Flash drives scale to 128GB

Flash drives will take the leap to mass storage in the first half of this year when Samsung releases a 128GB drive for use in PCs and mobile devices and threatens to make the hard drive redundant for some systems.

The Korean giant will offer the solid-state drives in 1.8-inch and 2.5-inch formats. Demonstrated at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the drive will write data at 70MB/s and read at 100MB/s, thanks to an optimised controller and firmware, Samsung said. Transfer speeds are aided by a 3Gbit/s SATA II interface.

Also, a 1.8-inch drive that is just 5mm thick will be available for ultra-thin laptop designs.

There is no end in sight for Flash storage capacities. Also at CES, BitMicro Networks said it plans an 832GB Flash drive for late-2008, using a 2.5-inch form factor.

Ultra-mobility is also an aim. At the Storage Visions conference last week, also in Las Vegas, Intel showed off its tiny Z-P140 Flash drives that will be available in 2GB capacities this quarter and 4GB next quarter. Smaller than a fingertip, the drives are aimed at ultra-mobile PCs and other small-format devices, including those built on its own Menlow platform that uses the forthcoming “Silverthorne” processor and “Poulsbo” chipset. Menlow-based products are scheduled for mid-2008.

The announcements come as demand for Flash drives is expected to grow at a rapid clip. Samsung cited Web-Feet Research in predicting that the market will grow in value from $570m in 2007 to $6.6bn by 2010.

However, experts do not expect a sudden transition from rotating media to solid state.

“Our forecasts suggest that price declines on spinning drives will mean there remains a significant price difference for some years to come,” said Claus Egge of analyst IDC.

“For certain form factors it’s only a question of time that the industry buys Flash rather than spinning – it’s not acase of ‘if’ but ‘when?’. But for most computers it’s going to be a hybrid model where Flash is used for fast boot-up, but spinning [disks] for storage.”