Samsung Announces Fastest 64-GB SSD 145
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."
Good to hear but there are other options (Score:5, Interesting)
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 around for long time now. Inexpensive ones that you can put into your sub $1,000 computer... perhaps that is new. Yet another sensationalized copy in a Slashdot story abstract. Oh so surprising.
1 essential fact missing (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I/O limited distros more popular? (Score:3, Interesting)
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."
Can't one achieve such performance & more/w RA (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Can't one achieve such performance & more/w (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Real SSDs used to be faster than this! (Score:2, Interesting)
A few years ago there was this bizarre Gigabyte i-Ram gadget that took four DDR dimms of any size and connected by SATA, it was relatively cheap too at ~$125 (sans Ram). If they had made a larger model, say 8 or 16gb, I'd be all over it! There's also this FusionIO company that's kind of spinning its wheels right now, in true dot-com style, but they're at least trying to bring the concept of DRAM-based storage back into the spotlight.
Even with 15k drives and RAID, there are some things that just take forever on my workstation (random access stuff). Consumer equipment is getting really fast, but the high-end has been stagnating for years. With more and more people taking advantage of quad-core processors, dabbling with audio/video editing and hi-def content, not only do we need larger capacity, but we need massively increased transfer rates to match. What good is a terabyte disk if it takes 10 hours to read/write the whole thing ? Where are my 150mb/sec transfer rates ? Why design high-speed SATA interfaces if the actual drives can't even use a third of its juice ?
These flash drives serve a purpose, yes, but I think it's safe to say their target market is less concerned about transfer rate and more about battery life and shock-resistance. For the other 98% of the world, we want more speed dammit!
Re:I/O limited distros more popular? (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 ordinary).
With a page size of 1024 bytes, a 64GB drive would hold 64 million pages. If we assume that all updates require a full page erase-write, but that a clever algorithm distributes updates evenly, this leaves us with a guaranteed life-time of 6.4 * 10^12 (6,400,000,000,000) updates before memory failures start rolling in.
That's without doubt more than sufficient for desktop usage, but 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.
Now, assuming that you're able to feed the drive at 100MB/s is probably way off, but on the other hand your wear levelling algorithm will probably be far from perfect.
Re:I/O limited distros more popular? (Score:1, Interesting)
This is the link you want [storagesearch.com]. Basically, your problem is assuming only 100k writes. 100k writes was typical for 1997; the page I linked to gives a figure of 2M writes, but I would say even that is very conservative these days.
So the link I gave gave a (conservative) number of 51 years. The point isn't that a flash drive is going to last 51 years. The point is that a modern flash drive is not going to wear out from write exhaustion. Basically flash memory today has reached a point where the number of rewrites allowed is not the limiting factor in its engineering.
Re:I/O limited distros more popular? (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.