Samsung goes solidly green
At this week's Storage Visions 2009 Conference on Tuesday, Samsung announced that it's preparing to ship a 100 GB solid-state drive with fresh green credentials.
The announcement indicates that the Samsung SS805 is expected to ship this quarter. Geared toward data-center servers, the drive has a random-read speed of 25 Krpm and a random-write speed of 6K. The company says that the drive can process as much as 100 times as many input/outputs per second (IOPS) per watt than a comparable HDD-based drive.
Power consumption and heat output are where the environmentally friendly stuff comes in. A typical 15K HDD requires on average somewhere between 8 and 15 watts of power in active mode, and 1-2 watts while idling. Samsung's solid-state tech, on the other hand, pares that down to 1.9 watts in active mode and 0.6 watts in idle mode, minimizing power consumption for both the computers themselves and the hard-working A/C units cooling the data center down.
The company says that speed tests show the drive reading sequential data at 230 MB/sec and writing sequentially at 180 MB/sec. The new drive uses an 8-channel controller as well as fresh NAND flash and drive firmware, all developed in-house at Samsung.
The drive comes with full data encryption for the security-conscious, and a special function manages disk operations in case of power outage; if that happens all data in the process of being stored to the drive will be preserved.
Pricing for the SS805 is unknown at press time.