Samsung on Monday introduced solid-state drives (SSDs) for netbooks that are smaller than traditional SSDs and consume significantly less power.
Samsung’s mini-card SSDs are up to 80 per cent smaller than SSDs found in most laptops today, the company said. The small drives weigh between 7.5 grams (0.17 pounds) and 8.5 grams, lower than the 75 grams to 85 grams that 1.8-inch and 2.5-inch SSDs weigh.
The small SSDs are suitable for netbooks, which are thin and light laptops designed for basic computing tasks like Web surfing and word processing. The SSDs could significantly reduce the weight and power consumption of netbooks.
The drives could easily attach to the motherboard and don’t need to be plugged in special slots, said Brian Beard, product marketing manager at Samsung. They consume about 0.3 watts of power, compared to an average of about 1.1 watts for 2.5-inch SSDs.
One caveat is that the new drives come with lower storage capacities of 16GB, 32GB and 64GB. The larger SSDs offer larger storage of up to 256GB. Samsung didn’t talk about pricing for the SSDs.
Samsung has shipped samples of the drives to PC makers, who may include them in laptops appearing in the second half of this year. Company officials declined to comment on increasing storage capacities for mini-card SSDs, saying that the 32GB storage was the “sweet spot” for the category.
The drive could also be used in netbooks as a second drive to complement hard-drive storage, Beard said. For example, the OS data could be stored on the SSD, while the hard drive could store data like photographs and important documents. The drives could also be embedded as storage in devices like printers and ruggedized mobile devices.
