Samsung Samples 50nm 16Gb NAND Flash

Samsung inches closer to making SSDs more mainstream

When it comes to storage technology on computers, hard drive technology has advanced the slowest as far as performance is concerned. Companies like Samsung are looking to Flash Solid State Disks (SSDs) to replace the spinning disk and reduce loading times for applications.

SSDs have the advantage of rapid response times without having to wait for a hard drive to spin up/seek and have drastically reduced power consumption compared to traditional hard drives. SSDs use zero watts when not being accessed, and as little as 200 milliwatts during read/write activities.

Given the lower power requirements, company’s like Sony and Fujitsu are looking to Samsung to provide SSDs for their mobile computers. Samsung also uses its SSD drives on the Q30 notebook and Q1 UMPC.

Samsung announced today that it has produced samples of the world's first 16Gb NAND flash memory device built on a 50 nanometer process. The multi-level cell (MLC) design uses a 4KB page size instead of the 2KB used in competing designs. As a result, read speeds are double that of 2KB designs while write speeds are increased by 150%.

The increased storage capacity and faster write speeds will help Samsung reach its goal of producing 128GB SSDs by the first half of 2008.

Samsung will begin mass production its new MLC 16Gb NAND flash memory chips in Q1 2007.

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