Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., leader in advanced semiconductor technology, today announced that its three solid state disk (SSD) drives have been officially recognized by Microsoft Corporation as fully qualified Windows-compatible peripherals.

After thorough testing by its Windows Hardware Qualification Lab (WHQL), Microsoft has validated that Samsung SSDs meet all of the requirements for storage media in a Windows operating environment.

"Microsoft's certification of Samsung's SSDs provides designers with the added assurance of full compatibility in a demanding Windows environment, with our SSDs adding a strong dose of speed, reliability and power savings." said Jon Kang, senior vice president of Technical Marketing at Samsung Semiconductor.

Samsung's SSDs also markedly enhance system performance. The SSDs have a data read speed of 57MB/s and data write speed of 32MB/s, more than double the performance levels of a 1.8-inch HDD. Moreover, the SSDs provide a performance boost of up to 50 times that of a 1.8 HDD when servicing small, random data "read" requests. Such faster speeds shorten application program operating time as well as system boot time.

When asked about the reliability of NAND-based hard drives, Barnetson had no problem shrugging off fears of write corruption of failure.  "Samsung's solid-state devices have a MTBF of approximately 1 to 2 million hours."  Typical disk-based hard drives have a mean-time between failures of approximately 100,000 to 200,000 hours.  Since there are no moving parts, the only real point of failure is for something to come unsoldered or a problem with the physical bit during a write.

Obviously, write-errors are a huge concern for those who have used flash products in the past.  Only a few years ago the highest-end flash media was only useable for 1,000 or so writes.  At that point the physical bits would "burnout" and could no longer be flipped. Today's single-level cell (SLC, memory that stores one bit per cell) is rated in excess of 100,000 writes before burnout.  Multi-level cell flash, memory that stores multiple bits per cell, is significantly cheaper but even then is still rated at over 10,000 writes before burnout. 

Is 10,000 writes enough?  Absolutely, assures Barnetson.  Samsung memory uses a technique called "wear leveling" to distribute the writes on a media through as many groups of cells as possible. The idea behind wear leveling is that all of the cells have approximately the same amount of writes to them, maximizing the life of the device.  Consider a typical computer that writes 120 megabytes per hour to the hard drive.  On a 32GB solid-state NAND drive, wear leveling would distribute this data over the entire drive -- it would take 267 hours to fill the device once. Even on a multi-cell flash device, at this rate it would take no less than 150 years to burnout all the bits on the SSD.  Single-cell drives are capable of ten times as many writes.