Samsung Announces Fastest 64-GB SSD

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."

I/O limited distros more popular?

[Crankymonky]

A few machines in the past have had SSD's and the manufacturer did nothing to limit the Input and output of the operating system, therefore limiting the longevity of the drive. With Asus' eeePC just launched, I'm not sure what they've done as they do use a SSD. Does anyone expect we will see a rise in both development and popularity of Linux distributions that will limit input and output access to the drives by some means? Does anyone think Microsoft would do anything to this extent within the near future? On the linux front, as far as I know, only live CDs and their frugal installs (that support saving to a save file) and maybe (probably?) Asus eeePC's OS have options to limit the input and output of a drive, by default.

Re:I/O limited distros more popular?

[HateBreeder]

Thanks to algorithms that spread written data across the chip, MTBF's of SSD are much higher than those of regular HDDs with similar usuage patterns.

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).

Old news

[rrohbeck]

The announcement was in March [samsung.com], mass production in June [samsung.com] and availability in September [samsung.com].

I haven't seen a price yet but it's going to be at least close to a grand.

Re:Vaporware

[Shikaku]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=2013240636+1421430848&name=64GB [newegg.com]

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.

Double Dupe?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this what you call something that has been duped twice?

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:1 essential fact missing

[leuk_he]

A small google shows that current generation of 32 GB ssd cost about $599-$1500 [dvnation.com] (depending on speed)

the new version has double the capacity, do the math yourself.

DELL and Alienware offers Samsung 64GB SSD...

[holywarrior21c]

http://www.cio-today.com/story.xhtml?story_id=130008HEVRPI

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.

This is how it works

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Get sixteen, 4 GB SDHC, Class 6 or 8 innards

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:Cheap, fast and good.

[Laurentiu]

Why would you buy a SSD?

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 if you don't have a laptop and a need for 4-6 hrs/battery, don't. And even if you do, you'd be probably better off just buying a spare battery.

Kudos to Samsung for pushing the envelope a little further.

Re:Cheap, fast and good.

[Kjella]

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 if you don't have a laptop and a need for 4-6 hrs/battery, don't. And even if you do, you'd be probably better off just buying a spare battery.

LOL, you're looking at the wrong specs. 3GBit/s is the SATA2 interface speed, which by the way also has two bits error correction for every byte so divide by ten for 300MB/s maximum actual throughput. In reality even the fastest WD Raptor 10k SATA drives have a sustained read/write around 80MB/s with minimums around 60MB/s. The MTRON and these Seagate disks are already faster than non-RAID HDDs, in addition to near-instant access time, lower power, lower weight, no noise, shock resistant and in smaller form factors like 1.8" and 2.5" compared to the top-of-the-line 3.5" performance I'm comparing with. Or you can compare to a mobile HDD, but then it certainly gets severely beaten in performance. Oh and RAID0 - take the most unreliable component in the system, make it twice as big, powerhungry, noisy and errorprone...

In other words, it's more like why are you not buying SSDs:
1. Price
2. Price
3. Price

Re:I/O limited distros more popular?

[DoofusOfDeath]

Thanks to algorithms that spread written data across the chip, MTBF's of SSD are much higher than those of regular HDDs with similar usuage patterns.

MTBF doesn't mean [wikipedia.org] what most people think it means, and is less useful [wikipedia.org] than most people treat it.

Re:Price depends on speed...

[JoelKatz]

Speed doesn't matter. With 16 low-speed cards, you can make one really high-speed one. It just takes a smart controller.

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 $24. The means you can sell 64GB of flash chips for $384 without losing your shirt. This even includes the cost of a controller, packaging, and the cost to advertise, stock, and sell the product that we don't need.

There is no rational reason this drive should sell for more than $500, except that there is only limited supply. As soon as supply ramps up, the price will drop to about this value. I'd guess this will take 3 months or so.

Re:We need a new spec for SSD's

[JoelKatz]

There is no read limit. The write limit is about 100,000 writes (really erasures) per cell.

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.

Re:This is how it works

[Anonymous Coward]

So would that be something like this? http://www.zentek.com/product_sd_md816.htm [zentek.com]

I have to contact them to see how much they ask for the 16 slot model and if it supports SDHC. It's a bit large but still seems interesting.

Re:I/O limited distros more popular?

[Anonymous Coward]

It doesn't impact performance hugely if the wear-leveling algorithm is designed properly, i.e., only swapping/remapping blocks if the wear is (say) 1000 writes more than the next block in line to be remapped.

If you are writing to the same logical block over and over, a swap/remap will only happen once every 1000 writes.

But it all depends on how the algorithm/architecture was designed.

To the GPP: an algorithm that actually knows what space is used up by your files and fails to wear level using those blocks would be stupid and wrong. Don't expect wear leveling to be that bad.

Re:What speeds?

[vadim_t]

That 60 MB/s is almost never attainable in practice.

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.

Re:I/O limited distros more popular?

[Intron]

Where are you getting your numbers? Block erase is 128K or 256K on NAND flash that I've looked at, and erase time is about 1500 usec. The large flash drives measure sequential I/O across multiple chips to get their meaningless performance numbers. Random writes are still painfully slow. The controller keeps an erase count for each block to do load leveling, and when a page gets used too many times it has to swap the whole page with one that isn't used much. The article claims 8GB per chip, which seems high to me. I think they might mean 8Gbit per chip, which would mean 64 chips to do 64GB.

Since there is an onboard controller with a RAM buffer, it can do a verify on every write. Flash tends to fail at erase or write time which can be recovered with no data loss, so MTBF depends on how many spare blocks you leave.