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Solid state drive goes on sale in UK
Samsung's solid state drive (SSD) is to go on sale in the UK under Just Rams' Integral brand.
The 32GB drive will arrive in the UK next month costing £411 inc. VAT – a tough price to stomach. It's also worth bearing in mind that a significantly faster 64GB drive will start rolling out of Samsung's factories within the next two months.
We've previously reviewed an oem version of the drive and found its performance was unparalleled for most tasks.
The utopia of 2.5in notebook drives, power consumption is considerably lower than mechanical hard disks. SSDs are also silent and operate at no more than two degrees hotter than ambient room temperature.
Reliability is an issue though and long term readers of PCW will know that NAND flash can fail after just a few re-writes, typified when formed editor Gordon Laing attempted to make a silent computer a few years back.
He used compact flash cards to store data but couldn't use Windows XP because it would destroy the compact flash card in no time due to lots of rewrites. He resorted to installing Dos.
Samsung insists that this is not a problem with its NAND flash, partly because it uses single layered cells, which can withstand 100,000 re-writes – ten times more than the number of re-writes multi layered cells, like that used in compact flash.
What's more, Samsung includes a chip that performs wear levelling that alleviates some of the re-write problems.
In layman's terms, it takes files that usually never change (unmovable system files, common program files) and places them on cells that have been rewritten to a lot, to sort of give the tired cells a break.
If a cell should fail, Samsung claims it uses error correction techniques to minimise the loss. Dead NAND flash cells might result in you getting 31.9GB instead of 32GB space available; whereas a single fault in a mechanical hard disk can spell 'game over' for all of your data.
You can read our 32GB solid state drive review here.
Posted by Emil Larsen on May 22, 2007 | Permalink
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