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."

Define "drive". Remember the hardcard?

[tepples]

Keep in mind that the FusionIO card is a card, not an SSD.

Do you remember the days before ATA, when hard disk drives each came with their own controller cards? Do you remember hardcards [wikipedia.org], or hard disk drives that plugged straight into the ISA slot?

Price depends on speed...

[Joce640k]

Is your $24 card a high speed one?

Re:What speeds?

[JoelKatz]

First, you mean MBps. We're talking bytes, not bits.

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.

Re:Good to hear but there are other options

[rootofevil]

so then its optical hard disk drive, floppy hard disk drive, zip hard disk drive, etc, etc?

methinks no.

Re:I/O limited distros more popular?

[skelly33]

"let's for a moment assume that you're able to max out the drive, writing at the rated speed of 100MB/s. With a page size of 1024 bytes, that's 100.000 page updates every second, so failure will set in after 64,000,000 seconds = 2 years."

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.

Re:I/O limited distros more popular?

[torkus]

How often do you feed a disk (not in a server) at 100MB/sec for any sustained period of time? Heck, how often do you feed a disk 100MB/sec for one minute much less an hour much less 2 years straight.

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.

Re:I/O limited distros more popular?

[torkus]

More than 10x higher. No one sustains 10MB/sec of writes 24/7 or even averages that on an individual's computer/laptop.

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.