Samsung puts large flash SSD on shoulder - dares Intel and Toshiba to knock it off
I had a flash drive in my first laptop and I love ‘em. So the industry’s dithering on SSDs drives me nuts. Some kind of announcement, then zip on product availability. Then another announcement, aimed at God-only-knows what market. Multi-billion dollar investment announcement, followed by nothing. WTF?
Hope isn’t a plan, but at least it’s something
So I hesitate to get excited about Samsung’s new 64 GB drive announcement, but I can’t help myself, it sounds good. The press release goes after hard disk drives in a refreshingly direct fashion.
Note to clueless Samsung marketing droids
Koreans have a low opinion of American numeracy, and for good reason. But leaving access times and IOPS off the chart is just dumb. While your average American ultra-light notebook buyer may have no idea what those numbers mean, we do like numbers. So give us some, especially when it makes you product look really good.
Now, I normally charge big bucks for marketing advice, but here’s an idea: present access times in microseconds. Like this:
Flash drive access time: 100 microseconds
HDD access time: 20,000 microseconds
We may not understand the numbers, but we sure do like them. You mention SLC, which nobody understands, and leave off access times?
The SLC mention is significant though: this drive is aimed at computers, not music players.
The StorageMojo take
This is the product that Apple will use in their new 2.2 lb. MacBook Nano in Q3. Apple will buy every drive Samsung can produce for the first six months, leaving competitors scrambling for product, just as they did with the first flash-based iPod Nano. I’ve been burned before, but I want to believe that by year end we’ll have volume availability of notebook flash drives. I can hardly wait.
Oh, and clueless Samsung marketing droids: just kidding about the droid part. You can send me a long-term eval unit and no more droid jokes. Honest.
Comments welcome, of course, especially from Samsung. I’m on the road most of this week, so moderation is a tad sporadic. But keep those cards and letters coming folks!
on March 29th, 2007 at 4:57 am
I haven’t been able to find a pricee listed for the drive yet, Robin, but I would suspect Apple would first use the drives in the iPod and then push them out to the MacBook, unless the cost messes with Apple’s current pricing on the iPod. My interest is in seeing how well these drives are able to push data to the CPU as HDD’s are the current bottleneck in our GHz clock speed./bus speed world. I myself wonder how a company like Sun might use larger SSD drives in a SFF “Thumper” unit or with the their “Niagara”-based servers and how the improved transfer rates will affect th databases and OLTP. It is interesting to see how much hype there is for these drives and how little the market seems to be responding. The shift will be slow, but it’s coming and it can’t be stopped, I hope.