Samsung's 32 GB Flash Drive Previewed
By Jason Zushman, Achim Roos
September 20, 2006 09:07

If you follow the hard drive market, you are probably familiar with names such as Raptor, Deskstar or Barracuda, which stand for hard drive families from various manufacturers. All of today's mainstream hard drives are based on rotating magnetic platters, allowing for relatively high capacities of up to 750 GB per hard drive.

But the technology has limits, as the data transfer speeds did not increase much over time. As a matter of fact, hard drives are the slowest components in modern PCs. Most attempts to speed up storage performance either use caches to store data that is used frequently, or they deploy faster memory solutions such as SDRAM or DDR-SDRAM.

However, all of these require the steady supply of energy by means of buffer batteries or by sucking power out of the grid. Solid state hard drives based on Flash memory are similar to SDRAM-based solutions, but they are unaffected by power-related volatility issues, which plague SDRAM units. Data that is written to Flash stays - even throughout power interruptions.

Flash hardware has intrinsic benefits, as it benefits from extremely short access times, but it also has specific advantages for the upcoming Windows Vista operating system. Flash memory as an optional cache allows the user to take advantage of Vista's "ReadyBoost" feature, allowing for a peppier PC.

Toms Hardware
complete article

This looks like an excellent innovation. I'm amazed that it uses a standard ATA 66 HDD connection. Although it's small one can use an external USB drive or a standard HDD SATA or IDE drive for storage and just use this drive to run Windows and the basic applications one uses daily.

I can see that making its way quickly into high-end laptops, even if it is only 32gb

32GB certainly seems plenty for now............ currently the partitions I make/use for Vista testing are between 20-30GB, so definately this could be used to house an OS/programs........... although I'm azzuming it's to be used for ReadyBoost??

Synaptic wrote:

I can see that making its way quickly into high-end laptops, even if it is only 32gb

That is more than enough for my work laptop. I have a 40GB HDD and 27GB is free.

kd1966 wrote:

32GB certainly seems plenty for now............ currently the partitions I make/use for Vista testing are between 20-30GB, so definately this could be used to house an OS/programs........... although I'm azzuming it's to be used for ReadyBoost??

No, ReadyBoost has a maximum of 4GB, so it would have to be used as a hybrid drive if you wanted to use it for ReadyBoost, otherwise it would be a waste of 28GB. This would be used best as an OS Disc. This drive could work wonders for something that needs to read and write small files continuously.

LOOK at the Windows XP boot up time!!! Plus, the power savings would be huge on a laptop! I want one...

moved from bin / edited : rippinchikkin

I wonder how long it will be before the hardrive as we know it will be gone and replaced with flash memory.. mmm i hope as soon as possible mainly for use in laptops. Until then, we'll have to make do with the upcoming Hybrid drives.