Samsung's Solid-State Disk Drive Unveiled

Iddo Genuth writes "After unveiling their upcoming hybrid hard drive, Samsung — along with a number of other manufacturers — is planning to begin shipping solid-state drives during 2007. Unlike the upcoming hybrids, solid-state drives should work with windows XP as well as Vista." The drives will be introduced in 1.8- and 2.5-inch form factors for notebooks. While streaming performance can't equal that of hard disks, Samsung claims that random-access performance is more important and that (e.g.) Vista users would see a 4x speedup in many key operations. Pricing was not announced.

Dedicated OS Harddrive?

[SevenHands (984677)]

Now this is one configuration where this drive will make a large difference in bootup speeds. Office apps, audio, video and other media should be happy on the old 7200 rpm drives for a few years still.

Re:

[by Anonymous Coward]

No, this drive will be worse for boot up time. Boot time is a function of how fast info can be pulled off the drive, and this thing is modestly slower than hard drives. But its latency is terribly faster and will increase responsiveness whenever information scattered at different points is rapidly needed, since it takes no time to move a physicial arm between memory locations.

Re:Dedicated OS Harddrive?

[owlstead (636356)]

Don't forget spinup time. Spinup time is pretty important, especially for notebooks. Notebooks are bound to suspend the disk a lot more than desktop drives, so to safe power.

Re:

[epiphani (254981)]

Bzzt, wrong. I don't know how many applications you're loading up, but 32 Gigs is plenty for my entire windows C: drive. I'll keep all my applications and operating system on fast, quiet SSD, and I'll happily store my 400 gigs of music and video on magnetic drives.

Re:

[Jugalator (259273)]

With hibernation I don't really have a problem with boot up speeds anymore.

Re:

[Poltras (680608)]

11 seconds to boot up? In what world do you live? My mac takes around 30 seconds before being functionnal and my windows 1m30 at least... Linux is around that figures too. No, I won't use VxWorks or QNX as a desktop. Good for you if you do, but I'd like to know how you achieve such performance with conventional desktop OS.

Re:

[Surt (22457)]

I use windows xp on a dell laptop and desktop ... post is 3 seconds, 8 more seconds to reach the xp login. The desktop is a little faster.

Not on XP?

[bkg_cjb (952573)]

Could someone tell me why one type of drive wouldn't work with a specific version of Windows? Shouldn't they be able to write drivers for that?

Re:Not on XP?

[danpsmith (922127)]

Could someone tell me why one type of drive wouldn't work with a specific version of Windows? Shouldn't they be able to write drivers for that?

Ah, you must be new here. It's not that it wouldn't work, it just doesn't, you dig? No? Well, here's a Vista t-shirt.

Re:

[MankyD (567984)]

Could someone tell me why one type of drive wouldn't work with a specific version of Windows? Shouldn't they be able to write drivers for that?

I am guessing that a better description of the problem would be "not optimized for Windows". A hybrid drive is best used when small, in-demand data chunks are put on the flash components and large or infrequently accessed files are left on the platters. Perhaps there is no reasonable method to decide what files should go where?

Re:Not on XP?

[IntergalacticWalrus (720648)]

Could someone tell me why one type of drive wouldn't work with a specific version of Windows? Shouldn't they be able to write drivers for that?

Obviously because Microsoft paid them a certain amount of money to make it an extra reason to force people to upgrade.

Re:Not on XP?

[alexhs (877055)]

Solid-state drives are flash drives with a PATA/SATA connector, and will work like a regular hard disk, as far as the motherboard and the OS are concerned. Therefore working whatever OS you're using.

Hybrid drives, OTOH, are relying on two different technologies, and it seems the choice of using disk or flash is up to the OS. It means that if your OS isn't Hybrid-drive aware, you probably will end up with using the disk and losing its flash ability. Vista OTOH will be able to put some files on the flash part.

Re:Not on XP?

[AnonymousHero (129337)]

You seem to have three hands.

Re:Not on XP?

[k31bang (672440)]

You seem to have three hands.

Sooo, no need to type one handed like the rest of us.

Re:

[Surt (22457)]

Vista has features at the OS level to take advantage of hybrid drives.

While a hybrid could function in XP with a driver, you can't get the magic (extra fast app and os load) without vista.

Re:

[TheNetAvenger (624455)]

Could someone tell me why one type of drive wouldn't work with a specific version of Windows? Shouldn't they be able to write drivers for that?


