Okay, with all the products making their debut as the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas this week, I decided to chime in on some of the products over the next few days. I'm sometimes hard-pressed to fit these into the realm of business IT, but I think some of them made the cut.
Samsung announced several storage products at the show that were primarily targeted for laptop usage:
The SpinPoint M6 has 500GB capacity and while Samsung wasn't the first to introduce a drive this size in a standard 2.5" form factor for notebooks hard drives; this is the first in a 9.5mm-high unit (which means you could install two of these in a notebook for a one terabyte of storage). The drive contains 8MB cache, has a 1.5Gb/s SATA interface and is fitted with the now obligatory sudden-drop sensor. Some versions come with a second detector, this time for rotational vibration. The 500GB Spinpoint M6 is expected to go on sale in March.
The 128GB FlashSDD is a multi-level cell (MLC) flash-based solid state drive (SSD) that will be available in a thin-standard 1.8" version that is 5mm-high, to spur the design of thinner ultra-mobile PCs, in addition to a conventional 1.8" version for mobile consumer applications and a 2.5" version for standard-sized notebooks. The drive has a 3.0Gb/s SATA II interface and can achieve write speeds of 70 megabytes per second (MB/s) and read speeds of 100MB/s. It also features device/host-initiated power management for an exceptionally low power consumption level of 0.5W in active mode. The drive is expected to be available before July.
There's a bright future for SSD storage; according to market research firm Web-Feet Research, the SSD market is expected to reach $570 million in 2007 and increase to $6.6 billion by 2010 – a compound annual growth rate of over 120 percent. As the drives grow larger they'll see much more application in the enterprise arena and may help with all the green initiatives ongoing in the data center. Are you currently using any SDD products in your business or any other solid-state storage solutions like the one I posted about in AMD Partners with Violin on DRAM Storage?
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