Samsung Announces Fastest 64-GB SSD

XueCast writes "The new solid-state drive from Samsung can write data at 100 MB/s and read at 120 MB/s. This handily outperforms other SSDs now on the market, which typically feature only 50-80 MB/s read/write rates. Samsung's SSD will come in two form factors, 1.8" and 2.5", and will be running on the SATA II standard. It will only consume 50% of the power of current SSDs. There is no information yet about price."

Comments

Re:I/O limited distros more popular?

[HateBreeder]

Thanks to algorithms that spread written data across the chip, MTBF's of SSD are much higher than those of regular HDDs with similar usuage patterns.

Furthermore, A simple buffering scheme sounds likely to solve most of the problems you're talking about (Assuming it's constantly many small writes done by the OS... for say, log file keeping or file access-time updating).

Old news

[rrohbeck]

The announcement was in March, mass production in June and availability in September.

I haven't seen a price yet but it's going to be at least close to a grand.

Re:1 essential fact missing

[leuk_he]

A small google shows that current generation of 32 GB ssd cost about $599-$1500 (depending on speed)

the new version has double the capacity, do the math yourself.

Re:Cheap, fast and good.

[Kjella]

I'm looking right now at the data sheet of the latest Seagate SATA hard drive models, that tout a 3 Gb/s data rate (325 MB/s, if you are too lazy to divide by 8), and I haven't even started talking about RAID 0 algorithms yet. Yes, the Samsung SSD is fast - the caveat here is that it is fast when compared with other SSD's. The good news is that this is a relatively new technology, with great potential for improvement IMHO. But if you don't have a laptop and a need for 4-6 hrs/battery, don't. And even if you do, you'd be probably better off just buying a spare battery. LOL, you're looking at the wrong specs. 3GBit/s is the SATA2 interface speed, which by the way also has two bits error correction for every byte so divide by ten for 300MB/s maximum actual throughput. In reality even the fastest WD Raptor 10k SATA drives have a sustained read/write around 80MB/s with minimums around 60MB/s. The MTRON and these Seagate disks are already faster than non-RAID HDDs, in addition to near-instant access time, lower power, lower weight, no noise, shock resistant and in smaller form factors like 1.8" and 2.5" compared to the top-of-the-line 3.5" performance I'm comparing with. Or you can compare to a mobile HDD, but then it certainly gets severely beaten in performance. Oh and RAID0 - take the most unreliable component in the system, make it twice as big, powerhungry, noisy and errorprone...

In other words, it's more like why are you not buying SSDs:
1. Price
2. Price
3. Price

Re:We need a new spec for SSD's

[JoelKatz]

There is no read limit. The write limit is about 100,000 writes (really erasures) per cell.

These devices will have wear leveling. That means that if a cell is close to running out of erase cycles, the drive will move data that has not changed in a very long time into that cell. A few cells will be kept as spares in case some cells don't last as long as they are predicted to.

If you do the math, and figure a typical use scenario as a laptop's primary drive, you get that these drives should outlast mechanical hard drives by many years. For example, a 64GB hard drive with an endurance of 100,000 writes should be able to tolerate about 5 million GB of writes before it fails due to wear.

How long it will take you to run that out depends on your average write rate. But with a reasonable rate (10MB/s) that works out to about 15 years.

Re:What speeds?

[vadim_t]

That 60 MB/s is almost never attainable in practice.

SATA drives have a seek latency of about 9ms. This means that the drive can perform 111 seeks per second. Assume a very pessimistic scenario of reading a 2KB cluster. Your drive's performance is now about 200KB/s.

For an expensive and low capacity SCSI drive, you can get 3.3ms, with about 600KB/s worst case scenario.

This is assuming you're actually reading data you're interested in. Some of that will involve reading filesystem metadata, which from the user's POV isn't what you're actually interested in. For a directory with lots of small files I imagine you could get maybe half of that performance.

I've seen SSD latency being quoted to be around 0.01ms. The same calculation above gives 195MB/s, assuming reading takes no extra time (which is false)

From this you can see that a hard disk is highly limited by seek latency, while a SSD is much more limited by read/write speed.