Samsung offers Flash disk as laptop upgrade

Samsung is to make its Flash solid state disk (SSD) available to business buyers as well as system vendors. The drive will be offered initially as an upgrade to mobile workers seeking greater reliability from their laptops.

Available from the end of June, the 32GB SSD will be sold through memory specialist Just Rams as part of its Integral brand for £350. Resellers such as Insight will offer a swap-out service to upgrade laptops to SSD and move all information from their existing hard disk, according to Samsung.

Ralf Ebert, manager of Samsung's European Flash business, said that SSDs offer much greater reliability than traditional hard disks, and this was more important to professional users such as lawyers and accountants than the higher purchase cost of an SSD.

"After two years, hard drives exhibit a 5 to 10 percent failure rate. These guys may have already spent two and a half thousand on a laptop, and they don’t want it to fail while they’re out on the road," Ebert said.

Samsung's 32GB SSD has a mean time before failure of one million working hours, or about three times that of a standard hard disk, according to the firm. The unit is designed as a drop-in replacement for a 2.5in hard drive, and so has the same shape and ATA interface.

However, it has other advantages beside reliability. The SSD weighs about half as much as a standard hard drive and draws less power. Ebert said that switching to an SSD should extend a typical laptop's battery life by 10 to 15 percent.

While the current SSD model's 32GB capacity is less than that of many laptop hard drives, Ebert said this is sufficient for running Windows, and a 64GB model is due to ship in the coming months.

Samsung also has an eye on the server market with its Flash SSD technology. Ebert said that the reliability and high read performance of SSDs compared to rotating media meant that they would be a good choice as a boot device holding the operating system in a server.