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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
see also:-
Samsung
- editor mentions on STORAGEsearch.com,
Samsung's
SSD blog
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Editor's comments:-
re Samsung and SSDs
One of the world's top 10 storage
companies by revenue - Samsung stated its aim as long ago as
2005 -
to become the world's largest supplier of
flash SSDs. That
made Samsung the first storage company (of its size) to recognize the
strategic importance of SSDs.
But 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. Samsung'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.
Unlike
most other SSD manufacturers -
Samsung makes its own
flash memory. In earlier
phases of the SSD market that would have given it a big competitive advantage
- because memory was a large part of the cost of an SSD. But in today's markets
- and particularly in the high end server market - the
SSD controller plays a
much more significant part in the SSD market selling price equation.
At the top end - this can count for more than the sum of the flash
memory in the product. Samsung has been facing the risk that it could be
relegated to role of supplying SSDs in low margin consumer markets (where the
controller design is easier) or as a commodity supplier to high value server SSD
makers. That's why it has been trying to forge closer links with other SSD
companies who really understand the server markets better than it does. And also
why it tried to acquire SanDisk
in 2008.
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Recent Samsung SSD milestones from
SSD Market
History
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.
In August 2009 -
Samsung Electronics
announced it is
targeting
the PC gaming industry with its 256GB SSD. This seems to confirm the
consumer-led focus of the company's business strategy. Earlier StorageSearch.com
had said it doesn't think Samsung's SSD product marketing is good enough
to achieve success in the enterprise server market.
In September
2009 - Samsung
announced that HP was
offering its SSDs as an option in ProLiant servers.
Also in September
2009 - Samsung
announced
it has begun producing 512Mb PRAM memory. PRAM combines the speed of RAM for
processing functions with the non-volatile characteristics of flash memory for
storage. This has been a Problematic RAM technology. Samsung originally
announced a working prototype
of the 512Mb PRAM 3 years earlier - in September 2006.
In
October 2009 - Samsung
announced
it
has invested in Fusion-io.
Iin January 2010 -
Rambus and
Samsung
announced
that they have agreed a $900 million settlement for all claims
between them - and they have agreed a perpetual fully paid-up license to certain
DRAM products.
In March 2010 - a video from
Samsung was featured
in a new directory of SSD
videos - here on StorageSearch.com
In April 2010 -
Samsung dropped out of
StorageSearch.com's
top 10 SSD oems list
- and got its lowest ever ranking.
June 2010 - to save power
in notebooks
Samsung announced
imminent volume production of a 512GB
SATA SSD - the 1st to
use
toggle-mode
DDR NAND which enables sequential R/W speeds upto 250MB/s and 220MB/s
respectively while using about half the power of a regular
flash SSD of the
same capacity. |
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| SSD Pricing -
where does all the money go? |
SSDs are among the most
expensive computer hardware products you will ever buy.
Understanding
the factors which determine SSD costs is often a confusing and irritating
process... |
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...not made any easier when
market prices for identical capacity SSDs can vary more than 100x to 1!
Why is that? ...read
the article | | | |
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