Samsung 32GB flash drive goes live

Darius Chang | Mar 28, 2006

Samsung has began offering 32GB solid state hard drives to manufacturers. Based on NAND flash memory technology, these high-capacity disks have no moving parts. As a result, they are shock-proof and use only 5 percent of the power required for magnetic-based storage. Moreover, flash drives are not susceptible to erasure by magnetic fields and have higher read/write speeds.

Unfortunately, all these advantages do not come free. Significantly more expensive than magnetic harddisks (a 2GB SD flash card costs approximately S$200 (US$142.50) compared with S$180 (US$128.25) for a 20GB 1.8-inch harddisk), we can expect the first generation of mobile devices to be priced at a premium.

As it is still rather large--about half the size of a comparable hard drive--we expect the flash drive to appear in high-end notebooks and portable multimedia devices first. However, the veteran magnetic storage will not be going the way of the Dodo anytime soon, though it may eventually be relegated to server-level storage solutions.

Filed under: Notebooks
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