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Samsung Announces Fastest 64-GB SSD
Posted by
kdawson
on Wed Nov 07, 2007 02:23 AM
from the want-to-see-it-again dept.
from the want-to-see-it-again dept.
XueCast writes "The new solid-state drive from Samsung can write data at 100 MB/s and read at 120 MB/s. This handily outperforms other SSDs now on the market, which typically feature only 50-80 MB/s read/write rates. Samsung's SSD will come in two form factors, 1.8" and 2.5", and will be running on the SATA II standard. It will only consume 50% of the power of current SSDs. There is no information yet about price."
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Good to hear but there are other options (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Keep in mind that the FusionIO card is a card, not an SSD. SSD is used to refer to "solid-state drives" (where "solid-state" is slowly becoming synonymous with "flash", but that wasn't always the case...).
It's pretty clear that the FusionIO card isn't a drive, because there aren't any drive interfaces on the market today that can do 600 MB/s...
Not that I have anything against FusionIO -- on the contrary, I'd love to have one to play with -- but it's not a drive.
Define "drive". Remember the hardcard? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
methinks no.
Is there a marketting-to-english babelfish? (Score:3, Funny)
By the half of the page I had developped an extreme allergy to the word "leverage". Two sentences out of three were just saying that the lever some (supposedly awesome) proprietary technology. And more importantly, I was none the wiser. There wasn't a single sentence that even said what it _does_. What makes that technology so awesome? What'
Re:What speeds? (Score:4, Insightful)
Second, your hard drive can sustain 60MB/s on the fastest part of the drive. Its average is probably much less than that (due to different linear speeds on the inside and outside of the platters).
That speed drops catastrophically in many real-world scenarios. Small random reads, for example, become dominated by seek time and rotational latency and the high transfer rate doesn't help very much. Small random writes are only slightly better.
It is really not "only double". It has a real-world speed that is about twice a high-end hard drive's theoretical maximum speed.
Parent
Re:What speeds? (Score:5, Informative)
SATA drives have a seek latency of about 9ms. This means that the drive can perform 111 seeks per second. Assume a very pessimistic scenario of reading a 2KB cluster. Your drive's performance is now about 200KB/s.
For an expensive and low capacity SCSI drive, you can get 3.3ms, with about 600KB/s worst case scenario.
This is assuming you're actually reading data you're interested in. Some of that will involve reading filesystem metadata, which from the user's POV isn't what you're actually interested in. For a directory with lots of small files I imagine you could get maybe half of that performance.
I've seen SSD latency being quoted to be around 0.01ms. The same calculation above gives 195MB/s, assuming reading takes no extra time (which is false)
From this you can see that a hard disk is highly limited by seek latency, while a SSD is much more limited by read/write speed.
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Outperforms? (Score:2, Interesting)
Texas Memory Systems http://www.superssd.com/benefits.htm [superssd.com] says can saturate Fibre Channel (GBs/sec) and this one caps out at 100s of MB/s. Perhaps not quite so unequivocally outperforms as this statement makes it out to be.
How about outperforms other flash based SATA SSDs now on the market???? What is surprising is that more of the SSDs don't max out the SATA pipe.
yeah they are in different price classes but it isn't like SSDs haven't been
1 essential fact missing (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:1 essential fact missing (Score:5, Informative)
the new version has double the capacity, do the math yourself.
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Yes, but... (Score:4, Funny)
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
the new version has double the capacity, do the math yourself.
If you mean to multiply by two, that's not how it works in mooremathics (yes, I just made that up). I've been paying a little attention to the development on memory sticks over 4 doublings from 512MB to 8GB now at the same price point. Every time process tech has evolved to give double capacity, it has doubled and the price stayed the same. So if the last generation cost 600-1500$ for 32GB, I predict this generation will also cost 600-1500$ for 64GB, with 32GBs for half that.
