Samsung Announces Flash-Based Disk Drive

doc6502 writes "Samsung has announced flash-based disk drives with a 16 GB capacity, with an aim to get the drives to market by the end of the year. The (short) article suggests that this could be a big boost to laptop owners, as battery life could be seriously extended if there isn't a big high-speed motor to power constantly. The drives should be fast, too."

Comments

Naming?

[Winterblink]

Why is it called a disc drive if it's based on flash memory? :)

Re:Old News

[LordStraun]

Yes, and depending on how the writes are being spread across the media, the device could last a day or years. From the comments in TA, someone posted the following specs:

MTBF specs vary based on the manufacturer and the calculation used; the following are some sample specs I have found:

Pretec --> MTBF 500,000 hours (powered on)
Simpletech --> MTBF 1M+ hours
SanDisk --> MTBF 3M+ hours
BitMicro --> MTBF 2M+ hours


But the most reliable and experienced guys around are BitMicro, and this is what they pubish for one of their flash drives:

http://www.bitmicro.com/...urces_flash_ssd_db2.php

Example #2: Write Frequency in MB/sec

E-Disk® PB Size = 16 KB

I/O Block Size = 64 KB

Write Frequency = 6,016,204,800 KB per day (68 MB/sec)

E-Disk® capacity = 155,648 MB
Number of Flash chips = 608
Size of Flash chips = 2048 Mbit or 256 MB or 262,144 KB


Number of writes to Flash chip = 64 KB / 16 KB = 4
Total E-Disk® physical blocks = (262,114 / 16) x 608 = 9,961,472
Total max writes to E-Disk® drive = 9,961,472 x 1,000,000 = 9,961,472,000,000

Endurance (in days) = 9,961,472,000,000 / (4 X (6,016,204,800/64)) = 26,492 days
Endurance (in years) = 199,229 days / 365 = 72.59 years

Samsung could also use a form of wear leveling to increase device longevity.