Samsung, one of the leading manufacturers of consumer electronics is aware of the fact that the storage market is slowly heading towards a new standard. As a consequence, the South Korean company has already unveiled its flash-based SSD storage solution, which Dell uses in a rather large number of its notebooks. Still, the company also keeps a close eye on its hard drive business, while moving forward with its SSD plans.

According to Dell's Hubbert Smith, Samsung is going to continue to treat solid state drives as an alternative to hard drives, in several distinct segments and while doing so, the company is also expected to further develop its current hard drive lineup.

Samsung, as all the other storage product manufacturers, knows that the current SSD technology is still far from allowing the development of flash-based drives meant to become an alternative to standard hard drives. Users are still looking for high-capacity drives that can offer an extensive number of write cycles and a good price tag. Unfortunately SSD drives, using current technology, are high-priced and provide limited wire cycles, which makes them inaccessible for most users.

On the other hand, SSD drives have some important advantages over standard magnetic hard drives, which makes them a better product choice for the latest portable computer systems. Because they lack moving parts, Solid State Drives are more shock resistant and come with an extensive MTBF of almost 2 million hours. Solid State Drives are also more power efficient and can provide a working environment without the undesired noise level.

Major manufacturers such as Intel, TDK and even Seagate are currently working on a way to improve SSD technology, which will allow them to manufacture and release more cost-effective solid-state drives.