DELL and Alienware offers Samsung 64GB SSD... (Score:2, Informative)
They cost $920 when added to a Dell laptop. The 64-GB SSD is available initially on Dell's XPS M1330 ultraportable notebook Relevant Products/Services, and, later this year, on other models in the XPS line, as well as on Latitude corporate notebooks and Dell mobile workstations. For Alienware, users can choose dual 64-GB SSDs in RAID 1 or RAID 0 configuration, or a 64-GB SSD in combination with a magnetic drive for the Area-51 m9750 high-performance gaming notebook. Prices start over $1,000 for the SSD additions.
As far as price is concerned. I would rather get this. http://www.engadget.com/2007/08/21/toshibas-320gb-2-5-inch-hard-drive-a-worlds-best-for-laptops/
And if battery life really concerns you probably getting external battery from electrovaya or batterygeek may eliminate that worries.
Flash! Ah ahhhh... (Score:5, Funny)
Cheap, fast and good. (Score:5, Interesting)
"write data at 100 MB/s and read at 120 MB/s."
Hey cool, that's pretty fast.
"64GB
Good, good.
"There is no information yet about price."
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
1) Power consumption
2) Battery life
3) Power. Consumption.
I'm looking right now at the data sheet of the latest Seagate SATA hard drive models, that tout a 3 Gb/s data rate (325 MB/s, if you are too lazy to divide by 8), and I haven't even started talking about RAID 0 algorithms yet. Yes, the Samsung SSD is fast - the caveat here is that it is fast when compared with other SSD's. The good news is that this is a relatively new technology, with great potential for improvement IMHO. But
Re:Cheap, fast and good. (Score:5, Informative)
In other words, it's more like why are you not buying SSDs:
1. Price
2. Price
3. Price
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Name just one of Seagates drives that can do anywhere NEAR 325MB/s for more than a few milliseconds. I think you must have mis-read the datasheet or something. That simply can't be true. Maybe as burst rate for tiny files which reside entirely in the cache and have previously already been read.
Old news (Score:5, Informative)
I haven't seen a price yet but it's going to be at least close to a grand.
Double Dupe? (Score:2, Informative)
Today, plus...
Oct 28: http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/28/1337207 [slashdot.org]
Oct 25: http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/25/149202 [slashdot.org]
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Double Dupe? (Score:4, Funny)
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SSD (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
thank you.
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This is how it works (Score:3, Informative)
2. Strap the lot in parallel, giving 64 GB
3. 6|8 MB/sec/innard x 16 innards begets 100 MB/sec
4. Profit !!
Each 4GB innard is $20 currently, so 16 by 20 is 320. Figure $10 for plumbing. 1% margin for OEM (335), 50% markup by distributor (500), and another 50% by retailer (750), and there you have it $750 for 64 GB.
Thank you !! Come again !!
Re:This is how it works (Score:5, Interesting)
4 USB controllers, 16 readers, 1 PCI controller, support electronics. the device would cost some $30 to produce. Sell it empty, without the cards.
And provide a good supply of bulk amount of the cards.
The user can replace a faulty card without scrapping the whole device. They can add or remove cards depending on the needs. They can replace cards with bigger ones when they want more space. They can physically write-protect chosen partitions of the drive.
If you don't worry about the speed much, you can use USB hubs instead of the controllers. Then the device plugs into USB.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
I'd love to get a small form factor system. Using SD memory in place of hard drives is a great solution to reducing the space, noise and heat issues. Obviously, I'd like to see speed and size increases and cost decreases. But this is a natural move for the market which will happen over time anyways.
Another technology catches up with windows (Score:2)
Fastest? Not by a mile (Score:2)
I think the folks at STEC [stec-inc.com] might be a bit surprised by these claims. Especially considering that their product has been shipping for months already.
Of course, they might be quite a bit less expensive than the Zeus SSDs, which are quite pricey...
For some folks, high performance is the requirement and cost is no object. Those folks get their solid-state drives from folks like STEC, Texas Memory Systems [texmemsys.com], or (soon) Violin Scalable Memory [violin-memory.com]. I'd love to be able to afford this stuff. Buy maybe Samsung w
$24 times 16 == $384 (price) (Score:2)
*16
----
$384
Upper limit on the price...
