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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
What the...WE HAVE SHARP METAL DISCS SPINNING @ 7200prm ON OUR LAPS?!
HEAVENS TO BETSEY!
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?
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?
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
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.
And if anyone had actually read the article, they would see that according to Samsung, the Flash technology in use in the drives has a lifetime of TEN years (your IDE / SATA HD likely wont last that long btw). They also note how much the R/W cycle issue has improved in the last few years.
/., we don't read the articles we just write silly comments first!
Oh wait, this is
"To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." - Tennyson
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've always wondered about this. Most modern flash seems to get 100k writes (many more reads). Fast flash is on the order of 13MB/s write.
With load balancing, you wouldn't notice a failure until all the locations were rewritten just shy of 100,000 times. So the drive will "fail" in once you've written 40GB of data 99,999 times, or almost 4PB of write ops. At 13MB/s, that's just under 10 years of 100% duty cycle writes. If you presume you'll read that data once at 20MB/s, and you allow only an 82% duty cycle overall (to make the math easy), then your drive should last 20 years.
I don't know about you, but I don't have any 20 year old computers or drives. The computer I had 20 years ago (PS/2 model 30, iirc) used 720k floppies, and a 20MB hard drive was a $400 option. Wait, check that. I do have a copy of Windows 1.04 on floppy disk here. It fits on three 720k floppies.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Let's look at the application, notebooks. There are quite a few pros for solid-state drives here: 1) HDDs are loud, 2) HDDs are hot (especially as you increase RPM), 3) HDDs are sensitive to motion, 4) HDDs require more power, 5) HDDs are marginally heavier (I mean the things are pretty small already). So the advantages here are pretty obvious, quieter, cooler, longer battery life, and marginally lighter notebooks.
Now, it is only fair we look at the downside, which is this overplayed write issue. Let us assume 10,000,000 writes (this is very generous, so I include 1,000,000 as well), since they will surely be using the best they can get, and this is pretty close to the high end that you will hear people discuss. You rarely re-write a vast majority of the software on your PC. Many programs are installed and never updated, and those that are updated are not done that often. If we assume, for the sake of sanity and argument, that the Windows system folder will only be written during Windows updates and that there would be one update per day that would be equal to something in the range of 27,000 days before you reached 10 million writes (only 2,700 if we say 1,000,000 writes). Most of your media files will be re-written even less.
So let us look at two things that can be written fairly often. First, you have a page file. The solution, load up your system with 1 to 2 GB of RAM and set the Windows page memory settings to the minimum. Of course, if Windows behaved properly, it wouldn't even write to the page file until AFTER the RAM was full (or damn near full). Second, user documents. Let's us assume your program performs auto-saves of your documents on a 5 minute cycle. So, the file is written one time every five minutes, 12 times an hour, 288 times a day (if you type for 24 hours of course), 105120 times a year (wow, I recommend some sleep and bathroom breaks), which ultimately results in 95 years (wow, congratulations on long life) of the file. Granted if we go with one million that is 9.5 years of continuous typing, but then you probably don't have much of a life if you are doing that.
This re-write claim is the most over-stated problem. Most places tell you the average life of today's HDD (for home use) is between 3 to 5 years, of course that is why they also tend to only warranty you for that long. Also, using my numbers, how many 9.5 year old drives are you using at home? Seriously, this problem is not that big of a deal; if it was going to be a huge problem, I am sure they would have though about that. (Note: This doesn't even get into the technology they use to spread the writes out to avoid wear.)
"Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb."
While I wouldn't doubt we see more devices in the upcoming years, hard disks definitely have a place, at least on home computers. I imagine it's rare that anyone with a full 100GB+ HDD has only programs and application data. Giant media files are commonplace, and reading/writing large files is the primary drawback of SSD, and something platter hard drives do very well and very cheaply.
I think what we'll probably see is computers starting to come standard with an "applications" ssd and a "media" hdd.
The usual way they construct it is like this:
1. Fill your drive 95%
2. Trash the remaining 5%. Your disk will now die in 1/20th of the time, that is a matter of months
IMO even that theoretical problem could be solved by active swapping, that is using some of your write cycles to move information internally. If you spent 100 of your 100k cycles doing that noone would notice. So when you're trying to trash those 5%, those 5% would swap places with the other 95%, even though there's no free space. For all I know maybe they do already, but if it was a problem that is the solution (this was sooo obvious. I bet it's patented).
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Backup early - backup often.
Too lazy to create a sig...
I've seen this problem happen in practice, with a development embedded system that booted off two flash cards. It ended up lasting 6 to 8 months or so before we needed to put in another flash card (it used CF cards, one 32mb which took all required R/W operations and one 1GB which was RO) and we took images for when the CF cards died. There was no swap, no journaling, and temp files were moved to a ramdisk where possible, but some files needed to be modified during development and the CF cards didn't last. Actually, some files were not readable after the flash failure. Perhaps this was due to an inconsistent filesystem state.
GPL: Free as in will
It's at times like this that I wish there was a '+6 Funny'.
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.
What the...WE HAVE SHARP METAL DISCS SPINNING @ 7200prm ON OUR LAPS?!
Worse... Glass!
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