David Flynn28 November 2008, 4:00 PM
Samsung and Micron are prepping 256GB SSDs for the mass market, while Intel lays the foundations for drives with “over 300GB capacity”.
Beefed-up netbooks and ‘thin and light’ ultra-portable notebooks will face one less compromise next year when mass-market solid state drives roar past their current 128GB ceiling.
Samsung last week flicked the switch on mass production of its 256GB ‘FlashSSD’ solid state drive, which uses the standard notebook 2.5 inch form factor. The drive boasts a read rate of 220MB/s and writes at 200MB/s, closing the read-write performance gap that typically sees solid state drives write data much slower than they can read it.
Samsung’s 256GB FlashSSD brings 256GB solid state storage into the standard notebook 2.5 inch
form factor with near-equal read and write speeds (220MB/s and
200MB/s, respectively)Now Micron has joined the 256 Club, announcing it will begin volume production of a 256GB consumer solid state drive due for release in March 2009. Samples of the Micron RealSSD C200 have already been shipped to current and prospective OEM partners, although the read/write speeds of 250MB/s and 100MB/s will make for slower overall performance than the Samsung offering.
Micron's 256GB SSD is due to hit the mass market in March 2009, but the company is betting on its joint venture with Intel to deliver even larger capacities without sky-high costsBut a joint venture by Micron and Intel should bear fruit later next year with SSDs jumping over 300GB. The building block for this is a 34nm multilevel cell process which has just done into mass production at a dedicated flash fab in Utah and is expected to yield “over 300GB-capacity SSDs in standard 2.5-inch and 1.8-inch form factors”, according to Intel.
Intel’s current flash offerings are 80GB and 160GB in the X18-M (1.8 inch) and X25-M (2.5 inch) models, which have peak read speeds up to 250MB/s and write up to 70MB/s.
The Utah plant is expected to move more than 50 percent of its output capacity to 34nm before the year is out, in an effort to dramatically boost both uptake and cost-recovery of the high-capacity SSDs, which will be sold by both Intel and Micron.