Samsung Launches SSD 830 Drive 148
MojoKid writes "Although they haven't been big hits with enthusiasts, Samsung's solid state drives have been successful due to strong relationships with a number of OEMs, including Apple. With the release of their new SSD 830 Series Solid State Drives, however, Samsung appears ready to make inroads with enthusiasts as well. The SSD 830 tested here is 256GB model, with eight 32GB Samsung NAND flash memory chips, 256MB of Samsung DDR2 SDRAM cache memory, and a new Samsung SSD Controller. The Samsung controller features a 3-ARM core design with support for SATA III 6Gb/s interface speeds. Performance-wise, the Samsung SSD 830 Series drive offered the best Read performance of the group that was tested, even versus the latest SandForce-based SSDs, though the SSD 830 couldn't quite catch SandForce in writes."
Big questions (Score:5, Informative)
1) How does this Samsung chipset compare vs latest Sandforce2 in terms of compressed read/writes?
2) TRIM support?
3) OSX friendliness?
4) Cost?
5) Size max?
So far I've identified 2 use cases that have very nice sweet-spot answers - a) For a desktop with PCI-e, the OCZ Revodrive3 X2 just gives amazing performance, completely bypassing SATA and delivering unbeatable performance/cost ratio. b) For a laptop solution, I'm more interested in max storage/price/performance, and the 512GB Crucial m4 seems unparalleled in delivering this (expensive at $700, but can completely replace an laptop HDD).
It will be interesting to see if Samsung is ready to challenge this market.
Re:What will happen when they die? (Score:5, Informative)
Fortunately the Intel SSDs come with a 'wear indicator' showing how much life is left. Mine are all showing 99-100% life left, so unless I hit the Intel 320 8MB bug that randomly trashes the drive I don't see failure being a problem before I replace them.
Re:What will happen when they die? (Score:5, Informative)
So? HDDs also die. They're guaranteed to in fact, since they have plenty moving parts that will wear out eventually. I've had quite a few drives die on me.
SDDs at least in theory wear out in a predictable manner and can deal with the effects without data loss. Since flash fails on write, a SDD conceivably could (I don't know if any do that) reach a point where it says "that's it, no more redundancy left, read only access from now", which is a whole lot better than a head crash.
Everybody should have a backup plan, regardless of storage tech.
Re:What will happen when they die? (Score:4, Informative)
Does anybody have a backup plan for when their SSDs die? After all, unlike magnetic media, SSDs have a limited number of writes. AFAIK, none of them are rated yet for over a million writes, so they are bound to fail at some point.
Buy a new SSD? SSD failure is predictable. If you're lucky, your firmware will not try to write to blocks that are past their rated # of write cycles and so when your SSD reaches the end of its lifespan, your data will become read only. Even if not, you can still tell very easily if you're approaching end of lifespan using SMART status. I suspect that SSD death is much more predictable than HD death...
Price??? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:What will happen when they die? (Score:2, Informative)
And the "backup plan" is pretty much the same as for a regular hard drive: duplicates on RAID for reliability and backups for failure recovery.
Mirroring an SSD to another SSD which is likely to fail at almost the same time doesn't seem a great plan to me :).
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:why haven't they "been a big hit with enthusias (Score:5, Informative)
OEMs love 'em because, while mediocre, they have been comparatively reliable(no equivalents of the Jmicron controller debacle, firmware that makes them show up as only 8MB in size, assorted bleeding-edge weirdness and general "No, we really do have to offer these things under a 3-year warranty to get business customers"-stopping issues.)
The enthusiast-darling crown has changed hands a number of times. Intel was the one to have a little while ago, I think that they've been eclipsed by some of the newer Sandforce gear of late. There are rather more brands than there are chipsets, so brand enthusiasm tends to swing wildly based on cost and who is releasing the new hotness chipset this month.
Re:What will happen when they die? (Score:5, Informative)
The mechanicals sometimes last a decade if you get lucky, or die within days of install if you don't. Moral of the story: If you store anything on a hard drive, you don't love that something very much. You'd better have backups.
The shape of the failure probability/time graph is likely a bit different for SSDs; but the "You'd better have backups" message, and the available means of taking those backups are pretty much exactly the same.
Again, because of the somewhat higher cost, burning your way through SSDs is a little more painful than burning your way through HDDs; but anybody whose plans involve just trusting a hard drive has always been doomed.
Re:What will happen when they die? (Score:5, Informative)
Bullshit.
SSDs erase in extremely large blocks, like 256K. Having a counter per block is not a problem. It works out to 16K of memory per GB for a 32 bit counter per block.
It probably doesn't even take an extra space, since a block probably already contains metadata and ECC, so a simple counter probably fits in there nicely, It won't even cause any extra wear because the only time you want to change the counter is when the block is being rewritten anyway.
Re:What will happen when they die? (Score:5, Informative)
See these (their usages might match slashdotters more):
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/05/the-hot-crazy-solid-state-drive-scale.html [codinghorror.com]
These rates are probably for "normal users" (as in normal users who buy SSDs ;) ):
http://www.behardware.com/articles/831-7/components-returns-rates.html [behardware.com]
http://www.behardware.com/articles/810-6/components-returns-rates.html [behardware.com]
Note the common failure modes are not very graceful, they're usually brutal and/or weird:
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r25491097-Dell-Laptop-and-SSD-Time-warp-issue [dslreports.com]
http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?83778-Time-warp-drive-vanishing-after-3-days-data-gone-on-reboot...I-need-3-to-5-users-with-this-issue-to-help [ocztechnologyforum.com]
http://www.techspot.com/news/44694-intel-confirms-8mb-bug-in-320-series-ssds-fix-available.html [techspot.com]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X25-M#Past_bugs [wikipedia.org]
In contrast with most (not all of course) of the HDD failures I've seen you still can get a lot of data out.