Samsung Unveils New High-Capacity, ‘Green’ Enterprise SSD

Solid-state semiconductor maker Samsung revealed Jan. 6 that it has developed a new enterprise-level 2.5-inch, 100GB solid-state flash drive that can handle heavy-duty applications such as video on demand, streaming media content delivery and online transaction processing while consuming substantially less power than a standard spinning disk drive.
The new enterprise SS805 SSD, introduced at the Storage Visions 2009 Conference in Las Vegas, will start shipping in March. It is designed as an alternative to traditional 15K-rpm hard disk drives, Samsung said.
The SSD can process IOPS (input/output per second) more than 10 times faster than the fastest 15K-rpm SAS disk drive available for transactional data workloads, Samsung said. It features a random read speed of 25K and a random write speed of 6K.
It can process as much as 100 times the number of IOPS per watt as a 15K-rpm 2.5-inch SAS HDD in applications where higher performance and lower power consumption are both needed, the company said. The drive reads data sequentially at 230MB per second and writes sequentially at 180MB per second.
Much Lower Power Draw
At the same time, the new SSD draws much less power from the wall than standard HHDs. The new Samsung SSD uses only 1.9 watts of power in active mode and 0.6 watts in idle mode, minimizing power and heat loads. A typical 15K HDD consumes between 8 to 15 watts in active mode and 1 to 2 watts in idle mode.
The Samsung SS805 drive also features a key enterprise storage function that allows all data in the process of being stored within the SSD to be preserved in the event of a power outage.
The company said the 100GB SSD’s high performance can be attributed to a sophisticated eight-channel controller, improved NAND flash quality and special drive firmware-all developed in-house by Samsung.