The “Break it Down” Blog

FastSilicon has the scoop on Samsung announcing their new ultra-fast, ultra-low energy 64GB SSDs (Solid State Drives).

We have covered SSD development quite a bit in the past, including the sometimes lack-luster performance. It’s true that in some cases the drives can perform pretty phenomenally (0.1ms seek times for example) but some of the read/write numbers were previously not much better than say a standard Western Digital Raptor drive.

Luckily it looks like these new badboys from Samsung not only use 1/2 the power that previous-gen SSDs did, but they also sport sustained 100 MB/sec write rates and 120 MB/sec read rates.

You may be saying “well my Raptor can burst to that, who cares?”, well the answer is that your Raptor might burst, but it’s sustained transfer rate is more around 40 MB/sec. An interesting trait of SSDs is that when they transfer, it’s a solid sustained transfer, there doesn’t seem to be a “burst” to speak of. This may be due to the insanely fast seek times; check out Notebook Review’s benchmarking of some SSDs, notice the transfer rate graphs are more or less just flat lines at a certain speed.

The only problem now is that these SSDs, likely for the next 2 years, will be targeted at high end servers or rich enthusiasts, as the price point for 64GB SSDs is around $1200 from Newegg… a far cry from anything affordable for Joe-computer-user-that-didn’t-win-the-lottery.

So I wouldn’t go adjusting your Newegg wish list or new-computer-build list just yet, give it a few more years until SSDs are up to 100+ GB in size, and around $500… then I’d say jump on it like hotcakes.