Solid-state Hard Drive Capacity May Soon Double

Among the many miniaturized technologies that will descend upon Las Vegas at CES 2007. Samsung is gearing up to add to the mix the second generation of solid-state hard disk drives. This at a time while users even today continue to discover the first generation.

Since August of 2005, Samsung has been shipping solid-state drives (SSD) using 4 gigabit (Gb) and 8 Gb NAND flash memory components, in 1.8" and 2.5" form factors, and last June announced a new model with a 32 gigabyte (GB, with a big "B") capacity. This morning, Samsung upped the ante with its announcement that it is shrinking the lithography for its NAND flash memory from 65 nm to 50 nm, and will be shipping 16 Gb NAND flash components in this quarter.

The move is significant, because it paves the way for 64 GB SSDs and higher during this year, evolving into the capacity necessary for a very small portable computer (sub-notebook) to run not just Windows Mobile but Windows Vista, and even have some Office 2007 applications installed.

Vista also supports a new feature called ReadyBoost, which leverages portions of flash memory in SSDs and hybrid hard drives (also from Samsung) as a kind of data cache, increasing system performance by populating easily accessed locations with sectors before those sectors are specifically requested.

So during CES, rather than manufacturers showing samples of NAND flash under big spotlights and larger magnifying glasses, we may be seeing small computing components taking bigger advantage of flash memory-based components. Samsung is the world's leading flash memory producer by a substantial margin, and although it's also a hard drive manufacturer, Samsung drives are not noted for their high performance.

As Samsung pushes its solid-state philosophy, it doesn't stand to lose much in the field of magnetic media. Meanwhile, competitors Seagate -- the leader in the conventional HDD field -- and Toshiba continue to make strides in the miniaturization of their own devices.

One market where these ever-smaller technologies could collide head-on is the MP3 player arena, where some continue to perceive the usefulness of miniature hard drives as limited. While NAND flash would be much more expensive to implement in 60 GB capacities today than in their current 8 GB implementations, this may not be the case for too long. The next step for Samsung after 16 Gb 50 nm, as the company announced last September, is 32 Gb 40 nm later this year.

If Samsung can effectively increase the lifespan of flash memory in proportion with the decrease of its die size -- which is a literal possibility given the smaller unit's lower power consumption -- the possibility exists for the MP3 player and small device industry to find its "break-even point," where high-capacity NAND flash costs about the same as high-capacity HDD, by this time next year.

This morning, Samsung cited research from In-Stat predicting a possible 50 percent saturation of SSD components in mobile devices by 2013. While Samsung has had a fast start in the fabrication department, it has had a relatively slow start in the market toward that goal, so 2013 may yet be a tall order. But we'll have a much better picture of the next six years after next week.