Samsung Boosts Solid-State Disk Capacity to 64 GB

A little over a year after it premiered the first commercially available solid-state hard disk drives at about 32 GB capacity, Samsung said it's now mass-producing a package announced last March at an electronics show in Taiwan, that clusters eight 8 GB flash components together, while still maintaining the 1.8-inch form factor needed for portable devices.

The announcement shows Samsung is marching right in lockstep with its solid-state roadmap outlined in May of last year, which it reiterated at CES last January.

Meanwhile, competitors in the SSD space including one notable player - Seagate, which continues to hold a considerable stake in the not-so-solid-state disk space - are predicting that SSD will find a comfortable niche in portable components and as convenient tools for use in Windows Vista services like ReadyDrive.

As a result, there's something of a disparity between manufacturers' and analysts' predictions for the new technology. At WinHEC in Los Angeles last May, manufacturers couldn't directly address attendees' questions about when SSD technology would outmode today's prevalent, spinning ceramic hard drives. When they were presented a picture of such a moment of obsolescence never taking place, they were a bit astounded.

Samsung is predicting a 270% annual growth rate for sales of its SSDs between now and 2010. That makes sense, given that the company started out at zero just 12 months ago. But while independent analysts such as iSuppli are noting the slight dent that SSDs are having in the hard drive market at large, it's noted in recent months that HDD prices are plummeting at a rate faster than flash memory, when viewed in terms of capacity. As a result, the firm believes Samsung faces some hurdles in driving SSD implementation over that three-year time frame.