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Samsung's 64-GB Solid-State Drive
Anonymous Howard writes "Just a couple of weeks ago Sandisk introduced a 32-GB solid-state drive. Now Samsung has one-upped them, unveiling a 64-GB solid-state drive. They are expecting to begin shipping in the second quarter of this year. Samsung says the device can read 64 MB/s, write 45 MB/s, and uses just 0.5 W when operating (0.1 W when idle). In comparison, an 80-GB 1.8-inch hard drive reads at 15 MB/s, writes at 7 MB/s, and consumes 1.5 W when either operating or idle. No pricing yet."
64 GB "ought to be enough for anybody"!
Seriously, though, that's enough for windows XP/Vista/etc. plus your favorite games, apps, and so on. Maybe you couldn't put whole slews of videos or images on there, but you could always get 2 of them.
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Can anyone find some more details on the transfer rate/seek time?
For a hard disk peak transfer rate is when reading consecutive blocks... if the solid state drive can get near peak performance for random access, it's got a huge advantage.
And is thus very cool.
Quality hard drives are fairly reliable. They can last 10 years or more and you can usually count on them to last their warranty period - 3-5 years - and then some.
They also have error detection/correction, bad-sector remapping, and "I'm about to die" notification.
At one time, solid-state devices were good for about a thousand writes for any given memory cell, a lot fewer than HDs.
Does anyone know the reliability for these new solid-state devices over wall time, hours in use/plugged in, number of read cycles, and number of write cycles under normal operating conditions, and how those compare with a modern 1.8, 2.5, or 3.5" drive?
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This would be perfect for my iRiver H320 MP3 player, since (according to TFA) it's in the 1.8" form factor which almost every HD MP3 player uses.
How can it be one-upping them A-DATA already annouced 128GB SSDs two months ago?
Hard drive capacity growth has slowed the last years in notebooks, they just haven't been increasing in size that fast as in the early 00s. I think flash will surpass notebook harddrives in size within 2-3 years. As it is, 64GB is in the same magnitude of existing typical notebook drives now, just halfway down on the scale.
The price may or not go down enough within that time period to kick out harddrives completely - in which case we'll just see hybrid drives take over.
There should be no seek time, it's solid state. There is no read write head to move, and there is no platter to spin.
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yes. a solid-state hard drive is exactly that - a normal HDD that uses a different mechanism for storing data. Usually its a pinning platter, this uses non-volatile memory chips. The interface and size are the same, so you just use it as you otherwise would.
Personally, I think 64Gb is a bit much for me, I'd stick the OS and swap files on there - which come to about 10Gb on my current XP machine.
They're marketed as drop in replacements, currently built to notebook drive standards. The downside, as someone else mentions, is that they are flash based. While flash has gotten better recently, I'd be squeemish about having an OS that constantly writes to the drive even when nothing is (apparently) happening on it.
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." -Albert Einstein
What would you spend if you could be a 2.5" version that was interface compatible with your laptop sata connector that was say, 100gb with comparable power and performance?
Personally, to pull the SATA drive out of my laptop and replace it with a 100gb version of this that used so much less power and was so much faster would be a no-brainer even at something like 700 or 800 dollars (US). Battery life would be radically better, noise and heat would be much lower, performance better and general usability should be outstanding.
What are the downsides? How is the duty cycle on these things? Will they last as long or develop hotspots that can't store data as well?
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
The SanDisk 32GB version reports a 2 million hour MTBF... http://www.sandisk.com/Oem/Default.aspx?CatID=1478
That's quite a bit better than typical hard drives these days!
Has anyone found MTBF information regarding the Samsung versions?
Not totally certain, but I would guess so. Depending on how big the pagefile was, perhaps the drive does some intelligent load-balancing that would keep you from frying it too quickly, but it might be better to keep another drive around for that, or loading the machine up with enough RAM to keep it from swapping often.
I used to know people who swore that, after adding RAM, the best thing you could do for speed was to add a small-but-fast SCSI hard drive and use it for nothing but your swapfile. I've never gone that route personally, because I've never thought it worth the expense, but I bet it would make for a pretty nice system. And I also suspect there have to be a lot of SCSI drives on the used market if you look.
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It's flash-based, so I would think the energy savings from not having to constantly run a hard drive's motor would lengthen battery life just with the batteries as they are now.
"There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge." - Bertrand Russell.
no, but your browser will need the latest Adobe plugins in order for your operating system to boot properly.
I read the articles. I didn't see anything about heat and noise output. Can anyone fill me in? I would guess it would be minimal and none, respectively.
Well, based on an energy consumption of 0.5W and an educated guess that they probably aren't emitting much light, I'd say that the heat output is 0.5W.
Duh.
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Well... that doesn't necessarily mean it's as fast at random access as it is at consecutive access.
Normal computer RAM is also faster at consecutive reads than random reads.
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Hm, based on the cheapest (without rebates) memory available at $8.50/GB, figure 20% markup between the manf and retailer, thats $6.8/GB.
e _digital_2gb.htm
$435 for memory
+10% for R&D
+10% for manf (including controller, parts, etc)
-10% for manf efficency when producing 64GB/run
COST $479
RETAIL:
+20% for geewhiz-newtoy-factor/supply shortages
+10% for retail
YOUR COST: $630
sources:
http://www.pricewatch.com/flash_card_memory/secur
Another prediction: SSDs will offer such huge power and performance advantanges, they will sell like crazy and drop in price by a factor of 70% within 1 year from now.
