Peter Clarke

EE Times

(05/23/2005 6:47 AM EDT)

LONDON — Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. has created a memory module intended to replace rotating magnetic media in computers from NAND flash memory integrated circuits.

To make ``drop-in`` replacement of hard disk drives (HDDs) possible the solid-state drives (SSDs) have been designed with a HDD-style electrical interface Samsung said adding that it has developed SSD module of a 2.5-inch type that carry 16 NAND Flash devices of 4-Gbit or 8-Gbit capacty to provide a total of 8-Gbytes and 16-Gbytes storage capacity respectively. A 1.8-inch type SSD coming later this year is set to offer 4-Gbytes or 8-Gbytes of storage capacity, Samsung said.

The flash memory storage offers several advantages over HDDs, Samsung said. The power consumption is less than 5 percent that of HDDs and the NAND-based SSD weighs less than half that of a comparably sized HDD. The SSD reads data at 57-Mbytes per second and writes data at 32-Mbytes per second about 150 percent faster than a HDD, Samsung said. The SSD memory is free of moving parts and emits no noise minimal heat, Samsung said.

The 1.8-inch type SSD will be available in August, 2005 for sub-notebook and tablet PCs.