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• Our sample unit integrates the unit by way of an UltraATA/66 interface, which effectively limited thoroughput in our tests to a maximum of 50 MB/s. The drive weighs about the same as a candy bar at 46 g, with the PCB/chips weighing 29 g. Thus the plastic drive casing comprises about 1/3 of total weight. Regular 2.5" drives clock in about 100 g total. As you can tell from the pictures and deconstruction there are 16x 16 Gbit Flash memory chips giving us the 32 GB total. When the unit is idle, power consumption is next to nothing, drawing only 0.03 W. While in operation, the power consumption was roughly 0.9 W. No noise is generated due to the lack of moving parts and rotation, and such a unit is not affected by shock in any way. Its footprint is smaller than of a regular 2.5" drive, although Samsung will offer larger sizes to allow for easy integration within existing form factors. Lastly, the unit does not get hot at all and can be operated in virtually any environment.

• SSDs Replacing HDDs Soon? Not A Chance

  Solid state drives are all the rage recently. But within the hype, the reality of having SSD drives dominate the market is a little far from actuality at this point. Of course, we're all excited about the potential of SSDs and the rate that manufacturers are improving on the technology make them increasingly delicious.The buzz on the Internet however, is that SSDs will be taking over the internal storage market fairly soon. I'm going to have to go out on a limb here and say that this is just rubbish. Manufacturer marketing aside, traditional magnetic HDD storage will remain the dominant storage solution for a few more years to come--and I'm not talking about a paltry one to two years either.Would I like to have SSDs in my laptop and my desktop? Absolutely. Would it make financial sense to do so at this point? No.The fact of the matter is, HDDs have a huge leg up on SSDs in terms of storage and the cost per gigabyte. With 1.5 TB drives selling for less than $150 now, it just makes capacity sense to stay away from SSDs. In terms of size, there's just no comparison. With perpendicular recording technology now in the mainstream, HDDs will continue to get denser at an alarming rate. Manufacturers have stated that HDDs are expected to reach up to 10 TB in the next two to three years.Right now, SSD drives are sitting typically at 128 GB and 256 GB options. I don't remember the last time drives of this size were popular--obviously too long ago. The race to cram more gigabytes is also escalating. With the cost of current SSDs, the technology remains out of the hands of most people. This however, is understandable and occurs with most new emerging technologies.We took a quick look online to see what we could get for $150--nowadays a lot of green to pony up on storage. What we found was that a Transcend TS16GSSD25-S-J 16 GB drive was available for roughly that price. For about $30 less though, we're able to run off with a Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST31500341AS 1.5 TB HDD.For archiving purposes, HDD storage capacities and prices beat SDDs hands down. There's absolutely no contest. While companies like Toshiba have announced 512 GB drives, they no doubt will cost both your arms and legs. Intel's zippy 32 GB SSDSA2SH032G1 X25-E Extreme costs a whopping $720.