Samsung continues to broaden the market for Solid State Drives where they use memory circuits instead of mechanical components as storage media. These incredibly quick and durable harddrives have many advantages over the mechanical equivalent, but there are also drawbacks. Samsung has earlier launched a 32GB SSD, already in use by two of the company’s mobile products. Now Samsung has announced yet another SSD, but with a different target audience. This is not a harddrive replacement but more of a complement. Samsung’s 4GB SSD is suppose to act as cache for the regular harddrives in portable and stationary computers. With a strorage capacity of 4GB thanks to NAND Flash memory the computer will have both a fast and relatively large depository for frequently used data.
Samsung 4GB SSD is suppose to be used together with Windows Vista and its technology Windows ReadyBoost, which has been developed for taking advantage of these ”cache harddrives”. This will make the computer quicker to react and Samsung’s 4GB SSD can also be used together with the hybrid harddrives expected to appear when Vista does.
”When a user requests that data, rather than being limited to servicing 100-200 requests per second (as with a traditional HDD), Samsung’s SSD can service up to 5000 request per second, virtually eliminating data seek delays. The 4GB SSD can work in tandem with a hybrid hard drive, coming into play as a secondary source of cached data.”
Despite the 4GB storage capacity Samsung’s SSD will be able to store up to 8GB data, this since Windows Vista automatically compress all data stored on a ReadyBoost unit. The Flash harddrive can be attached directly to the motherboard or housed inside a 2.5″ unit, no matter what the harddrive use a regular PATA connector. The price of Samsung’s 4GB SSD will according to DailyTech land at about $100, which sounds quite promising to us. The question is how much of a difference in performance you should be able to expect with this kind of harddrive cache.
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