Samsung's Solid-State Disk Drive Unveiled 241
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.
Reminds me of when... (Score:4, Informative)
"Pricing was not announced" (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Not on XP? (Score:2, Informative)
Cheap Spinning Media has come a long way too (Score:4, Informative)
>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:Not on XP? (Score:5, Informative)
Obviously because Microsoft paid them a certain amount of money to make it an extra reason to force people to upgrade.
Re:Maximum lifetime of flash... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Maximum lifetime of flash... (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Not on XP? (Score:5, Informative)
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:Dedicated OS Harddrive? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Bzzzt!!!! It uses flash ram. (Score:5, Informative)
Oh wait, this is
Re:Maximum lifetime of flash... (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Dedicated OS Harddrive? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Not on XP? (Score:3, Informative)
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:Not on XP? (Score:3, Informative)
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 Vista ReadBoost technology goes into play on this type of drive 'so to speak', even though it would be the primary HD, and this is why Vista would get even more of a boost from the solid state technology than other OSes currently.
Re:Not on XP? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Cheap Spinning Media has come a long way too (Score:3, Informative)
From the faq:
Q: How fast is your current SSD and what performance improvements does it offer?
A: The streaming R/W speeds are 57 MB/s and 32 MB/s, respectively, but the most significant performance advantage comes from its latency feature - less than 1 millisecond; roughly 10-15x faster than a hard disk drive.