Price depends on speed... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
In any event, even if they are slow, the speed limit doesn't come from the flash chips themselves. The speed limit comes from the controller.
This drive has a controller and some flash chips. The cost of the controller is, maybe, $50 tops. The question is -- how much do the flash chips cost? If you can get 4GB flash cards for $24, that means the flash chips inside there must cost at most $2
Don't flash drives have limited life? (Score:2, Funny)
( Sorry, no thread on flash drives is complete without it... )
This will be frighteningly expensive. I'd go for a cheaper 16Gb version - big enough for the system partition + swap file.
Re:I/O limited distros more popular? (Score:5, Informative)
Furthermore, A simple buffering scheme sounds likely to solve most of the problems you're talking about (Assuming it's constantly many small writes done by the OS... for say, log file keeping or file access-time updating).
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
MTBF doesn't mean [wikipedia.org] what most people think it means, and is less useful [wikipedia.org] than most people treat it.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Does anyone around here know of any numbers backing up the claimed high values for MTBF? I'm not unwilling to accept that the values are indeed high, but I'm looking for something closer to reality than the Wikipedia article arriving at an expected lifetime of 26,600 years.
The flash memory modules I've encountered have guaranteed a minimum of 100.000 write cycles per data memory byte before failure (NDAs prohibit me from listing the specific devices, but I suspect that this number is nothing out of the
Re:I/O limited distros more popular? (Score:5, Insightful)
2 years seems pretty impressive to me for beating the virtual snot out of your test subject testing in a completely unrealistic scenario. I would be surprised if my car's engine survived 2 years of running non-stop at 7,000 RPM.
Parent
Re: Car engine lifetimes (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I've seen some specs listing 300,000 program/erase cycles, minimum, which would boost your 2 years to 6, and note that that's their minimum guarantee, the average lifetimes are expected to be considerably (as much as 10x) higher. Presumably these devices just write off a page if it goes bad.
Re:I/O limited distros more popular? (Score:5, Insightful)
The only situation you might find to push that is a dedicated high-use AV workstation in a 24/7 media company. Oh, and never mind that workstation would be using arrayed drives for additional speed and redundancy isntead of a single drive...which would of course increase the expeted overall lifetime.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I/O limited distros more popular? (Score:5, Insightful)
I suggest two things:
1) those so paranoid about drive life return to their handy array of 9.1GB disks in raid 50 and leave the thread
2) run perfmon (or the linux equiv.) and look at your overall disk writes for an average day, triple it and then calculate the number of years the drive will last and cut it in half for the hell of it. I'd guess the computer and storge of the drive will be long obsolete before the expected lifetime.
If you need to handle writing 100MB/sec of data at a constant rate for weeks/months/years then you don't need a 1.8" SSD. You need a couple pentabyte san. These drives are *perfect* for normal users, power users, heavy users. I'd gladly put one in each of our developer's PCs for doing coding and builds. Our AV guys would love them too.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
And bigger, 128GB:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=2013240636+1421430849&name=128GB [newegg.com]
Yes, the prices are exorbitant. Just wait, patience is a virtue. At least we can actually see and purchase the current status of SSD, and at the rate they are increasing it will phase out hard disks in both capacity and price.
Re:Can't one achieve such performance & more/w (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re:We need a new spec for SSD's (Score:5, Informative)
These devices will have wear leveling. That means that if a cell is close to running out of erase cycles, the drive will move data that has not changed in a very long time into that cell. A few cells will be kept as spares in case some cells don't last as long as they are predicted to.
If you do the math, and figure a typical use scenario as a laptop's primary drive, you get that these drives should outlast mechanical hard drives by many years. For example, a 64GB hard drive with an endurance of 100,000 writes should be able to tolerate about 5 million GB of writes before it fails due to wear.
How long it will take you to run that out depends on your average write rate. But with a reasonable rate (10MB/s) that works out to about 15 years.
Parent