... which leaves 0W for the noise.
One possible reason is an OS that will not run, or will not run correctly, without paging. Linux actually fell into the latter category once upon a time, it would run like crap without swap (unless you made some patches.) SunOS4 was SOLIDLY in that category, but it's old (BSD 4 based - IIRC mostly 4.3, with some 4.4-lite code in the last release of SunOS4?) Windows 2000 would allow you to turn of all paging files, but would blue screen on boot if you did so as it absolutely required some paging (but you could have a teensy, fixed-length paging file.) But in a system that isn't so poorly designed that it requires paging, adding more RAM is a better solution any time you have the slots and the cash. It stops you from paging! That's pure gold right there. Who wants to wait for that?
One solution, of course, is to use a DRAM SSD for your swap if you're out of DIMM slots. Then only cash is the limiting factor. Granted, it still limits me right out of that particular game...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Fortunately flash fails on writing not on reading so while you can't write to sectors that have failed you can still read them.
If comparing these to 2.5" drives instead of 1.8" drives the advantages aren't as drastic.
* 2.5" drives consume between 0.8W to 2.5W (ok, seeking eats a lot, but during sequential read or write, they consume similar amounts), almost no power consumption when they spin down.
* 2.5" drives give 53MB/sec read and write.
* 2.5" drives are very cheap and have triple the capacity.
The solid state drives are still at an advantage, but it's not quite as large as compared to 1.8" drives.
If you even have to ask about pricing, trust me, you cant afford it.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
It's not about the MTBF (the wear with age), yes you can almost indefinitely read data from you flash drive, when compared to harddrives, because there's no mechanical wear.
/var and /tmp, most of the rest of the installation can be read-only), and that support special file systems designed for lower wear (JFFS and such), may fare better : for example there are some Linux distribution that are tested for running from flash, like Damn Small Linux.
BUT!
The flash cells have a limited number of write cycles, which is very small compared to hard drives. If you write too much data on the same sector, the sector get very quickly broken.
If you used a flash card for swap, it won't last long at all (because some sectors get constantly written over).
To limit those damages, flash controllers use "wear level". That means that the small RISC controller that interface between the flash cells and the computer interface (ATA/CF, SD, USB, etc.) dynamically remaps the sectors so the wear caused by write cycles is distributed over several different sector.
Let's say that an OS constatly writes data on the first couple of sectors. Instead of always writing on the first few cell, the controller remaps a different physical flash cell, to the logical disc sector seen by the OS.
This works as a charm for flash media storing files likes used in digital cameras and such.
But doesn't perform as well when used by an operating system.
Windows XP is specially bad at this.
Other OS - such as Linux or *BSD, that already have good support for running on slow read-only media (LiveCDs) for a long time, that don't need writing that much (except
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I'm sorry, Doug is in the server room, swapping Zip disks. How can I help you?
The numbers you used, approx 900/100, are also a special magic point on 32-bit CPUs under Linux. Above about 960MB, Linux uses "highmem" mode on x86, and that slows things down. A 32-bit x86 PC runs faster when you restrict it to 960MB instead of letting it use the full 1024MB.
For those of you who wonder how a computer could run faster w/ a little swap in RAM instead of just using all the RAM, the answer is complicated. Mainly, all the VM algorithms assume the existance of swap, and so when they get backed into a corner, they expect to be able to dump a bunch of stuff overboard into swap. They only start making the really hard choices once swap fills up. If you take away swap, then you hit the "out of swap" condition much more readily.
You might be thinking "ah, but it's all just a shell game! You'll still run out of swap at the same time, since your total memory is fixed!" Not true. The OS prioritizes disk buffers and other caches relative to the work it's doing and the RAM available to it. RAM dedicated to a RAM disk is not available for other purposes. Thus, a RAM-based swap partition dedicates some portion of RAM to only hold dirty program pages. No disk buffers, no network buffers, no inode information. Just dirty program pages. By forcing austerity on these other discretionary structures, you can compensate for the VM's inbuilt assumption it can just "dump things to swap", and that running out of swap occurs "almost never."
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IANAL, but I have studied law and I have worked in the litigation field. I have read many letters that have had me wanting to ROFL, and this is in that category. But the best part is also the last bit:
"From there, it should be a short trip to dismissal even if it means getting our clients to mediate Mr. Merchant's positive claims in the absence of an appropriate settlement."
Translation: If you have read this far, you realize that you not only have no case, but that you are entirely out of your league because the standards of evidence in the court system where I have major influence, would procedurally bar you from even entering your case on the docket. Despite this, my client's claims against you are already demonstrated, and our claims will continue to have merit even after your case is dismissed with prejudice (and we have not offered to drop our case.)
This letter is a masterpiece because it manages to hand the plaintiff his ass, in a rather respectful colleague-to-colleague way, while at the same time threatening a counterclaim that could end up with far greater damages than the initial claim!
And the real beauty is that even though the RIAA seems to have withdrawn its claim, the damages from the malice might still hold, if they really want to push it.
Who did they sue? Directors of a Silicon Valley bank? They should do some research before they pull the pin on the hand grenade!
"I would be happy to send the airplane..." (At the plaintiff's expense of course...)
Love it.
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