Samsung Reveals 512GB Solid State Drive: The Future Is Here
Few things get us more excited than solid state drives. Fast GPUs and
CPUs come close, but the instant speed increase given by installing an SSD just makes it almost magical. But one knock (aside from price) on
SSDs has long been their low capacity; it's been really difficult to
find SSDs with similar sizes to HDDs, but recently a couple of 400GB+
units have surfaced.
Now, Samsung is pushing the boundaries even further. The company has today introduced the first SSD utilizing high-performance toggle-mode DDR NAND, and sure enough, its a 512GB monster of a drive. The new unit has some of the most advanced features ever on a solid state drive, with it making use of a 30 nanometer-class 32 gigabit chip that the company began producing last November. The toggle-mode DDR structure together with the SATA 3.0Gbps interface generates a maximum sequential read speed of 250 Megabyte per second (MBps) and a 220MBps sequential write speed, both of which provide three-fold the performance of a typical hard disk drive. At these speeds, two standard length (apprx. 4GB each) DVD movies can be stored in just a minute.
Samsung provides further gains in power efficiency by having developed a low-power controller specifically for toggle-mode DDR NAND. The resulting power throttling capability enables the drive’s high-performance levels without any increase in power consumption over a 40nm-class 16Gb NAND-based 256GB SSD. The controller also analyzes frequency of use and preferences of the user to automatically activate a low-power mode that can extend a notebook’s battery life for an hour or more.
Samsung plans to begin volume production of the 512GB SSD next month, but pricing has not yet been made public. Rest assured, it won't be cheap, but we can't wait to benchmark it.
Now, Samsung is pushing the boundaries even further. The company has today introduced the first SSD utilizing high-performance toggle-mode DDR NAND, and sure enough, its a 512GB monster of a drive. The new unit has some of the most advanced features ever on a solid state drive, with it making use of a 30 nanometer-class 32 gigabit chip that the company began producing last November. The toggle-mode DDR structure together with the SATA 3.0Gbps interface generates a maximum sequential read speed of 250 Megabyte per second (MBps) and a 220MBps sequential write speed, both of which provide three-fold the performance of a typical hard disk drive. At these speeds, two standard length (apprx. 4GB each) DVD movies can be stored in just a minute.
Samsung provides further gains in power efficiency by having developed a low-power controller specifically for toggle-mode DDR NAND. The resulting power throttling capability enables the drive’s high-performance levels without any increase in power consumption over a 40nm-class 16Gb NAND-based 256GB SSD. The controller also analyzes frequency of use and preferences of the user to automatically activate a low-power mode that can extend a notebook’s battery life for an hour or more.
Samsung plans to begin volume production of the 512GB SSD next month, but pricing has not yet been made public. Rest assured, it won't be cheap, but we can't wait to benchmark it.
