Samsung Itching To Dump HDD Business As SSDs Arrive In MacBook Air

Samsung is reportedly looking to dump its hard-drive business, in an attempt to refocus in areas of stronger growth such as flash storage, in which the company has seen recent wins from industry heavyweights like Apple. According to the WSJ's source, Samsung is hoping to sell its traditional hard-drive business for $1.5bn, in a move that would leave it focusing on solid-state drives instead.

According to the WSJ, Seagate was potentially interested in the platter-drive side of Samsung's business, but no deal has been finalized. Samsung will apparently accept under $1bn, the insider claims, though the company has declined to comment on the reports.

Meanwhile, what are believed to be Samsung's mSATA "blade" SSDs have been spotted in recent MacBook Air models, differing from the original Toshiba Blade X-gale flash storage first found inside the aluminum ultraportable. According to Anandtech [via 9to5Mac], that could add up to a surprise boost of speed for the newer machines: Samsung's SM128C 128GB SSDs manage 261.1 MB/s read and 209.6 MB/s write, while the original Toshiba TS128C 128GB SSDs manage just 209.8 MB/s read and 175.6 MB/s write.

It seems that Apple is mixing and matching its memory choices, with no way of identifying what's inside your new OS X notebook until you load up the System Profiler.