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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.
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.
Could someone tell me why one type of drive wouldn't work with a specific version of Windows? Shouldn't they be able to write drivers for that?
Adventures in Shaanxi
the days of the spinning platter hard drive are almost over. while it will take a long time for the SSD to completely displace all uses of traditional hard drives (especially in industrial storage -- where hard drives are now displacing tape), be prepared for an avelanche of new products in the 1-2 year time frame.
merlin
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.
Developers: We can use your help.
Doesn't flash memory have a maximum lifetime (R/W cycles)? If so, are these new drives designed to "degrade" gracefully so that as the flash "rots", more and more data is stored to the drive instead of the memory? If so, this would mean that the drives would "slow down" over time right?
Nice try though...
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Reminds me of when a company in the 70's built a solid-state swapping "drum" memory system for IBM S/370 mainframes. Of course, that one wouldn't fit in a 2.5" form factor.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Coupled will fuel cell technology, mobile computing is finally going to live up to its potential.
And I love this William Gibson quote from 1991:
It wasn't until I could finally afford a computer of my own that I found out there's a drive mechanism inside- this little thing that spins around. I'd been expecting an exotic crystalline thing, a cyberspace deck or something, and what I got was a little piece of a Victorian engine that made noises like a scratchy old record player. That noise took away some of the mystique for me; it made computers less sexy. My ignorance had allowed me to romanticize them.The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.
...because they don't want you to get a bad case of sticker shock. If texas memory systems (http://www.texmemsys.com/) is any guide, these things won't be comparable to platter drives in cost per GB per performance. Maybe they've figured out a way to manufacture the things not too expensively per GB but the performance will be wretched. And even though most apps will not care unless you have a stopwatch people will look at the raw numbers and shy away. Just see all the trouble AMD had with the Pentium 4 vs Athlon XP CPU GHz wars.
So now this might get Vista running half as fast as every other operating system, right?
This would be cool for your PVR solution. Faster, more quiet, uses less power, therefor cooler component, less fan noise, I hope. Now, can I strap one to my old Jornada 525?
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
I did an eval of SSD back, oh five years ago for my employer. These were SSD's attached via SCSI to Sun boxes running Solaris and Sybase. Based on the results I saw then, I have two problems with this:
>Vista users would see a 4x speedup in many key operations.
Back in the day, we were seeing 10-20X improvements over spinning media in Random Access. 4x is almost not worth it, depending on price - give spinning media another year or two and they'll match that gain.
>Pricing was not announced.
Of course not, because it's going to be outrageously expensive!
-- "In order to have power, I must be taken seriously." -Mojo Jojo
Given that it should have no spin-up lag, and most people turn off their POST memory testing, I rather expect you're right.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I've got a fairly busy email server and this sounds like a great thing for the queue files... lots of little files, lots of random access.
Of course, the other posts about flash memory degrading after n writes would be something to watch, too.
The Army reading list
My notebook only has room for *one* drive onboard. I'm not going to replace a 80gb hardrive for a 4gb ssd (which currently cost $465 (see http://www.dvnation.com/nand-flash-ssd.html/). So the hybrid is the way to go ... but what I'd like to see is a
hybrid that just shows up as two drives under non-vista operating
systems. Then the boot stuff could go on the small flash drive and everything
else on the old fashioned (big) hard drive.
Wouldn't a better focus be on battery backed up RAM drives instead? Like those PCI DDR ram drives that cost a bundle. It would be nice to get a blazing fast PC3200 1GB RAM-Drive for $100.. which would be multiple times faster than these drives.
I understand they (Samsung) are the largest manufacturers of television sets of any kind now. And their stuff is of quality. Kudos to them.
It would seem to me that these drives if they were used might be present an issue with data security. Are there any plans to protect the solid state components from being read by unauthorized access? Hopefully the design is such that all data is protected but being new, I couldn't get enough details to make a determination.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
This might be perfect for page files if you have low amounts of ram and want to reduce the "Hard disk thrashing" that windows goes through when paging.
This is one of those interim solutions for early adopters who have more disposable income than capacity for delayed gratification.
Here's an "Ask Slashdot" moment though: why do the heads need to move at all? Why isn't WD or Samsung or Hitachi building a long, length-of-radius head over each platter? Then the only motor needed is for the platter, and the head is merely a fixed unit? This would probably reduce most HDD crashes too, since the arm would no longer traverse the drive plane.
