Solid State Drives (SSDs) are something you’re going to be hearing a lot about over the next year or so. Basically they are very large Flash drives that can be used as a replacement for the traditional mechanical hard disk drive (HDD) in your laptop, media player… Or phone.
The advantage of SSDs over a normal HDD is that SSDs can boot-up much faster and access files at hugely faster speeds. They also need a lot less power due to having no moving parts — and break less often.
So the news that Samsung is starting mass production of 64GB 1.8″ SSDs is hot stuff for the mobile device world. 1.8″ mini HDDs are the size used by Apple in the iPod – and so the 64GB SSD may potentially fit inside the iPhone. But even if Apple doesn’t make use of the new SSDs, there’s a good chance that other devices — such as larger Windows Mobile PDA handsets — may well soon be boasting storage capacities that just a couple of years back were common in laptops.
About Caspar Field
nice but where is the price and release date?
Sorry, should have said – these drives are primarily marketed at device manufacturers, so you won’t be able to buy them off-the-shelf for a while. Larger SSDs, in 2.5″ and 3.5″ cases (as used in laptops and desktops) are available now from some tech sites — but they’re not cheap at the moment. However, just as all other forms of Flash have seen prices tumble over the last couple of years, so will SSDs. We have a MacBook that’s ready and waiting for a low-priced 128GB 2.5″ SSD… Oh yes…
Well, even if its only 64 GB. I’m sure folks at Apple can cram two of them in to a MacBook Pro as a RAID0 ultra high speed 128GB. Since its solid state, should be less chance of failure. I’m using a 120GB 5400 RPM drive and its not too pokey but I can just imagine the speed.
Scan has 32GB Samsung SSDs for just over £300 at the moment…
http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/ProductInfo.asp?WebProductID=558790
…which isn’t enough to switch to, practically speaking.
But a 64GB SSD would be tempting at around the £200 mark because of the performance boost, extra battery life, and increased reliability it would offer. However, with Scan also offering 160GB 2.5″ Samsung HDDs for £60 inc. tax, there’s clearly a huge gulf between the price-versus-capacity that SSDs offer compared to HDDs.
It depends whether SSDs are viewed as a performance option, or simply an alternative to HDDs. On a cost-per-MB basis they just don’t make sense, but people often spend hundreds of pounds on graphics cards to boost performance. SSDs could fit into the same niche – at least until the prices drop.
Once SSDs start being bought in large numbers by laptop manufacturers, we expect prices to drop sharply.