Samsung Upgrading Flash Memory to 256GB

I find the idea of solid state drives intriguing. Besides fans, hard drives are one of the few moving parts inside a computer and when it comes to laptops, the more moving parts, the more drain your battery suffers. Solid state drives, though not the end all to storage solutions, helps remedy that somewhat.

It looks like Samsung will be delivering 256GB solid state drives (SSDs) by 2009. That’s important because the storage solution of your average computer user is still less than 500GB. Power users will have up to 1TB or more, of course, but power users represent such a small segment of the computing population that they are insignificant insomuch as they don’t signify what the mainstreams needs.

This is significant because Apple just recently updated their laptop product line with bigger hard drives. The lowly 80GBs now have 120GBs. With more people leaving the desk behind and taking their computing on the road, it only makes sense for Apple to offer larger storage space for those MP3s and movies bought off iTunes.

Before last year, the idea of high storage SSDs was a pipe dream, mainly because of the expense, but the price of SSDs is dropping drastically and will only continue to fall the more widely adopted the storage type becomes. Samsung will begin shipping 128GB SSDs in the middle of the year and though they will be far more expensive than 120GB HDDs, once they become more widely used, the price will fall.

I’m pretty excited about going all flash memory based on my laptop. Maybe they can figure out a way to make RAM have some of the same characteristics. You never know.

~ by The Shepherd Sons on March 10, 2008.