I dunno, there's better ways to describe what I mean but I know there's something good in the creamy center of that idea.
-BA
I weakest link will become the battery. Even after switching to OLED for displays and to solid state drives, the CPUs and the video cards will drain more and more power because they'll have to run behemoths like Vista on the machine. So unless there is a dramatic improvement in the basic processor design or battery technology (fuel cells?) mobile computing won't quite live up to it potential yet.
This would make an ideal drive for streaming media servers and small databases, which is exactly what I currently need. Streaming media requires a lot of sustained reads from different locations, which taxes the ability of a drive head to cover. With 1ms access time, a single drive could replace a RAID configuration, saving power and space in our 1U boxes. Woot!
Since flash does have a limited number of writes, using one of these in a PC for daily use would be limited at best, so I'm wondering what types of applications would this media be ideal for?
The only answer that I could think of is anything that is 'write once, read many times'.
Movies - build a huge RAID array of flash drives an let them go to town on the lastest blockbuster.
TV - PPV system / VOD. New shows come on their own stack, plug them into the PPV system and be done with it.
Databases - certain tables that hold nonchanging data / lookup values.
That's about it. Anyone else?
III.IIVIVIXIIVIVIIIVVIIIIXVIIIXIIIIIIIIVIIIIVVIII
If you are going to use 1GB of RAM, it would be much more efficient to add this GB to your main memory and increase the size of your filesystem cache (if your OS doen't do it automatically). Ok, you wouldn't gain in boot time, but after that the OS makes sure your additionnal GB is used in the most efficient way.
It's almost the same thing as when pagefiles were introduced in Windows. People suggested using a RAMdisk to hold the pagefile, so that swapping would be much faster........
If you can't afford RAM you shouldn't even be dreaming about SSDs.
He's probably just a Niven/Pournelle fan.
I've broken 32 gigs of applications ... over a year ago. I have a 100 gig windows/application partition. It is over half full. I don't believe I am the only one.
Amazing that this kind of stuff gets touted as innovative new features. I have in the past put together a shell script of a few lines which pre-loads commonly open files at boot time. It's trivial and shows just how inflexible Windows really is.
Deleted
The transfer rate of most flash memory is still slower than hard drives. The advantage for now is no seek latency. However, transfer rates are improving pretty fast, so we'll see in that 1-2 year time frame.
If you look carefully at the photo of the HDD drive on top of a laptop in the article , you can read the popup on the screen saying '... to fix this problem'.
You can't install your OS to system RAM. Its also not easy to automatically have all documents or programs or whatever always loaded into RAM. Not to mention the limits on total physical ram (especially in the Windows world). If I could get an 8GB Ram drive for $400 I would probably do it. 3GB/s transfer rates blow any other currnet storage medium out of the water.
Now compare the price of a motherboard + Operating system + 8GB additional RAM(for windows users mostly) and you see how efficient adding more RAM is.
I just hope the drive offers a way to overwrite the flash part multiple times. I can see people making sure the hard disk is erased before moving a machine between departments or selling them, but then the next owner just checks the flash part, and finds document caches of documents which should never see the light of day.
My System folder (OS X 10.4.8) is only 1.87GB and my Applications folder is 8.3GB (with iWork '06, Adium X, Textwrangler, One Button FTP, etc - aside from iWork, small programs).
Unless I'm missing some huge hidden folder, that means a 16GB drive would be plenty for most users as the OS+applications drive, unless (since I said "most users") Windows XP or Vista have become so bloated that they can't fit it all in even 16GB.
I've been wanting to build a computer for my ATV so I can have a nice mapping program (like TopoFusion, or maybe an open source app) and GPS tracking and recording.
These drives wouldn't be affected by the bouncing and vibration like a normal drive would.
Lose Weight and Feel Great with Isagenix
But they talk about Vista like it is already an existing product. (Comparing speeds, and stuff).
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
It's a trap!
Backup early - backup often.
Too lazy to create a sig...
The only benefit I see is in the boot time. Any benefits the flash claims can be achieved with more RAM/caching. With a low swappiness I can get upto 10mins between HD spinups on my laptop.
What can you do with the flash which cannot be done with more RAM (unless you need to boot 10 times a day)?
