Samsung Introduces First 1TB Ultra-Thin SSD

Samsung is aiming to tackle one of the limitations of ultra-thin laptops – their reliance on 1.8-inch storage drives – with a line of ultra-thin low-power solid-state drives (SSD) that range in capacities up to 1 terabyte (TB).

The new range of 840 EVO drives use the mSATA interface found in ultra-thin laptops and is about one-quarter the size of a standard 2.5-inch SSD, according to Samsung.

Lightweight

It is less than half the thickness of a typical 2.5-inch drive, at 3.85mm, and is lightweight at 8.5g. The 1TB model is an industry first, according to the company.

The new drives come in 120GB, 250GB, 500GB and 1TB models with read and write speeds of up to 540MB/s and 520MB/s respectively. The range builds on Samsung’s 2.5-inch 840 EVO SSD range announced in July. Those drives offered up to three times the performance of Samsung’s previous line of SSD drives.

The drives use Samsung’s proprietary controller and TurboWrite firmware. The 1TB drive offers up to 98,000 random read and 90,000 random write I/O operations per second (IOPS) allowing for complex multi-tasking, Samsung said. The new drives can be used along with other HDD or SSD devices as long as the notebook has an mSATA socket.

The SSDs use Samsung’s 128Gbit NAND flash memory, based on a 10-nanometre class process technology.

The 1TB drive consists of four flash memory packages, each with 16 layers of 128GB chips. It supports DEVSLP, a Samsung software algorithm that permits constant updating, instant wake-up and low power consumption. Security features include TCG/Opal and MS Encrypted Hard Drive.

Speed boost

Samsung is bundling the drives with Magician 4.3, its SSD software, which includes features such as RAPID (Real-time Accelerated Processing of I/O Data) Mode and 256-bit AES encryption.

RAPID, Samsung’s performance-enhancing firmware, can boost the drives’ sequential read speed to over 1,000MB/s, or about twice the speed of a typical SATA SSD and ten times that of an average HDD, Samsung claimed. RAPID was previously used with Samsung’s 840 PRO SSD drives.

The drives will be available later this month, according to Samsung. The company has not yet indicated pricing.

In August Samsung introduced the first SSD based on its 3D V-NAND technology.

The company has said the power savings introduced with SSDs make them suitable for green data centres.

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