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Samsung Electronics

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.

flash disk ad - click for more info on solid state flash disks

There are hundreds of articles about SSDs on StorageSearch.com
Here, below, are some recently published examples.
.............
solid state disks - home page for SSDs since 1998
SSDs
on StorageSearch.com
Over 130 SSD manufacturers listed
and profiled on our classic SSD page.
.............
ssd specs article 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

profile from featured press release June 23, 2009.............


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