Samsung unveils quick 64GB SSD

Oh sweet mother of solid state disks, Samsung just birthed another. Their new 1.8-inch 64GB SSD not only doubles the capacity of their current offering, it's said to be up to 60% faster than their existing SLC NAND-based 32GB SSD to boot. Mass production of this 1.8-inch drop-in replacement for hard disks is expected to begin in Q2. Fine, but hey, Samsung, in case you haven't noticed SSDs are already plenty fast enough in comparison to the conventional hard disks they are meant to replace. So how 'bout bringing us consumers bigger and cheaper SSDs based on your new MLC NAND instead of your lickity-quick SLC NAND? After all, Sandisk and Toshiba are breathing down your neck on this one. Thanks for listening.

[bongo @ Mar 27th 2007 9:24AM]

perhaps the reason mlc-nand is not being used for this kind of application is that the rewrite cycle limit is at about 10,000 cycles, compared to 100,000 cycles for slc-nand devices, which still seems a pretty small number to me.

[Tim @ Mar 27th 2007 9:26AM]

I wanna shove a super fast SSD or something in my ExpressCard slot. It's oh-so-empty at the moment :-( Possible?

[Chris @ Mar 27th 2007 9:58AM]

I just want one available to purchase, faster, slower, bigger, smaller.. I just want a SATA version to buy right now.. Can't find any yet.

[strider_mt2k @ Mar 27th 2007 10:05AM]

My laptop only has (and needs) a 40GB HD.

Just gimme a cheap swap out replacement soonest and we're jamming.
Then we can work on a big fat replacement for my network drive.

Good stuff this solid state storage.

[ksmith @ Mar 27th 2007 10:12AM]

1.8" you say? Do I smell a solid state iPod?

[PEZ @ Mar 27th 2007 10:13AM]

For some reason, I thought these were all 2.5"... yay.

[Kev50027 @ Mar 27th 2007 10:40AM]

This is all great, but the price per gigabyte is still off the roof, and hard drives will reign supreme for at least another 3 years.

[brendan Sheehan jnr @ Mar 27th 2007 10:43AM]

Perhaps a full flash based iPod lineup this year isn't that far fetched after all?

[Zach @ Mar 27th 2007 11:12AM]

Just a note: It takes one transistor per bit (sometimes you can get 2 or 3 bits per) but its on the order of 10^0. So, from a technological point of view, its much much easier from them to work on things like making it faster, than doubling capacity. Its also a hell of alot more economical. I'm sure if they wanted to they could push out a couple really big ass SSDs, but they'de be massively expensive to make, even when comparing to the current price of SSDs.

[nikster @ Mar 27th 2007 11:46AM]

We wantssssss one... now.

why so shy about the prices, samsung? or is it a case of "if you have to ask you probably can't afford it" :(

[mesaboogie @ Mar 27th 2007 12:07PM]

@ nikster

That's probably the case. Unfortunately. *tear*

[Tremelune @ Mar 27th 2007 2:58PM]

"Samsung, in case you haven't noticed SSDs are already plenty fast enough in comparison to the conventional hard disks they are meant to replace."

Mm...I'm pretty sure this is false. Last go around with these drives, read speeds were about the same as current hard drives and writes were waaay slower. I imagine it depends on what your doing (seek vs transfer), but current solid-state drives are by no means a slam dunk at this point.

I wouldn't go buying until some independent benchmarks are made available. In the meantime, you can always buy another gig of RAM...