Back in October, when I last wrote about flash drives — storage that your computer “thinks” is a hard drive but uses persistent RAM circuitry instead of spinning magnetic platters — the largest available one was 32GB, a little more than half the capacity of the hard drive on my main computer, a 12″ 1.33GHz G4 Aluminum PowerBook. Samsung have doubled the size of their previous offering and now have a model that packs 64GB in the same 1.8″ enclosure.
At 64GB, Samsung’s flash drive is now at the “minimum reasonable size” for a hard drive in a new machine (for “minimum reasonable size”, I use the smallest hard drive included with a current-model Apple laptop as my guide; Apple’s always been stingy with the hard drive capacity).
The advantages of Samsung’s 64GB solid-state drive over an 80GB traditional platters-and-heads drive are:
- 4 times the read speed
- More than 6 times the write speed
- 75% less weight
- 1/3 to 1/15th the power consumption
- More resistant to impact
For more details, see the specs at the bottom of their press release.
2 replies on “Samsung Introduces 64GB Flash Drive”
This is exactly what I thought, but…
Don’t flash drives start to fail after a number of accesses? Some time far sooner than a hard disc at any point?
(Or is it just SD cards which do this?)
You are correct. Since the writing process involved switching a silicon gate to represent the bit of code, it would start to fail after a few dozen thousand writes. Realistically, it would probably start to fail after 4,000 writes to the same part.
If you actually use something like this, you should be mindful of what you put on it, and do not defrag it unless absolutely necessary.