Samsung Mass Releases 16Gb Chips

If you prefer the abbreviation, you can call them SSDs. The new memory chips made by Samsung bump the density of the previous NAND flash generation from 8 Gb to 16 Gb. In a 16 x 16 Gb configuration, future devices will reach the capacity of 32 GB. With some initial plans of launching the first SSDs in March 2006 being left in the dust, the actual launch date has been postponed to the time when Vista will come out. Furthermore Samsung has only recently received the Windows Hardware Qualification Lab (WHQL) for the SSD. As a result mass production of the 16 Gb chips is planned to ramp in the first part of 2007.

The manufacturer claims that its 1.8" and 2.5" SSDs could reach data read speeds of 57 MB/s and sustained write speeds of 32 MB/s, which is about twice as fast compared to a magnetic 1.8" hard disk drive. Actual tests have shown that Samsung's SSDs cannot sustain the numbers that were claimed but they reach about 50MB/s in transfer mode. And that's pretty good. Moreover, the SSD consumes only 0.9 watts under full load and that could translate into longer battery time.

But that's not all. Actually, the SSDs have another 2 advantages on their side. First comes the fact that the access time is practically inexistent (typical for a flash device). And then there's the fact that they can absorb a lot of shocks without taking any damage since there are no moving parts inside them. With the coming of Vista, Samsung plans to introduce small 2.5" SSDs (a 4GB model should come out in 2 weeks) which will work alongside normal drives and will support Vista's ReadyBoost technology. You can imagine that this addition could shorten the boot times by 50% so I guess that SSDs will probably be a big hit in 2007.