SNW Samsung Meeting Update
Samsung was up next, briefing us on their SSD products. As we are finding with most of the SSD community, Texas Memory, STEC, etc... Samsung's SSD business is growing very fast. SSDs are getting a 5% attach rate in laptops and about a 1% attach rate in the enterprise.
Samsung has begun shipping samples of mSATA to manufacturers. This is a new SSD form factor that is about 1/3 the size of a business card and about the same thickness. With the same capacities as other form factors, this SSD chip is going to be ideal for Netbooks and other devices and you could see where it can play a role in mobile phones like iPhones.
Thursday, October 15, 2009
The Netbook use case is very interesting, the mSATA SSD can cut the current weight of a Netbook substantially. Think of how heavy a 2.5" hard drive is, now replace that with an SSD that weighs the equivalent of eight paperclips.
From a market perspective, Samsung feels its differentiation is that it has vertical integration of all the components that make up an SSD offering. The flash market changes quickly, by owning flash memory and the flash controllers they can move quickly to new designs. They also place a heavy emphasis on helping their OEMs build robust firmware to help insure that the SSD experience is positive for the eventual end users. A bad SSD experience is bad for the whole market. Samsung gets it.
George Crump, Senior Analyst
SNW Briefing
