San Jose (CA) - Samsung and Sun Microsoystems today said that the two companies have developed a single-level-cell NAND flash memory device for use in solid state drives that offers "much higher endurance levels than any other flash memory device on the market today."

Compared to other SLC SSDs, the new memory provides a a "five-fold increase" in data write-and-erase cycles, which, at least to our knowledge, would put teh device into the 5-10 million read-write-cycle range. Samsung said that its server-grade SLC memory will provide a 100-fold increase over conventional hard drives, in the number of data transfers (input/output per second or I/OPS) per watt

According to the memory manufacturer, the new memory could be used for video streaming, high-transaction data processing, search engine operations and other high-speed server functions.

“We have been working with Sun to develop this new 8Gb server-grade SLC flash memory, which will give IT managers the best in high-density, high-endurance memory design with markedly less energy consumption than we see today,” said Jim Elliott, vice president, memory marketing, Samsung Semiconductor. “Sun sees incredible upside to using server grade SLC NAND flash to accelerate customers’ applications, and we plan to incorporate this technology into our line of servers and storage,” said Michael Cornwell, lead technologist for flash memory, Sun Microsystems, in a prepared statement.

What is really needed

Jul 17, 2008 14:27     

What is really needed is the price to be more competitive with the equivelant hard disk drive. What would be great if they were a combo drive; the SSD drive C: being the drive for the operating system and the HDD drive D: being the data and programs drive. It would have the best of both worlds.
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re: What is really needed

Jul 21, 2008 14:01     

Add the confusion of managing multiple drives for regular end users? No thanks. For the near-term future SSD's don't have to directly compete with winchester drives on price or capacity. Their usage in high-end computers (after all some CPU's sell for under $100 while others are over $1000) and especially transaction-based servers is where they shine. You don't see anyone saying that the latest Quad-Core-Xtreme from intel needs to compete with the Atom.

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