News: Computer Hardware for Small Business

Solid State Hard Drive: Samsung 32 GB Drive

Impressive speed, low power, but high price (for now)

by Keith Wheeler

3/29/2006

Today’s computers aren’t normally considered mechanical devices. However, when there’s a clanking sound emanating from a computer, the mechanical part - the hard drive - has just failed. Samsung has released a new solid state hard drive with a 32 GB capacity. It has no moving parts giving its reliability an edge. It also improves on hard drive performance in two areas: speed and power consumption. Is it ready to take over the hard drive market? While there are no moving parts on the outside of a hard drive, the inside is a symphony of motion. Platters are spinning at up to 10,000 rpm while read/write heads dance across the surface. All the while, the user (or in the case of a server, many users) never think twice about the data storage device making their work progress possible. Since the hard drive is the most mechanical aspect of the computer’s components, it would stand to reason that it would be most prone to failure. The clanking sound coming from the hard drive means that the failure has occurred and it’s time to find the backup to have access to that data. The idea of a solid state drive changes this picture since it would have no moving parts whatsoever. Imagine a series of 32 1 GB USB drives all working together in a single drive. Samsung’s new drive comes in a 1.8” drive similar to what’s already available on the small form factor hard drive market. The throughput of the Samsung drive is rated to read data at 57 MB/s while being able to write data at 32 MB/s. When compared to typical 1.8” hard drive speeds of 24 MB/s, the solid state drive reads over twice as fast. The fascinating part of the Samsung SSD is the amount of power it consumes. Using solid state technology, the drive uses 95% less power than typical mechanical drives. The power savings bode well for portable uses such as laptops, TabletPC’s, even digital cameras. Pricing is the issue, at least for the short term. It is expected that the 32 GB drives will be priced between $750-1000. That is significantly more than the current CDW price of $249.00 for a Toshiba 1.8” 40 GB hard drive. Naturally, that price is expected to come down. Some experts have been made predictions that the price of NAND memory (the type of solid state memory typically used in USB drives) will halve itself over the first half of 2006. If that occurs, look for more large-scale, solid state, storage devices to be made available to the small business market soon – and with lower pricing.