Not quite as quick as a flash
SSD manufacturers are purportedly having a bit of bother with Samsung's 32nm NAND flash chips, reporting significant write speed issues and slowdowns.
The issue was originally highlighted by Daily Tech, after half a dozen firms admitted to having dumped Samsung's 32nm offerings for comparable chips from Toshiba and IM Flash Tech - bad news for the number one NAND flash chip producer.
Samsung has responded by saying that it isn't the chips that are problematic; instead, the write speed slowness is to be blamed on inferior controllers which have trouble with Error Correcting Code (ECC).
"For quality SSDs, every NAND process geometry upgrade requires a matching upgraded controller. Should (Samsung's) 30nm-class NAND be used with a conventional controller of insufficient quality, performance slowdowns are indeed possible," said the company in a statement. According to Daily Tech, the SSD manufacturers it spoke to had paired Samsung's chips with Barefoot flash controllers from Indilinx.
However, firms that switched to 32nm Toshiba offerings said those chips too had initially been slow and problematic, but that the issues had eventually been overcome.
32nm NAND flash production has long been touted as a shift which should have made SSDs cheaper and more affordable to the unwashed masses. But as Windows 7 production deadlines near, and upcoming hardware refresh cycles for new Intel CPUs, cheaper DDR3 memory and DirectX 11 hardware become imminent - cheap SSDs before Christmas look increasingly unlikely.
Earlier this year, Intel and Micron had to delay their - now successful - 34nm NAND offerings by six months; something experts now believe could have been caused by similar challenges to that which Samsung is currently facing.
Meanwhile, taking to heart the motto ‘if you want something done properly, do it yourself', Samsung says it is finishing work on its own flash controllers.
"We spend many months developing and then fine-tuning the controller and firmware technology for our SSDs, working very closely with most of the major PC OEMs," the firm said.
It's just a shame customers won't feel the price benefits of 32nm flash for a while longer.
