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Samsung's 64-GB Solid-State Drive
Posted by
kdawson
on Tue Mar 27, 2007 01:41 PM
from the we-don't-need-no-steenkin-RPMs dept.
from the we-don't-need-no-steenkin-RPMs dept.
Anonymous Howard writes "Just a couple of weeks ago Sandisk introduced a 32-GB solid-state drive. Now Samsung has one-upped them, unveiling a 64-GB solid-state drive. They are expecting to begin shipping in the second quarter of this year. Samsung says the device can read 64 MB/s, write 45 MB/s, and uses just 0.5 W when operating (0.1 W when idle). In comparison, an 80-GB 1.8-inch hard drive reads at 15 MB/s, writes at 7 MB/s, and consumes 1.5 W when either operating or idle. No pricing yet."
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finally, one big enough for regular use (Score:4, Insightful)
Seriously, though, that's enough for windows XP/Vista/etc. plus your favorite games, apps, and so on. Maybe you couldn't put whole slews of videos or images on there, but you could always get 2 of them.
Re:finally, one big enough for regular use (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:finally, one big enough for regular use (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Not the MTBF, the read-write cycles. (Score:5, Informative)
BUT!
The flash cells have a limited number of write cycles, which is very small compared to hard drives. If you write too much data on the same sector, the sector get very quickly broken.
If you used a flash card for swap, it won't last long at all (because some sectors get constantly written over).
To limit those damages, flash controllers use "wear level". That means that the small RISC controller that interface between the flash cells and the computer interface (ATA/CF, SD, USB, etc.) dynamically remaps the sectors so the wear caused by write cycles is distributed over several different sector.
Let's say that an OS constatly writes data on the first couple of sectors. Instead of always writing on the first few cell, the controller remaps a different physical flash cell, to the logical disc sector seen by the OS.
This works as a charm for flash media storing files likes used in digital cameras and such.
But doesn't perform as well when used by an operating system.
Windows XP is specially bad at this.
Other OS - such as Linux or *BSD, that already have good support for running on slow read-only media (LiveCDs) for a long time, that don't need writing that much (except
Parent
Re:Not the MTBF, the read-write cycles. (Score:4, Interesting)
Since flash doesn't have sectors that are faster than others; Thus, this is incorrect.
Flash chips each have a read and write speed limit the more of them you have in parrelel the faster it can read/write. It's trivial to make the chips within a flash drive have JBOD(F) properties.
This is one of the major advantages for me, disks that will be able to max out gigabit+ ethernet with increadible seek times, data redundancy, and massive througput.
As disks get bigger it may become nescessary to have some space for a read/write buffer (normal HD's have ram for this) which will increase the life or need for higher MTBF sections, both of these properties are showing up in variations on flash.
So if you have a flash disk with 1 Increadible MTBF chip, 1 super speed no storage sector (like ram), 1 massive storage space, and a bunch of standard flash you can have all the advantages of every kind of disk with the internal controller handling performance and wear leveling (not a trivial programming problem but one which we have a bunch of excellent solutions in place for).
My personal problem with flash disks is that industry seems to be holding back development, trying to develop an upgrade cycle instead of realeasing a perfect solution.
I can get a 1GB microsd flash card for $15 about 400-600(conservative) of them would fit into a 2.5 disk enclosure. With JBOD and wear leveling across the chips and I'm assuming it would be cheaper because you wouldn't need hundreds of cases/interfaces a 200GB drive with read/write speeds of 100-300 Gb a sec and seek time of
Hmm, well maybe the price does need to come down but the other concerns about flash seem unjustified, write wear isn't a problem, it's not scary. losing all your data to a HD failure, now that's scary.
Parent
Re:finally, one big enough for regular use (Score:5, Informative)
They specify 10 years for flash memory to hold it's data, but in practice (e.g. not at the highest temperature or most extreme operating voltage) it is significantly longer. I don't know to what extent the hard drives work around bad sectors, but they probably do it for both flash drives and the traditional magnetic type.
Parent
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(((64 * 1 024) / 45) * 1 000 000) / (60 * 60 * 24 * 365) = 46.1807317
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Looks perfect- but it reports a formatting error when loaded into my camera and reformatting it doesn't fix the problem.
