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Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. is a global leader in
semiconductor, telecommunication, digital media and digital convergence
technologies with 2009 consolidated sales of US$116.8 billion. Employing
approximately 188,000 people in 185 offices across 65 countries, the company
consists of eight independently operated business units: Visual Display, Mobile
Communications, Telecommunication Systems, Digital Appliances, IT Solutions,
Digital Imaging, Semiconductor and LCD. 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 page
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Editor's comments:- January 2012 -
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 the multi-billion dollar revenue
size) to recognize the strategic importance of SSDs.
Between then
and the 4th quarter of 2010 Samsung's SSD product can best be described as "me-too",
lagging severely behind in the performance dimension, and mostly suited for use
in notebook PCs which the corporation buys you - but which you wouldn't buy for
yourself.
In December 2010 - Samsung started sampling credible 2.5"
SSDs for use in enterprise SATA arrays - and they will probably find homes in
value engineered enterprise storage racks somewhere...
Samsung's real
solution to re-engineering itself as an SSD powerhouse will be to
acquire an SSD
company. It has tried before - in
2008 it tried
to buy SanDisk.
Realistically Samsung needs to buy 5 SSD companies.
- a high IOPS flash SSD specialist for the enterprise acceleration market
- a high reliability medium perfomance flash SSD specialist for the bulk
storage market
- a x3 / x4 MLC specialist for the phone and consumer markets (that was the
thinking behind SanDisk)
- a RAM SSD systems maker
- and an extra one for luck - just in case one of the others goes wrong
In
a couple more years there will be
3x as many SSD
companies in the market as there are in 2011. There will be more choice and
the question of who to buy and why will become clearer.
If you're
looking seriously at Samsung SSDs then you can find alternative competing
manufacturers in these directories too:-
1.8" SSDs,
2.5" SSDs,
3.5" SSDs,
SATA SSDs,
notebook SSDs. |
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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.
In August 2010 - Samsung and Seagate
announced
they will jointly develop
SSD controller
technologies to operate with Samsung's 30nm-class MLC NAND. The jointly
developed controller will be used in
Seagate's
enterprise-class SSDs.
In October 2010 -
Samsung said it is
shipping 200GB 3.5"
SATA SLC SSDs to EMC.
Sequential R/W speeds are 260MB/s and 245MB/s respectively. R/W
IOPS are
47,000 and 29,000. The new Samsung SSDs have an 'end-to-end
data integrity'
function and encryption.
In
December 2010 - Samsung
announced it is sampling 400GB 2.5" SATA MLC SSDs for use as the
primary storage in enterprise storage systems (instead of hard drives). The new
SSDs can process random read commands at 43,000 IOPS and random writes at
11,000 IOPS. In addition, they have an 'end-to-end data protection' function
with advanced data encryption
algorithm to assure reliability
and security for the drive.
In April 2011 -
Samsung announced it is
exiting
the hard disk market.
Seagate has agreed to
acquire Samsung's HDD assets for $1.375 billion.
In August 2011
- Samsung acquired
Grandis - an
nv
RAM company which has been developing spin transfer torque random access
memory (STT-RAM).
In January 2012 - Samsung entered the
fast purge SSD market
- which currently numbers about 25 companies. The company says that models of
its PM810 2.5" SATA SSD family with its Crypto Erase technology deletes
targeted data in a couple of seconds regardless of the overall volume of data or
the capacity of the SSD. These models have been validated for compliance to
NIST
FIPS 140-2 |
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| Samsung and
Micron launch new high density memory group |
Editor:- October 7, 2011 - Samsung and Micron have launched a
new industry initiative -
the Hybrid Memory Cube
Consortium - which will standardize a new module architecture for
memory chips - enabling greater density, faster bandwidth and lower power.
"HMC
is unlike anything currently on the radar," said Robert Feurle,
Micron's VP for DRAM Marketing. "HMC brings a new level of capability to
memory that provides exponential performance and efficiency gains that will
redefine the future of memory."
Editor's comments:- HMC
may enable SSD designers to pack 10x more
RAM capacity into the same
space with upto 15x the bandwidth, while using 1/3 the power due
to its integrated power management plane.
The same technology will
enable denser flash SSDs too - if flash is still around in 3 years' time and
hasn't been sucked into the obsolete market slime pit by the
lurking nv demons
which have been shadowing flash for the past 10 years and been waiting for each
"next generation" to stumble and be the last. |
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The power management
architecture integrated in HMC and the density scaling it allows for packing
memory chips (without heat build-up) are key technology enablers which were
listed as some of the problems the SSD industry needed to solve in my 2010
article -
this way to the
Petabyte SSD. | | | |
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| Surviving SSD
sudden power loss |
Why should you care
what happens in an SSD when the power goes down?
This important design
feature - which barely rates a mention in most SSD datasheets and press releases
- has a strong impact on
SSD data integrity
and operational
reliability.
This article will help you understand why some
SSDs which (work perfectly well in one type of application) might fail in
others... even when the changes in the operational environment appear to be
negligible. |
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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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