12.31.2007 — Not a lot of fanfare followed the discussions on future applications of NAND solid-state flash hard drives (SSDs) at the June 2007 Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHec).

Now, those SSDs have arrived, with NAND hard drives shipping in laptop computers from Dell (in its XPS M1330) and Toshiba (in its Protégé R500).

Solid-state NAND drives offer significantly faster access times than traditional rotational platter magnetic media based hard drives.

How fast? They offer sequential write speeds of 80 MB/second and reading speeds of 100 MB/second in SATA II (serial ATA) configurations.

They are also lighter and consume less power, about half as much as a traditional drive.

Samsung is currently offering 64-GB NAND models with 1.8-inch and 2.5-inch sizes for laptops. Mtron, another company in this solid-state drive space, has 2.5-inch laptop and 3.5-inch desktop drives in 32-GB, 64-GB and soon 128-GB sizes.

So why the fuss and hoopla over NAND drives? Some say that because NAND drives are faster and have no moving parts, they are ideal for running operating systems like Vista Media Center and will make Media Centers boot faster and more reliable, durable and stable.

Faster and more reliable booting and stability of media-centric operating systems (OS) from Vista Media Center to Superna make them much closer to being the appliance-based products that are key to large scale adoption by more traditional audio/video integrators.

Companies like Inteset are already using a separate 2.5-inch laptop drive to run their OS. Using a traditional platter drive for users’ music, video and photos will enable NAND drives to speed up initial boot times—especially after power outages.

An added benefit of these SSDs for Media Centers is that they are inherently cool and silent, so systems will need less cooling and will draw less power.

Solid Industry Impact

Media Centers are not the only systems that will benefit from NAND.

As capacities of NAND increase and become more affordable, integrators looking for maximum transfer speed and reliability will begin to utilize NAND 3.5-inch drive sizes in Windows Home Server applications, for example.

On the gaming front, Sony’s PlayStation 3 features a user/installer replaceable 2.5-inch laptop drive appropriate for NAND use.

This would be a great performance upgrade for a customer that wants faster load times for games and more reliability for console-stored music, video and photos.

As this Samsung chart suggests, solid-state drives have several advantages over standard hard drives, including a greater mean time between failures (MTBF) and generally consuming less power.