Samsung Electronics announced that it has developed a 100 gigabyte (GB) solid state drive for use in servers for applications such as video on demand, streaming media content delivery, internet data centers, virtualization and on-line transaction processing.

Samsung claims the new performance-optimized 100GB Enterprise SSD can process IOPS (input/output per second) more than 10 times faster than the fastest 15K rpm SAS HDD available for transactional data workloads, with a random read speed of 25K and a random write speed of 6K. The new drive can reportedly process as much as 100 times the number of IOPS per watt as a 15K rpm 2.5-inch SAS HDD in applications where higher performance and lower power consumption are both needed.

The 2.5-inch enterprise drive reads data sequentially at 230 megabytes per second (MB/s) and writes sequentially at 180 MB/s.

The 100GB SSD includes an 8-channel controller, NAND flash and special drive firmware, all developed by Samsung. It also comes with full data encryption.

Claiming the most environmentally friendly drive for data centers today, Samsung's enterprise SSDs use 1.9 watts of power in active mode and 0.6 watts in idle mode, minimizing power and heat loads. These 'green' ratings tower over typical 15K HDDs, which consume between 8 to 15 watts in active mode and 1 to 2 watts in idle mode, the release reports.

The Samsung SS805 drive also features a key enterprise storage function that allows all data in the process of being stored within the SSD to be preserved in the event of a power outage.

The 2.5-inch single-level cell (SLC) 100GB SSD, which will be available this quarter, is standardized in height, width and thickness.