I could hold my whole XP image on 10.4GB. Anything that's not on the image is on the corporate network somewhere such as Notes servers. So if someone would build a laptop with a 16GB fast SSD then that would be great. I'll even buy my own portable USB harddrive for everything that doesn't fit. For home use I already have a NAS.
It's at times like this that I wish there was a '+6 Funny'.
Definitely not a fan of the the Peoples' Rebulic of Taxachusetts
If these drives become standard they'll have a huge impact on my day-to-day.
The most common point of failure in a desktop PC is the drive head smacking into the disk platter in a rotational-magnetic drive. The worst part of these failures is that your drive head runs a real good chance of being over your important data when it hits (because you access it often, because it's important), so you're much more likely to toast your critical ACT! database instead of the rarely used Typing Tutor Turbo III you don't care about. Switching to solid state drives would increase reliability and reduce data recovery costs. You would see the impact on national GDP.
Many new algorithms, even today, have to be designed to minimize disk seeking and re-order disk accesses into sequential reads. Pulling a million 100 byte records from a database that are scattered across a 100GB table is enough to make an SQL database unusable since even if you're using an index and have it entirely resident in cache. Solid state storage would free up capital being sunk into this kind of development, which translates into increased investment in more application features or lower costs.
Once the streaming performance is addressed (matter of time), solid state drives are going to be the standard and we'll wonder why we ever put up with rotational-magnetic storage.
Seems to me that you could do RAM+flash; have it work as a RAM drive when "powered on", but then when powered off (either with the whole system, or by power management powering the drive down due to inactivity) it dumps the RAM to the flash, and restores the RAM from flash when powering up. You get better performance, and save read/write cycles on the flash (of course, it'll be much more expensive than a flash drive, too.)
You might ask "why not just get more system RAM", and of course, that's a viable approach. OTOH, this way you might save money for the amount of fairly-fast storage by getting RAM that's not as fast as you'd want for system RAM, but still faster than reading from a traditional harddrive or flash. Of course, given the size of RAM modules, it won't be good for the "main" drive except in specialized applications, but it might be useful for special-purpose drives where access speed is critical.
4x is almost not worth it, depending on price - give spinning media another year or two and they'll match that gain.
The thing that increases for HDs is throughput. Essentially this means the sustained rate that can be transferred by a HD once it's found the right position to read from.
What DOESN'T get better very fast is latency. That is the time it takes for a HD to seek a new position on the HD.
So a 4 times improvement in load times is extremely significant, and worth the money. I'd love to have about 5-10 gigs of space for the OS to load up very quickly (or to make things faster, from a hibernate/deep sleep). I'd probbably buy such a HD and leave any major data storage to my fileserver.
It remains to be seen how much this actually will improve performance however.
Of course not, because it's going to be outrageously expensive!
I bet it won't. This is really just taking two pieces of off the shelf technology and combining them together. I'd expect a 20 gig drive to be somewhere around $300-$400. That's certainly a lot more expensive than a HD, but it's not so expensive that it doesn't fit into the budget of higher-end computers.
AccountKiller
You might well be right, but according to the EULA, you would invalidate your license if you tried to find out.
Here's my advice:
Cover your eyes and ears when booting and uncover them at random intervals, lest you notice the actual boot-up time. If your office mates make fun of you just get them to read the EULA, tell them you'll tattle on them, and soon you'll have everyone doing it. In fact, don't rest until you can see your boss doing it. Try not too snicker too loudly either.
most people turn off their POST memory testing
Are you really claiming that most people go into the BIOS and change the defaults to save a second off of boot time? I find it very hard to believe that any significant number of people change that setting even among people who know where that setting is. System bootup generally takes at least 30 seconds on any system. The memory test isn't going to take more than a second or two unless you put a ton of ram into a really old computer.
But screw Flash. PRAM (Or OUM, call it what you want) Its going to be awesome. You can use it for nearly everything. l1/l2 caches, solid-state drives with higher data densities because of the ungodly small form factor possible with teh technology, system memory. Hell, you could just as easily build a computer with a real "plug and play" OS (install the OS on a stick of RAM, plug it in, and turn on the computer. Computer accesses the OS RAM bank, near-instant OS load (or at least significantly increased loadup times, by far.) I say PRAM is the way to go. Trillions of write cycles? Bye, flash memory.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
There surely has to be a better way than that...
I mean, if such an archaic and painful method is the solution to defragging for linux... What's the point?