of its expertise in these drives when it acquired Msystems, an Israeli outfit that was an early pioneer of USB flash keys.

"A few years ago, some of the people at Msystems told me their most expensive drives cost $70,000," said Jim Handy, chief analyst at Objective Analysis. "They are very tightly connected to the military in Israel."

The commercial drive from SanDisk contains a controller and other electronics that reduce power consumption and the overall cost of the drive that make it possible to slip it into high-end corporate notebooks, Oren said.

SanDisk packaged the drive into a 1.8-inch package, mostly to make it easier for notebook makers to adopt it. The package can be shrunk (to reduce the overall size of the notebook) or increased so that a flash drive could fit into a notebook with a 2.5-inch drive chassis.

"We can and will do other form factors," Oren said.

The flash drive isn't for everyone. At 32GB, it is far smaller than the conventional drives found in current notebooks, desktops or even MP3 players. Many business users, however, never max out the capacity on their drives.

The drive will also add about $600 to the cost of a notebook. Those prices will hinder sales, Handy said.

"There are certain applications where it can be used, but I just don't see it for business where the most violent thing they [users] will encounter is a cab ride in New York," said Handy.

Still, the capacity and price gaps will begin to erode over time, Oren said. NAND flash memory makers (NAND is the kind SanDisk makes) have managed to double the storage capacity of its chips nearly every year for the past few years.

The NAND flash contained in the SanDisk drive, in fact, only contains one bit of data per memory cell. SanDisk makes NAND flash that can hold two bits of data per cell and, through Msystems, has technology for expanding that to 4 bits of memory in a cell. Increasing the capacity can thus be accomplished without massive technological breakthroughs.

NAND pricing has also been dropping rapidly.

Meanwhile, drive makers point out that hard drives also continue to increase in data density and are far less expensive. Hitachi executives have said drives that can hold a terabyte of data are on the horizon.

Internet video will choke flash. An hour of standard video gobbles up about 1GB, while an hour of high-definition video will take up 4GB, according to various estimates.

"Right now, the average notebook shipment drive we're shipping is 80GB, and it's growing about 7 or 8GB a quarter," Seagate Technology chief executive Bill Watkins said in an interview in November. "If you talk to an Apple or Dell or HP or someone like that, they're going to tell you in 2010, 2011 they're looking for the average notebook to be more like 250GB, because there is going to be a lot of content. How is flash going to get there?"

"Right now, the average notebook shipment drive we're shipping is 80GB, and it's growing about 7 or 8GB a quarter," Seagate Technology chief executive Bill Watkins said in an interview in November. "If you talk to an Apple or Dell or HP or someone like that, they're going to tell you in 2010, 2011 they're looking for the average notebook to be more like 250GB, because there is going to be a lot of content. How is flash going to get there?"