Samsung today announced a Flash storage device that aims to completely replace the traditional hard drive in some mass market mobile computers. The 32 GB solid state disk (SSD) drive comes in a 1.8" form factor and reads data at more than twice the speed of hard drives. Best of all: The SSD is promised to consume 95% less power than a hard drive.

According to Samsung, the SSD will read and write data at 57 MB/s and 32 MB/s, respectively. We will have to benchmark such a drive in our test lab to verify this claim but if correct, the Flash disk would be about twice as fast as the latest 1.8" hard drive generation, which was measured at a read speed of 24 MB/s by the engineers of Tom's Hardware. The acceleration is most likely not enough to enable instant-on computers, but we would expect Windows computers to cut the system boot time at least in half.

Pure performance is only half the story of a SSD; the drive's light weight (15g), noiseless operation and a reduced power consumption may be even more important in most mobile applications. Samsung says that the Flash disk consumes only 0.1W when not in use and just 0.5W under load. For comparison, a typical mobile hard drive consumes somewhere between 1W and 2W of power in seek, read and write processes and between 0.2W and 0.8W when idle. Samsung may be a bit optimistic that the SSD uses just 5% of the electricity needed to power a hard disk drive, but it is clear that SSD will provide a substantial additional amount of battery time in mobile devices. In a common model that assumes that a hard drive consumes about 10-20% of the battery power, the SSD could add about 20-40 minutes of operating time in a notebook that runs about 4 hours on one battery charge.

This will be perfect for laptops! Hard drives are probably the most likely part in a laptop to fail, given that they're the only "moving part" in the computer.