Samsung announces 64GB SATA II drives in 2.5, 1.8-inch varieties

All familiar things: Samsung, SSD flash drives, SATA II, 2.5 and 1.8-inch sizes (read: laptop and portable media device sizes, respectively), 100MBps write / 120MBps read, up to 64GB (again). Not that they stated prices, but we're not even asking.

[Via Akihabara News]

[max andrews @ Nov 5th 2007 12:54AM]

Very cool, just a few more years of the waiting game and these will be in everything! Won't that be nice...

[Nick @ Nov 5th 2007 2:10AM]

Do we want to know the price? lol

[Scott Neary @ Nov 5th 2007 9:00AM]

...and again, why is this called a "disk"?

[Dan Parmelee @ Nov 5th 2007 1:27AM]

Something like this in an iPod (or similar) would seriously improve battery life, AND make it a good portable hard drive!

[sam @ Nov 5th 2007 1:31AM]

You missed the word that makes it exciting in the title. "Flash"

[Jagannath A @ Nov 5th 2007 4:37AM]

if anythings less than 80gb is in the title its 'Flash' :-\

[sam @ Nov 5th 2007 1:31AM]

You missed the word that makes it exciting in the title. "Flash"

[Luis @ Nov 5th 2007 1:46AM]

The brushed metal look sure is nice... will all drives ship with it or is it just the promo pic??? BTW sam is right SSD should be in the title

[M @ Nov 5th 2007 2:00AM]

Price is the hold back for most... I definitely want this tech to take off. Imagine a RAID with these types of drives!
M

[boomhauer @ Nov 5th 2007 3:19AM]

who needs raid when you dont have moving disks that can crash into moving heads?

[josh @ Nov 5th 2007 10:45AM]

"who needs raid when you dont have moving disks that can crash into moving heads?"

Someone who realizes that accounts for very little in the way of drive failure. RAID certainly is convinient when used in the various mirroring configuration to prevent data loss from complete hard drive death like you described, but it is also useful when presented with simple bad sectors and other localized data loss that isn't caused by anything so catastophic. Given the number of memory waffers in flash storage of this capacity I wouldn't be surprised if some are not 100% reliable and similar localized failure occurs. RAID would be useful in this situation.

Further, while the performance of the flash drive is pretty significant alone, it could be combined with a stripping RAID setup to further increase data throughput throughout the system. RAID isn't a single implementation after all and some of the configurations revolve around performance rather than data integrety. FLASH technology doesn't obsolete RAID in the least.

[boomhauer @ Nov 5th 2007 10:59AM]

yeah i actually posted a followup message last night butforgot to click the authorize link, but striping etc could def go from way fast to way way fast.

[Julian Bond @ Nov 5th 2007 3:35AM]

When do the price/capacity curves of Flash and Disk drives cross? Flash seems to be growing in capacity really fast but at a huge cost. Drives are also leaping ahead but staying at pretty much the same price. 2.5" drives seem to have gone from 40 to 80 to 160 to 320 in the blink of an eye. Does Flash ever catch up?

BTW. Why are 1.8" drives so expensive? Is it because Apple have bought the entire production capacity? And is that why 160Gb are unobtainable from anywhere except bolted inside a Classic?

[thethirdmoose @ Nov 5th 2007 7:55AM]

Clearly because they are made of pure Unobtanium.

[josh @ Nov 5th 2007 10:48AM]

Capacity being equal, memory density per volume is much greater in 1.8" drives. That alone would drive up price, ignoring that PMP demand for 1.8" drives exceeds laptop demand for 2.5" drives.

[Jacob Magnusson @ Nov 5th 2007 4:28AM]

"100MBps write / 120MBps"

That's effin incredible!

When can we expect them? I seriously can't hold on much longer :P

[HineyWipe @ Nov 5th 2007 7:33AM]

Today's impressive storage, tomorrow's Bernoulli!

I want to know MTBF, how many writes/erases before block errors (Flash drives DO have limits).

I'm sure we'll see 32GB iPods next Spring, and then 64GB version in 2009.

Why not just make the PC internal spec memory non-volatile and begone with storage devices!
(I'm just saying that outloud)

[josh @ Nov 5th 2007 11:00AM]

Despite the impressive speed of these drives (as reported by their manufacturer rather than through real world usage benchmarks) they don't hold a handle to the speed of moderm RAM modules. It is important for RAM to be as fast as possible, as any clockcycle spent waiting for data from memory to feed the processor is a clockcycle wasted (hence why AMD processors, despite being largely inferior to Intel processors currently, still hold performance crown for memory intensive calculations. They do a better job of feeding data to the processor and that becomes the bottle neck). RAM could always be faster, as could the bus that feeds its contents to the processor, and switching to an existing non-volatile technology would be a major step backwards. Making NVM technology match the speed of RAM is technically possible, but doing so removes the major advantage, price. It would be MORE expensive per MB to make a non-volatile solution as fast as RAM, than RAM currently costs.

It may oneday happen, especially as processors are not increase in clock speed at anywhere near the frequency (ha) that they once were, opting to build out the number of cores rather than up the clockspeed, but it isn't happening soon, especially given the current price of significant non volatile memory at large capacities vs that of traditional platter disks.

[kirby @ Nov 5th 2007 11:41AM]

iPod touch 16gb. iPhone 8gb.


I think it has already begun.

[Robert Wicks @ Nov 5th 2007 9:09AM]

I'm really excited to see what's going to happen with the datacenter when these drives become readily available.

[steve @ Nov 6th 2007 1:10AM]

Samsung: You want the specs?
Engadget: I want the price!
Samsung: You can't handle the price!

[Jim Thompson @ Nov 20th 2007 1:24AM]

just wait until we get hybrid HDs, and ZFS keeps its index on the flash portion. Remember to only buy laptops that can handle 4GB of memory, because ZFS *will* use it.