

Disruptive technology : Samsung 250gb laptop SSD - marketer
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080526/tc_afp/skoreaelectronicsitsamsungchip

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mullr
How is this disruptive? Is it significantly cheaper than expected? The
capacity is larger than before, but it feels like an incremental improvement
to me.

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gojomo
Yes, this Yahoo/AFP blurb story is weak. But we can look at some of the other
coverage...

[http://www.electronista.com/articles/08/05/25/samsung.256gb....](http://www.electronista.com/articles/08/05/25/samsung.256gb.ssd/)

<http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=8904>

..and see that:

(1) It's double the size of the previous largest Samsung offering, and will be
the largest SSD available.

(2) It's faster than previous offerings.

(3) It's the thinnest such drive with a SATA II interface.

(4) It uses a cheaper manufacturing process, though the impact on final cost
isn't yet announced.

So incremental, yes, but a fairly large increment.

More interesting than any single company announcement, though, is how this
reinforces an industrywide trend of SSD improvement and adoption. A lot more
laptops will have SSD drives... but also many servers, as a performance boost,
and because SSDs have different random-access characteristics than spinning
drives it will affect the optimal architecture of server-based apps.

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pmjordan
The latest Samsung SSD on the market now (128GB) was reviewed by c't magazine
recently and it already beats 2.5" HDDs by a decent margin, coming close to
3.5" HDD SATA transfer rates and trouncing even SAS HDDs for seek times. Of
course, it costs about a gazillion times more...

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alex_c
_Samsung said its 256-gigabyte solid state drive (SSD) for data storage is 2.4
times faster than traditional hard drives._

To me this just emphasizes how advanced traditional HDDs are. I would've
expected a bigger increase in speed.

Then again, I'm not sure how significant a single number is (random access,
small files, large files, seek time...)

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hollerith
The story is probably copied directly from a press release.