And hard drives last a lot less than they advertise too (all those google related articles 2 months back).
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Modern NAND flash is in the 100k+ erase/program cycles... from an ST application note on wear leveling: "In ST NAND Flash memories each physical block can be programmed or erased reliably over 100,000 times." Of course, the wear leveling is what gets you in the 1M hour MTBF range...
the MTBF numbers for flash assume that you stay within the endurance limits.
With flash, the weak point is wear
From my vantage point (Score:4, Insightful)
The price may or not go down enough within that time period to kick out harddrives completely - in which case we'll just see hybrid drives take over.
Parent
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Performance? (Score:4, Insightful)
Can anyone find some more details on the transfer rate/seek time?
For a hard disk peak transfer rate is when reading consecutive blocks... if the solid state drive can get near peak performance for random access, it's got a huge advantage.
And is thus very cool.
Seek time? Should be 0ms (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Seek time? Should be 0ms (Score:5, Informative)
Well... that doesn't necessarily mean it's as fast at random access as it is at consecutive access.
Normal computer RAM is also faster at consecutive reads than random reads.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
You know, those SDRAM timings that x-trememe overclockers 2 the max use to fully run 3dmarks to the xtreme maxx.
Put pagefile somewhere else? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
First, flash parts have internal controlers that remap the flash to level out the writes. (I remember hearing about some researcher who developed a great flash file system, only to find that it didn't make any difference because of the remapping.)
Second, flash parts can handle orders of magnitude more writes now than they could a few years ago.
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Re:Put pagefile somewhere else? (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
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That sentence should have ended right after "without a backup".
Re:Put pagefile somewhere else? (Score:4, Interesting)
I used to know people who swore that, after adding RAM, the best thing you could do for speed was to add a small-but-fast SCSI hard drive and use it for nothing but your swapfile. I've never gone that route personally, because I've never thought it worth the expense, but I bet it would make for a pretty nice system. And I also suspect there have to be a lot of SCSI drives on the used market if you look.
Parent
Re:Put pagefile somewhere else? (Score:4, Interesting)
The numbers you used, approx 900/100, are also a special magic point on 32-bit CPUs under Linux. Above about 960MB, Linux uses "highmem" mode on x86, and that slows things down. A 32-bit x86 PC runs faster when you restrict it to 960MB instead of letting it use the full 1024MB.
For those of you who wonder how a computer could run faster w/ a little swap in RAM instead of just using all the RAM, the answer is complicated. Mainly, all the VM algorithms assume the existance of swap, and so when they get backed into a corner, they expect to be able to dump a bunch of stuff overboard into swap. They only start making the really hard choices once swap fills up. If you take away swap, then you hit the "out of swap" condition much more readily.
You might be thinking "ah, but it's all just a shell game! You'll still run out of swap at the same time, since your total memory is fixed!" Not true. The OS prioritizes disk buffers and other caches relative to the work it's doing and the RAM available to it. RAM dedicated to a RAM disk is not available for other purposes. Thus, a RAM-based swap partition dedicates some portion of RAM to only hold dirty program pages. No disk buffers, no network buffers, no inode information. Just dirty program pages. By forcing austerity on these other discretionary structures, you can compensate for the VM's inbuilt assumption it can just "dump things to swap", and that running out of swap occurs "almost never."
--JoeParent
Re:Put pagefile somewhere else? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
What's the long-term stability? (Score:5, Insightful)
They also have error detection/correction, bad-sector remapping, and "I'm about to die" notification.
At one time, solid-state devices were good for about a thousand writes for any given memory cell, a lot fewer than HDs.
Does anyone know the reliability for these new solid-state devices over wall time, hours in use/plugged in, number of read cycles, and number of write cycles under normal operating conditions, and how those compare with a modern 1.8, 2.5, or 3.5" drive?
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Perfect for MP3 players (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't get it... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Price: $200ish? (Score:3, Interesting)
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I would spend serious money for a laptop drive (Score:5, Insightful)
Personally, to pull the SATA drive out of my laptop and replace it with a 100gb version of this that used so much less power and was so much faster would be a no-brainer even at something like 700 or 800 dollars (US). Battery life would be radically better, noise and heat would be much lower, performance better and general usability should be outstanding.
