Slashdot Mirror
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."
This drive doesn't outperform MTRON (http://www.mtron.net/english/). They announced 120 MB/s read, 90 MB/s write drives and they are shipping 100 MB/s read, 80 MB/s write drives already. The SSD-based Fusion IO card (http://www.fusionio.com/) at the claimed 800 MB/s read and 600 MB/s write speed would beat both them handily. Still, it's good to see a major manufacturer up its speeds.
In what price range are we talking ?
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
Savior of the Universe!
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).
Sigs are for the weak.
Cheap, fast, good - pick two.
.... will only consume 50% of the power of current SSDs"
.... Ah, shit!
"write data at 100 MB/s and read at 120 MB/s."
Hey cool, that's pretty fast.
"64GB
Good, good.
"There is no information yet about price."
She's built like a steak house, but she handles like a bistro....
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.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
I shall make this SSD my flagship.. and I will call it the Executor.
Don't get the innards of the cards. Place slots on your board.
4 USB controllers, 16 readers, 1 PCI controller, support electronics. the device would cost some $30 to produce. Sell it empty, without the cards.
And provide a good supply of bulk amount of the cards.
The user can replace a faulty card without scrapping the whole device. They can add or remove cards depending on the needs. They can replace cards with bigger ones when they want more space. They can physically write-protect chosen partitions of the drive.
If you don't worry about the speed much, you can use USB hubs instead of the controllers. Then the device plugs into USB.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
...what does a large google show?
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.
"let's for a moment assume that you're able to max out the drive, writing at the rated speed of 100MB/s. With a page size of 1024 bytes, that's 100.000 page updates every second, so failure will set in after 64,000,000 seconds = 2 years."
2 years seems pretty impressive to me for beating the virtual snot out of your test subject testing in a completely unrealistic scenario. I would be surprised if my car's engine survived 2 years of running non-stop at 7,000 RPM.
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.
How often do you feed a disk (not in a server) at 100MB/sec for any sustained period of time? Heck, how often do you feed a disk 100MB/sec for one minute much less an hour much less 2 years straight.
I suggest two things:
1) those so paranoid about drive life return to their handy array of 9.1GB disks in raid 50 and leave the thread
2) run perfmon (or the linux equiv.) and look at your overall disk writes for an average day, triple it and then calculate the number of years the drive will last and cut it in half for the hell of it. I'd guess the computer and storge of the drive will be long obsolete before the expected lifetime.
If you need to handle writing 100MB/sec of data at a constant rate for weeks/months/years then you don't need a 1.8" SSD. You need a couple pentabyte san. These drives are *perfect* for normal users, power users, heavy users. I'd gladly put one in each of our developer's PCs for doing coding and builds. Our AV guys would love them too.
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.
More than 10x higher. No one sustains 10MB/sec of writes 24/7 or even averages that on an individual's computer/laptop.
The only situation you might find to push that is a dedicated high-use AV workstation in a 24/7 media company. Oh, and never mind that workstation would be using arrayed drives for additional speed and redundancy isntead of a single drive...which would of course increase the expeted overall lifetime.
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.