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The popularity of low-cost PCs around the world
is driving "explosive growth" for SSDs (small
capacity solid state drives),
Samsung
said Wednesday as it announced three new models
of the device.
SSDs
are made from NAND flash memory chips and are
used to store software, songs, pictures,
documents and other data on computers. The
drives hold several advantages over common HDDs
(hard disk drives), including being speedier,
lighter, quieter and use far less power.
The market for low-density SSDs will grow by 57
percent per year annually until 2011, due mainly
to brisk demand for low-cost PCs, Samsung said.
The company said it will start mass producing
three new low capacity drives -- 8G byte, 16G
byte and 32G byte SSDs -- next month. The
storage drives are each about 30 percent smaller
than 2.5-inch HDDs, a small size normally used
in low-cost PCs and netbooks, or mini-laptops.
The new SSDs will also run faster than older
generation SSDs made for low-cost PCs, Samsung
said, because they include high performance SATA
II (serial advanced technology attachment)
controller technology inside.
Samsung's latest SSDs can all read data at 90M
bytes per second, while writing at speeds
varying from 70M bytes per second for the 32G
byte SSD, to 45M bytes per second for the 16G
byte SSD and 25M bytes per second for the 8G
byte SSD.
These speeds mark an improvement over the
company's first SSDs aimed at small devices,
which were launched in 2006. Those devices, 32G
byte and 16G byte SSDs, could read at 57M bytes
per second and write at 32M bytes per second.
Samsung is the world's largest memory chip
maker.
The most popular style of low-cost PC on the
market today that use SSDs are mini-laptops, or
netbooks, such as the
Eee PC
by Taiwan's Asustek Computer.
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