Samsung is one of the manfacturers that has been pushing the development of flash memory forward the most and the company has earlier displayed great faith in flash-based harddrives. Now yet another step towards the further development of OneNAND flash memory has been taken. OneNAND Flash has earlier been an alternative to regular NAND flash memory where OneNAND has offered considerably higher read speeds but somewhat worse write speeds. Samsung has now taken its OneNAND flash memory to new heights by developing new 2Gb (Gigabit) chips that not only can store up twice as much as earlier chips (1Gb) but also given the write speed a nice bump in the right direction.
One of the key components during the development of the new memory chips is Samsung’s 60nm manufacturing process. The new 2Gb 60nm OneNAND chips has a write speed at 17MB/s. You can compare this to NAND flash at 13MB/s and 9.3MB/s with the previous OneNAND chips. but if you pair up eight 2Gb chips in one and the same unit you will be able to reach 136MB/s. OneNAND is looking very promising and it seems to be the technology it is offering in its hybrid harddrives that is expected to arrive on the market soon.
“Because of its exceptionally high performance, OneNAND can serve as a catalyst in the development of new product markets. A much-discussed example of this application-creating role is in how OneNAND memory is now being specified as the buffer memory inside a hybrid hard disk.”