As others have pointed out, they are standard connectors and would work with any OS basically.

Why 'Vista' is singled out, is Vista will recognize that it is a solid state drive, and use a 'different' set of cache and pre-cache techniques to get even more performance out of it than a regular OS would, by utilizing the drives random r/w speed over conventional HDs.

The

SuperFetch

[truthsearch (249536)]

According to Microsoft, "SuperFetch understands which applications you use most, and preloads these applications into memory, so your system is more responsive".

Seems nice in theory, but the first thing I do to any XP machine that someone tells me is running very slow is to kill those quick start apps in the bottom right corner. Their use of processor and/or memory definitely slows the machine down overall. I'd much rather wait an extra second for an app to load so the system runs faster overall.

So they better have improved their techniques with this SuperFetch. If it causes many more context switches or reduces memory available to apps people are actually running then it'll be a hinderance. At the very least it should be automatically turned off for systems with less than an ideal amount of memory.

Re:

[mystik (38627)]

If it's done right, then it'll be handy. IIRC, linux uses free pages of memory for disk cache, and if an application needs more pages, it just invalidates the disk cache pages, and allocates them to the app.

If Windows caches applications into free memory pages during disk idle times, it'd probably make a huge difference, so long as it doesn't take memory away from the currently actively running applications.

Re:SuperFetch

[mkiwi (585287)]

I saw this "SuperFetch" idea and it is a total rip off of NeXT's "prebinding" system. Often, when you install something on Mac OS X (since version 10.0), there is a little status message in the installer that says "Optimizing System Performance...". This command calls a program that sits in "/usr/bin" that loads memory addresses of each program in a cache for faster launch times. After prebinding, applications load faster at startup.

There is also a daemon on Mac OS X that dynamically prebinds applications that have not been prebound. One condition of prebinding is that all the Libraries must be dynamically linked and prebound themselves. If one dependant library is not prebound, then the whole thing gets marked as something "not to prebind."

To see the actual programs on Mac OS X, do a
ls /usr/bin | grep prebinding

Re:

[badonkey (968937)]

So they better have improved their techniques with this SuperFetch.

You don't really seem to know what you're talking about (although I suppose that doesn't prohibit anyone from being "5, insightful" on /.). They can't "improve their techniques," because there was no version of this feature in XP.

Those "quick start apps" you mention have nothing to do with XP, and everything to do with application writers who think you want their garbage running all the time. Those aren't just "pre-loaded" into memor

Maximum lifetime of flash...

[rmdyer (267137)]

Doesn't flash memory have a maximum lifetime (R/W cycles)? If so, are these new drives designed to "degrade" gracefully so that as the flash "rots", more and more data is stored to the drive instead of the memory? If so, this would mean that the drives would "slow down" over time right?

Re:Maximum lifetime of flash...

[TeknoHog (164938)]

Hard disks also have maximum lifetimes. Both HDDs and flash drives reallocate damaged blocks to compensate for the problem. The question is how the two compare in practical use.

Two types of drives

[GomezAdams (679726)]

There are two types of disk drives; those that have faild and those that will.

Backup early - backup often.

Re:

[TheRaven64 (641858)]

TFA states that current flash technology has a lifespan of about 10 years. Unlike hard drives, when flash fails you can still read from it, just not write to it. This means that, when your drive wears out, you just dump the contents to the new one, which is much larger anyway. You don't lose data.

Off topic, when did 32MB/s write speeds become slow? My new laptop gets about 30MB/s sustained (linear) write speeds, and I thought that was pretty impressive.

Reminds me of when...

[Nom du Keyboard (633989)]

Reminds me of when a company in the 70's built a solid-state swapping "drum" memory system for IBM S/370 mainframes. Of course, that one wouldn't fit in a 2.5" form factor.

Solid State = Sexy

[Giant Ape Skeleton (638834)]

The greatest immediate benefit from the transition to solid state storage will, of course, be reduced power consumption.

Coupled will fuel cell technology, mobile computing is finally going to live up to its potential.

And I love this William Gibson quote from 1991:

It wasn't until I could finally afford a computer of my own that I found out there's a drive mechanism inside- this little thing that spins around. I'd been expecting an exotic crystalline thing, a cyberspace deck or something, and what I got was a little piece of a Victorian engine that made noises like a scratchy old record player. That noise took away some of the mystique for me; it made computers less sexy. My ignorance had allowed me to romanticize them.

