Samsung has brought out a pair of mighty 2TB solid-state drive (SSD) internal drives aimed at the consumer market.

The South Korean electronics giant said its 850 SSD PRO and EVO hard drives pack 2TB of capacity in a 2.5in hard-drive enclosure. Each drive contains 32 128Gb Samsung V-NAND chips as well as four 4GB DRAM chips.

Samsung has long touted the 3D V-NAND chips as a more scalable and power-efficient alternative to previous flash storage methods.

A 2TB capacity had been previously reported as possible, should users ask for one. Samsung said that, indeed, users had clamored for more storage space in the EVO and PRO SSD lines.

“Samsung experienced surge in demand for 500 gigabyte (GB) and higher capacity SSDs with the introduction of our V-NAND SSDs,” said Samsung memory senior vice president of branded product marketing Un-Soo Kim.

“The release of the 2TB SSD is a strong driver into the era of multi-terabyte SSD solutions.”

The 2TB 850 PRO costs $999 and carries a 10-year, 300TB-written warranty

No, Solid-State Drives Are Not Going To Kill Off Hard Drives
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ciocentral/2012/08/02/no-solid-state-drives-are-not-going-to-kill-off-hard-drives/

Myth #1: HDDs are based on dinosaur technology and will eventually be replaced by SSDs

While HDD magnetic recording on spinning platters has been around for over 50 years, flash memory is also over 30 years old. SSDs and HDDs are often more complementary than competitive.

Myth #2: Flash memory prices will fall faster than HDD prices and will one day be cheaper.

Many people commonly believe that flash memory prices will decrease faster than HDD prices, but based on long-term industry roadmaps for flash memory and HDD, the average cost takedown for both SSD and HDD will likely be similar. The consequence is that their respective long-term pricing curves are likely parallel and will not cross.

There are key challenges in reaching the resolution limits of lithography, scaling due to the high voltage required in the program/erase step and maintaining adequate data retention times with decreasing number of charges per cell.

The scaling of bit cost ($/bit) in HDD comes from modest decreases in unit cost from generation to generation but with large increases in capacity. HDD capacities will likely scale to 10x their present capacities in the next 10 years. For larger capacity HDD’s, particularly those of interest for use in cloud storage, the bit costs are projected to reduce by about 25 percent compounded. This projected cost reduction rate is very similar to what may be expected for at least the next several years from flash memory.

Myth #3: High performance HDDs in the Enterprise data center will disappear and be replaced by SSDs

The performance of an enterprise-class SSD can be about 100x higher for random read/write operations compared to an HDD. The challenge for SSDs, though, is the cost per bit is higher by at least 10x compared to HDDs.

Summary

Flash memory and HDD magnetic recording are synergistic technologies. Demand for digital data storage continues to grow at greater than 40 percent annual rate, in part due to the new applications enabled by flash memory. However, just as flash memory has helped create new demand for HDD storage capacity