Samsung joins the SATA 3.0 SSD party

Computerworld - Samsung, the largest manufacturer of NAND flash technology, has become the latest solid-state drive (SSD) maker to announce a SATA 3.0-compliant product that can serve data through a 6Gbit/sec pipe.

Samsung's entry into the SATA 3.0 realm heralds the coming of higher-speed internal interconnect technology for laptops and tablets.

The SATA 3.0 specification offers double the bandwidth provided by the predecessor SATA 2.0 spec.

Samsung last week announced volume production of the new higher-performance PM830 SSDs, which are available at up to 512GB of capacity.

The PM830 SSD boasts sequential read speeds of 500MB/sec and sequential write speeds of 350MB/sec.

The PM830 drives are also available in 256GB and 128GB capacities.

According to Samsung, the new SATA interconnect on its SSDs will shorten system boot-up time to about 10 seconds. The higher performance drives should allow users to download up to five DVD video files in less than a minute.

Samsung's new PM830 SSD

Earlier this year, Intel introduced a SATA 3.0 SSD, as did Micron Technology and OCZ Technology.

The SSD upgrades followed news that popular flash controller makers such as SandForce were upgrading to the 3.0 spec.

Samsung's new SSDs are aimed at manufacturers of high-performance notebook and tablet computers.

Sample production of the SATA 6Gbit/sec 512GB SSDs began in May, with volume production initiated earlier this month to system manufacturers.

The PM830 SSDs come with AES 256-bit encryption algorithm to protect personal or corporate data from unauthorized access.

The new drives are expected to replace SATA 2.0 SSDs by year's end, the company said.

"Samsung's new line up of advanced SSDs will raise the performance bar to the next level for ultra-slim notebooks and tablets and accelerate growth of the market for high-performance SSDs," Wanhoon Hong, executive vice president at Samsung Electronics, said in a statement. "The industry is expected to quickly embrace SATA 6Gbit/sec-based SSDs, which also will help increase market interest in 256GB and higher densities significantly."

The 512GB SSD utilizes Samsung's densest 20 nanometer, 32Gigabit multi-level cell (MLC) NAND memory chip. It also uses Samsung's own proprietary NAND controller.

Lucas Mearian covers storage, disaster recovery and business continuity, financial services infrastructure and health care IT for Computerworld. Follow Lucas on Twitter at @lucasmearian, or subscribe to Lucas's RSS feed . His e-mail address is lmearian@computerworld.com.

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