Re:

[Viol8 (599362)]

For someone who's supposedly an influential Sci-fi author you'd have expected the guy to have a vague clue about how the technology of the day worked. I'm not sure I believe him to be honest.

"Pricing was not announced"

[magarity (164372)]

...because they don't want you to get a bad case of sticker shock. If texas memory systems (http://www.texmemsys.com/) is any guide, these things won't be comparable to platter drives in cost per GB per performance. Maybe they've figured out a way to manufacture the things not too expensively per GB but the performance will be wretched. And even though most apps will not care unless you have a stopwatch people will look at the raw numbers and shy away. Just see all the trouble AMD had with the Pentium 4 vs Athlon XP CPU GHz wars.

Oh good!

[theGil (1010409)]

Vista users would see a 4x speedup in many key operations.

So now this might get Vista running half as fast as every other operating system, right?

Re:

[Utopia (149375)]

No, Its means that Vista users with this drive can take advantage of Readyoost [wikipedia.org] giving them faster performance versus those who don't have the drive.

Cheap Spinning Media has come a long way too

[humphrm (18130)]

I did an eval of SSD back, oh five years ago for my employer. These were SSD's attached via SCSI to Sun boxes running Solaris and Sybase. Based on the results I saw then, I have two problems with this:

>Vista users would see a 4x speedup in many key operations.
Back in the day, we were seeing 10-20X improvements over spinning media in Random Access. 4x is almost not worth it, depending on price - give spinning media another year or two and they'll match that gain.

>Pricing was not announced.
Of course not, because it's going to be outrageously expensive!

Re:

[owlstead (636356)]

I would not know about that. 5 years ago, a fast drive would do a seek in about 12 ms. Now it is 9 ms. That's not impressive. Density and streaming speed has increased manyfold within that time frame. Seek time has not. And it'll be some time before the random access speed of flash is met by spinning disks (and more importantly maybe, the drive heads). Especially if you read the article carefully, and see that the 4x speed up mentioned is the overall speed speedup.

From the faq:

Q: How fast is your current SS

Better performance for email servers

[tcopeland (32225)]

I've got a fairly busy email server [blogs.com] and this sounds like a great thing for the queue files... lots of little files, lots of random access.

Of course, the other posts about flash memory degrading after n writes would be something to watch, too.

Re:

[drinkypoo (153816)]

Just add more ram to your email server, and the size of the disk cache should increase automatically :P

obvious problem

[wes33 (698200)]

My notebook only has room for *one* drive onboard. I'm not going to replace a 80gb hardrive for a 4gb ssd (which currently cost $465 (see http://www.dvnation.com/nand-flash-ssd.html/ [dvnation.com]). So the hybrid is the way to go ... but what I'd like to see is a hybrid that just shows up as two drives under non-vista operating systems. Then the boot stuff could go on the small flash drive and everything else on the old fashioned (big) hard drive.

Wouldn't a better focus be

[joshetc (955226)]

Wouldn't a better focus be on battery backed up RAM drives instead? Like those PCI DDR ram drives that cost a bundle. It would be nice to get a blazing fast PC3200 1GB RAM-Drive for $100.. which would be multiple times faster than these drives.

Battery-powered RAM drive

[DragonWriter (970822)]

Wouldn't a better focus be on battery backed up RAM drives instead?

For servers and desktop, maybe... But for laptops it is impractical given the restrictions of keeping it powered.

Seems to me that you could do RAM+flash; have it work as a RAM drive when "powered on", but then when powered off (either with the whole system, or by power management powering the drive down due to inactivity) it dumps the RAM to the flash, and restores the RAM from flash when powering up. You get better performance, and save rea

Kudos to Samsung!

[bogaboga (793279)]

Samsung in my "small world", has risen from a relatively unknown entity in the electronics world, to a world leader ahead of names like Sony, JVC and Toshiba.

I understand they (Samsung) are the largest manufacturers of television sets of any kind now. And their stuff is of quality. Kudos to them.

What about security?

[UnknowingFool (672806)]

It would seem to me that these drives if they were used might be present an issue with data security. Are there any plans to protect the solid state components from being read by unauthorized access? Hopefully the design is such that all data is protected but being new, I couldn't get enough details to make a determination.

Re:inflection point is coming

[by Anonymous Coward]

What the...WE HAVE SHARP METAL DISCS SPINNING @ 7200prm ON OUR LAPS?!