What are the downsides? How is the duty cycle on these things? Will they last as long or develop hotspots that can't store data as well?
Re:I would spend serious money for a laptop drive (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
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MTBF (Score:3, Informative)
That's quite a bit better than typical hard drives these days!
Has anyone found MTBF information regarding the Samsung versions?
Predict $630 (Score:5, Interesting)
$435 for memory
+10% for R&D
+10% for manf (including controller, parts, etc)
-10% for manf efficency when producing 64GB/run
COST $479
RETAIL:
+20% for geewhiz-newtoy-factor/supply shortages
+10% for retail
YOUR COST: $630
sources:
http://www.pricewatch.com/flash_card_memory/secur
Another prediction: SSDs will offer such huge power and performance advantanges, they will sell like crazy and drop in price by a factor of 70% within 1 year from now.
These fair similar to 2.5" drives (Score:5, Informative)
* 2.5" drives consume between 0.8W to 2.5W (ok, seeking eats a lot, but during sequential read or write, they consume similar amounts), almost no power consumption when they spin down.
* 2.5" drives give 53MB/sec read and write.
* 2.5" drives are very cheap and have triple the capacity.
The solid state drives are still at an advantage, but it's not quite as large as compared to 1.8" drives.
No pricing yet (Score:4, Insightful)
My favorite line (Score:3, Informative)
"From there, it should be a short trip to dismissal even if it means getting our clients to mediate Mr. Merchant's positive claims in the absence of an appropriate settlement."
Translation: If you have read this far, you realize that you not only have no case, but that you are entirely out of your league because the standards of evidence in the court system where I have major influence, would procedurally bar you from even entering your case on the docket. Despite this, my client's claims against you are already demonstrated, and our claims will continue to have merit even after your case is dismissed with prejudice (and we have not offered to drop our case.)
This letter is a masterpiece because it manages to hand the plaintiff his ass, in a rather respectful colleague-to-colleague way, while at the same time threatening a counterclaim that could end up with far greater damages than the initial claim!
And the real beauty is that even though the RIAA seems to have withdrawn its claim, the damages from the malice might still hold, if they really want to push it.
Who did they sue? Directors of a Silicon Valley bank? They should do some research before they pull the pin on the hand grenade!
"I would be happy to send the airplane..." (At the plaintiff's expense of course...)
Love it.
Re:I'm lazy, yes, but that's not a bad thing (Score:4, Informative)
Personally, I think 64Gb is a bit much for me, I'd stick the OS and swap files on there - which come to about 10Gb on my current XP machine.
Parent
Re:I'm lazy, yes, but that's not a bad thing (Score:4, Informative)
One possible reason is an OS that will not run, or will not run correctly, without paging. Linux actually fell into the latter category once upon a time, it would run like crap without swap (unless you made some patches.) SunOS4 was SOLIDLY in that category, but it's old (BSD 4 based - IIRC mostly 4.3, with some 4.4-lite code in the last release of SunOS4?) Windows 2000 would allow you to turn of all paging files, but would blue screen on boot if you did so as it absolutely required some paging (but you could have a teensy, fixed-length paging file.) But in a system that isn't so poorly designed that it requires paging, adding more RAM is a better solution any time you have the slots and the cash. It stops you from paging! That's pure gold right there. Who wants to wait for that?
One solution, of course, is to use a DRAM SSD for your swap if you're out of DIMM slots. Then only cash is the limiting factor. Granted, it still limits me right out of that particular game...
Parent
Re:I'm lazy, yes, but that's not a bad thing (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Smaller isn't better... (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Heat and Noise? (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, based on an energy consumption of 0.5W and an educated guess that they probably aren't emitting much light, I'd say that the heat output is 0.5W.
Duh.
Parent
Re:Heat and Noise? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
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I think that the SSD is going to compete far sooner than most people realize. Looking at the numbers, we now see that laptops are almost outselling stationary computers, so people may actually turn to SSD as soon as 2.5 inchers at 200 GB come at competitive prices. Besides, if you want lots of space for vids and mp3s, then why not get a networked server with a cou
Re:Industrial PC's (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
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Try slipstreaming instead. nlite makes it even easier.