Samsung's Solid-State Disk Drive Unveiled

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.

Dedicated OS Harddrive?

[SevenHands]

Now this is one configuration where this drive will make a large difference in bootup speeds. Office apps, audio, video and other media should be happy on the old 7200 rpm drives for a few years still.

SuperFetch

[truthsearch]

According to Microsoft, "SuperFetch understands which applications you use most, and preloads these applications into memory, so your system is more responsive".

Seems nice in theory, but the first thing I do to any XP machine that someone tells me is running very slow is to kill those quick start apps in the bottom right corner. Their use of processor and/or memory definitely slows the machine down overall. I'd much rather wait an extra second for an app to load so the system runs faster overall.

So they better have improved their techniques with this SuperFetch. If it causes many more context switches or reduces memory available to apps people are actually running then it'll be a hinderance. At the very least it should be automatically turned off for systems with less than an ideal amount of memory.

Re:inflection point is coming

[Viol8]

I wouldnt bet on that. The gap between what can be stored on a given area of magnetic/optical disks compared to some type of solid state memory is actually getting larger , not smaller.

Re:Dedicated OS Harddrive?

[epiphani]

Bzzt, wrong. I don't know how many applications you're loading up, but 32 Gigs is plenty for my entire windows C: drive. I'll keep all my applications and operating system on fast, quiet SSD, and I'll happily store my 400 gigs of music and video on magnetic drives.

Re:Solid State = Sexy

[Moofie]

Why would you expect that? Gibson has always been very up front about the fact that he's not a technophile.

Re:SuperFetch

[badonkey]

So they better have improved their techniques with this SuperFetch.

You don't really seem to know what you're talking about (although I suppose that doesn't prohibit anyone from being "5, insightful" on /.). They can't "improve their techniques," because there was no version of this feature in XP.

Those "quick start apps" you mention have nothing to do with XP, and everything to do with application writers who think you want their garbage running all the time. Those aren't just "pre-loaded" into memory, they're scheduled processes that are wasting your time and resources. SuperFetch is completely different.

SuperFetch just uses heuristics to manage memory in an effort to keep items you'll want from being paged out, and if memory is available it will load something it predicts (based on your usage) you'll want. It won't schedule anything new.

Obviously, a poor implementation would slow your system down. That's the case with any memory management techniques, and isn't worth noting. Unless you're on Slashdot, and it applies to Microsoft and not Apple or Google.

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If it has more features than an Apple product, it's like totally bloated.

Re:Dedicated OS Harddrive?

[Jugalator]

With hibernation I don't really have a problem with boot up speeds anymore.

Re:Dedicated OS Harddrive?

[Poltras]

11 seconds to boot up? In what world do you live? My mac takes around 30 seconds before being functionnal and my windows 1m30 at least... Linux is around that figures too. No, I won't use VxWorks or QNX as a desktop. Good for you if you do, but I'd like to know how you achieve such performance with conventional desktop OS.

Two types of drives

[GomezAdams]

There are two types of disk drives; those that have faild and those that will.

Backup early - backup often.

Re:Dedicated OS Harddrive?

[owlstead]

Don't forget spinup time. Spinup time is pretty important, especially for notebooks. Notebooks are bound to suspend the disk a lot more than desktop drives, so to safe power.

+6 Funny

[Das Auge]

It's at times like this that I wish there was a '+6 Funny'.