First flash drive

Hard drives without moving parts are opening the way to mobile devices.

Hard drives for laptops will have no moving parts, no rotation, no breakage, no battery drain, no noise and lighter. That's what you get with Samsung's new 32GB Solid State Drive. Produced on the basis of NAND Flash memory, SSD is the first hard drive on the market that has enough capacity to compete with the standard hard drive for laptops. 32GB may not yet satisfy multimedia users but also for the majority of business users.

Take a look at the model to compare with the Seagate 5400rpm hard drive using the latest perpendicular bit technology and with the longtitudinal burner. SSD finds files twice as fast; faster boot speed; The average speed is 25% faster than the other two drives, quite impressive; although it is slower in two other tests involving drive access multiple times (see table).

New Samsung 32GB 2.5 SSD hard drive

Currently 32GB and 16GB drives are only available for device manufacturers. The price of Flash SSD memory (approximately 63 USD for each 4GB chip module at the time of writing) will take a while longer to match the price of a standard hard drive per gigabyte (currently less than 2 USD / GB) ). Samsung has also shipped the drive to the Japanese market in Q30 computers, which are discussing with US companies to bring SSDs into laptops and other mobile devices to the market.

Although the price of SSD is high, it is quiet, light, extremely shock resistant and consumes less energy, this is a very attractive point. The test drive weighs only 45.36 grams, compared to a standard 2.5-inch hard drive that weighs 99.2g; And the 1.8 SSD is even lighter. Vibration index of SSD reaches 1500G, so it can withstand most types of shock, much higher than the vibration index of normal hard drive is 200G to 300G. And the SSD only consumes a modest amount of power, 0.5w when operating and 0.1w when idle, much lower than a standard hard drive.

But don't expect SSDs to save a lot of battery power. Through system-level testing, it found only about 9% more battery life than the Seagate Momentus 5400.3 drive (4 hours 25 minutes compared to 4 hours 3 minutes).

Hybrid technology

To take advantage of SSDs at no cost, let's see a hybrid hard drive like the Seagate Momentus 5400 PSD 2.5 hard drive, featuring 256MB Flash memory. These drives don't have all the advantages of SSDs, but they save power by letting the motor head spin slower and reducing the boot time by saving the running data to the memory cache. They also allow faster access to multimedia and overall acceleration for the system. Seagate said the price of a hybrid hard drive is only about 10% higher than a normal hard drive.

Manufacturers will also launch hybrid hard drives during the period when Microsoft's Vista operating system appears. ReadyBoost Vista can use Flash memory to speed up system response time.

However, mobile users can "buy" a pure SSD hard drive that will like a 32GB SSD.