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Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. is a global leader in
semiconductor, telecommunication, digital media and digital convergence
technologies with 2008 consolidated sales of US$96 billion. Employing
approximately 164,600 people in 179 offices in 61 countries, the company
consists of four main business units: Digital Media Business, LCD Business,
Semiconductor Business, and Telecommunication Business. Recognized as one of the
fastest growing global brands, Samsung Electronics is a leading producer of
digital TVs, memory chips, mobile phones and TFT-LCDs. For more information,
please visit www.samsung.com .
click here for
Samsung SSDs /
Samsung HDDs and hybrid
drives
see also:-
Samsung
- editor mentions on STORAGEsearch.com
Editor's
note:-
SSDs
in Enterprise Storage (pdf) - is a paper by Hubbert Smith Director,
Enterprise Storage Marketing
Samsung . It includes
interesting graphs which compare the IOPS per dollar and IOPS per watt of 2.5"
and 3.5" hard drives compared with flash SSDs. Brings to mind my article -
Calling for an
End to Unrealistic SSD vs HDD IOPS Comparisons however.
- Editor's comments:- One of the world's top
10 storage companies by revenue - Samsung stated its aim in
2005 -
to become the world's largest supplier of
flash SSDs.
There was a huge gap between Samsung's stated aspiration and its
(then) available SSD IP and marketing competence which the company had to
fix. It's first few generations of SSDs were such slow performers that this
encouraged many small start ups to enter the market and show how it could be
done better. But Samsung didn't give up. Gradually its SSD products got closer
to the best in class.
In September 2008 -
Samsung Electronics
published an
open
letter aimed at shareholders offering to buy
SanDisk. SanDisk
spurned the offer and in October 2008 announced a deal with wafer fab
partner Toshiba which
could offload $1 billion worth of fab costs at the same time as reporting
21% revenue decline for the most recent quarter. Samsung didn't much
like the taste of that, and on October 22, 2008 - publicly withdrew its offer to
buy SanDisk.
Also in October 2008 - Samsung said it's shipping
"faster" server oriented 2.5" SLC flash SSDs with 25GB / 50GB
capacity. Throughput is significantly below competing best in class
2.5" SSDs - but
nevertheless a big improvement on previous laggardly products from the company.
No details were disclosed about IOPS - probably because they aren't very
impressive.
In November 2008 -
Spansion filed a
multibillion dollar patent infringement suit with the ITC against
Samsung related to
flash memory IP. ...Later:- in April 2009 -
Samsung
agreed
to pay Spansion
$70 million to settle this case, and the 2 companies cross licensed their
patents.
Also in November 2008 -
Samsung announced it
was shipping a fast
2.5" SATA MLC SSD
with 256GB capacity in standard 9.5mm height, with 220MB/s read, and 200MB/s
sustained write speed. No IOPS data was available at launch. But on R/W specs -
this is one of the top 3
fastest 2.5"
SSDs.
In January 2009 -
Samsung announced
details of a new 100GB 2.5" SLC flash SSD that will ship this quarter. For
the 1st time Samsung disclosed IOPS data - 25k random read IOPS and 6k write
IOPS. R/W throughput is 230MB/s and 180MB/s respectively.
In April
2009 - Samsung returned to its highest ranking position in the 8th
quarterly edition of the -
Top 10 SSD Companies.
In
June 2009 - Samsung
announced it is sampling a SATA mini-card SSD for use in the expanding
netbook
marketplace with these key parameters:-
- footprint:- 30mm by 51mm by 3.75mm
- weight:- 8.5g
- capacity options:- 16GB, 32GB and 64GB
- R/W speeds:- 200MB/s and 100MB/s respectively
- power:- 0.3W
"The market is beginning to embrace a
smaller SSD for the
nascent netbook sector," said Jim Elliott, vp, memory marketing, Samsung
Semiconductor.
Editor's postscript:- in view of the importance the SSD market has for
Samsung, one of my big disappointments has been the failure of that company to
engage in serious communication with the millions of readers who have used
StorageSearch.com to find SSD products and suppliers. Despite many offers made
to Samsung over the past 5 years - their marketing communications dialog with
our readers has been limited to mass produced press releases, interspersed with
corrections or follow ups to comments in these pages.
That suggests to
me that Samsung's marketers are weak in their understanding of the enterprise
SSD market - due to their failure to invest sufficient time and resources to the
most important and influential readership in this segment.
It may be
that trying to achieve success in the consumer market has been a lot harder
than Samsung originally imagined, and that all its efforts are strained in that
direction. leaving little in the way of additional resources for anything else.
Samsung does talk about the server market. But, like many other SSD oems - it
doesn't really understand it. And I don't think it's demonstrated the commitment
needed to succeed in this important segment - except as a me-too supplier.
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Can You
Trust Flash SSD Specs & Benchmarks? |
| Sadly no! - Many
published benchmarks for flash SSD are about as reliable as bank
valuations of Collateralized Loan Obligations (just before the onset of the
Credit Crunch). |
There are many
intrinsic technical reasons why you can't believe most published benchmarks
for flash SSDs (whether done by magazines or vendors) and why
even the tests you carefully do yourself don't give reliable results
which correlate with how the SSD will perform in real-life
applications.
We warned you of it this problem here
on StorageSearch.com - and now other publications and vendors are starting
to take it seriously too. ...read
the article | | | |
