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.

Comments

Not on XP?

[bkg_cjb]

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?

Re:Not on XP?

[alexhs]

Solid-state drives are flash drives with a PATA/SATA connector, and will work like a regular hard disk, as far as the motherboard and the OS are concerned. Therefore working whatever OS you're using.

Hybrid drives, OTOH, are relying on two different technologies, and it seems the choice of using disk or flash is up to the OS. It means that if your OS isn't Hybrid-drive aware, you probably will end up with using the disk and losing its flash ability. Vista OTOH will be able to put some files on the flash part.

Re:Not on XP?

[AnonymousHero]

You seem to have three hands.

Re:inflection point is coming

[Anonymous Coward]

What the...WE HAVE SHARP METAL DISCS SPINNING @ 7200prm ON OUR LAPS?!

HEAVENS TO BETSEY!

Re:Bzzzt!!!! It uses flash ram.

[Overzeetop]

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.