Samsung unveils high performance, lower power SSDs

Samsung has started mass production of new 25 and 50 GB solid state drives (SSDs) aimed squarely at enterprises that want to get better performance with lower power consumption.

The new single level cell (SLC) SSDs are primed for use in compute intense applications such as video on demand, web serving and online transaction processing and boast around double the random write performance of Samsung's standard 32 GB and 64 GB SLC SSDs.

The new drives will consume just 1.25 watts of power in active mode and 0.3 watts in idle mode - less than a quarter of the power of a 2.5-inch 15K SAS HDD, in addition to creating a very low heat load on data centre air conditioning, according to the electronics giant.

"The Samsung SSDs give IT managers the best in high-performance, high-endurance storage for servers, with markedly less energy consumption," said Gerd Schauss, director of memory marketing at Samsung Semiconductor Europe.

"Now being considered by virtually all major PC OEMs, the proven technology of enterprise SSDs provides a compelling combination of price, performance and longevity for many medium-sized businesses as well as large corporations."

The 2.5-inch interface enterprise SSDs will are available this month and will deliver much higher performance per watt than conventional 10K and 15K rpm HDDs as well as being capable of processing 100 times the number of IOPS per watt as a typical 15K 2.5-inch SAS HDD.