HEAVENS TO BETSEY!

Re:

[Viol8 (599362)]

I wouldnt bet on that. The gap between what can be stored on a given area of magnetic/optical disks compared to some type of solid state memory is actually getting larger , not smaller.

Re:

[TheJorge (713680)]

While I wouldn't doubt we see more devices in the upcoming years, hard disks definitely have a place, at least on home computers. I imagine it's rare that anyone with a full 100GB+ HDD has only programs and application data. Giant media files are commonplace, and reading/writing large files is the primary drawback of SSD, and something platter hard drives do very well and very cheaply.

I think what we'll probably see is computers starting to come standard with an "applications" ssd and a "media" hdd.

Re:

[truthsearch (249536)]

No, I don't think you want. For streaming reading from a disk is faster. If your video is stored continuously on disk then a spinning platter can transmit the data faster. Flash can be faster for random reads.

Re:Bzzzt!!!! It uses flash ram.

[ironwill96 (736883)]

And if anyone had actually read the article, they would see that according to Samsung, the Flash technology in use in the drives has a lifetime of TEN years (your IDE / SATA HD likely wont last that long btw). They also note how much the R/W cycle issue has improved in the last few years.

Oh wait, this is /., we don't read the articles we just write silly comments first!

Re:

[truthsearch (249536)]

your IDE / SATA HD likely wont last that long btw

I've never had a drive not last at least 10 years. Are drives today made of lower quality?

Re:

[HappySqurriel (1010623)]

Flash is too restrictive in how many times it can be rewritten to be a viable replacement for a hard disk drive.
Nice try though...

I know far too little about flash to comment on whether or not it is adequate to replace a hard-drive, but I do wonder on a modern PC how many times does a hard-drive really need to be rewritten to?

Back in the olden days of computers (as in not that long ago) few people had enough RAM to keep an entire program in memory so the OS was constantly swapping data between Memory and th

Re:Bzzzt!!!! It uses flash ram.

[Overzeetop (214511)]

I've always wondered about this. Most modern flash seems to get 100k writes (many more reads). Fast flash is on the order of 13MB/s write.

With load balancing, you wouldn't notice a failure until all the locations were rewritten just shy of 100,000 times. So the drive will "fail" in once you've written 40GB of data 99,999 times, or almost 4PB of write ops. At 13MB/s, that's just under 10 years of 100% duty cycle writes. If you presume you'll read that data once at 20MB/s, and you allow only an 82% duty cycle overall (to make the math easy), then your drive should last 20 years.

I don't know about you, but I don't have any 20 year old computers or drives. The computer I had 20 years ago (PS/2 model 30, iirc) used 720k floppies, and a 20MB hard drive was a $400 option. Wait, check that. I do have a copy of Windows 1.04 on floppy disk here. It fits on three 720k floppies.

Re:Bzzzt!!!! It uses flash ram.

[Kjella (173770)]

The usual way they construct it is like this:
1. Fill your drive 95%
2. Trash the remaining 5%. Your disk will now die in 1/20th of the time, that is a matter of months

IMO even that theoretical problem could be solved by active swapping, that is using some of your write cycles to move information internally. If you spent 100 of your 100k cycles doing that noone would notice. So when you're trying to trash those 5%, those 5% would swap places with the other 95%, even though there's no free space. For all I know maybe they do already, but if it was a problem that is the solution (this was sooo obvious. I bet it's patented).

Re:

[Mr. Hankey (95668)]

I've seen this problem happen in practice, with a development embedded system that booted off two flash cards. It ended up lasting 6 to 8 months or so before we needed to put in another flash card (it used CF cards, one 32mb which took all required R/W operations and one 1GB which was RO) and we took images for when the CF cards died. There was no swap, no journaling, and temp files were moved to a ramdisk where possible, but some files needed to be modified during development and the CF cards didn't last.

Re:

[thebdj (768618)]

Let's look at the application, notebooks. There are quite a few pros for solid-state drives here: 1) HDDs are loud, 2) HDDs are hot (especially as you increase RPM), 3) HDDs are sensitive to motion, 4) HDDs require more power, 5) HDDs are marginally heavier (I mean the things are pretty small already). So the advantages here are pretty obvious, quieter, cooler, longer battery life, and marginally lighter notebooks.

Now, it is only fair we look at the downside, which is this overplayed write issue. Let u