Samsung Electronics said Tuesday it has developed a 100 GB solid-state drive for servers that deliver video on demand, stream media content, or provide online transaction processing.

The SS805, announced at the Storage Vision 2009 Conference in Las Vegas, is an alternative to hard-disk drives that operate at a speed of 15,000 revolutions per minute. Samsung claims its new 2.5-inch, single-level cell SSD is 10 times faster than the typical SAS hard drive used for transactional data workloads.

The SSD can process as much as 100 times the number of input/output per second per watt as a 2.5-inch, 15,000 RPM hard drive, making the new product optimal for applications where higher performance and lower power consumption is needed, Samsung said.

"Our new enterprise SSD offers CIOs and IT managers the ability to greatly improve storage reliability and capacity while avoiding costly power and AC (air conditioning) infrastructure upgrades in data centers at or near capacity," Jim Elliott, VP of memory marketing for Samsung, said in a statement.

The SAS SSD reads data sequentially at 230 MB per second and writes sequentially at 180 MB per second. The higher performance is due to a sophisticated eight-channel controller, and better NAND flash and firmware than the previous generation, Samsung said.

The drive uses 1.9 watts of power in active mode and 0.6 of a watt at idle. In comparison, 15,000 RPM HDDs consume from eight watts to 15 watts in active mode and one to two watts at idle, according to the vendor. Other features of the new drive include a storage function that allows data in the process of being stored to be preserved in the event of a power outage.

Samsung said the drive would be available this quarter, but didn't release pricing. SSDs in general cost considerably more that HDDs, so get their greatest return on investment when used only in applications where the drive's advantages in speed and power are needed.