Samsung 256GB SSD is World's Fastest

i4u submitted one of many holiday weekend slow news day stories which starts "Samsung Electronics announced today the world's fastest, 2.5", 256GB multi-level cell (MLC) based solid state drive (SSD) using a SATA II interface. Performance data of the new Samsung 256GB SSD features a sequential read speed of 200 megabytes per second (MB/s) and sequential write speed of 160MB/s. The Samsung MLC-based 2.5-inch 256GB SSD is about 2.4 times faster than a typical HDD. Furthermore, the new 256 GB SSD is only 9.5 millimeters (mm) thick, and measures 100.3x69.85 mm. Samsung is expected to begin mass producing the 2.5-inch, 256GB SSD by year end, with customer samples available in September. A 256GB capacity is getting large enough to replace hard-drives for good — now just the prices just need to come down further for large capacity SSDs."

Comments

Seems like the complexity is lower

[Eccles]

Looking at a hard drive, it's got lots of moving parts, the need for sealing, etc. One would think that in the long run a solid state drive that is just a few chips and connecting logic would be cheaper to produce once you have the facilities.

The Power of 1000 Hard Drives

[StCredZero]

This pales in comparison to the ioFusion drive. The videos show tests being run where they are doing 8 operations at the same time, at blazing speeds, copying multiple DVDs in 5 seconds, and simulating swapping a blizzard of 4kb blocks as fast as RAM. Instead of 2 channels, their cards use 160 channels at the same time. This gives a single card the parallel random access bandwidth of a 1000 disk drive SAN.

http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/34065/135/

At $30 per gigabyte, it would be great to have a 10-gig for OS and your current favorite MMO game.

Re:Random write ops?

[Fweeky]

Every benchmark I've seen on SSD's have shown random IOPS of between 20 and 120/sec, ranging between cheaper consumer drives and more expensive enterprisey models; writing single blocks to random locations completely demolish their performance because such small writes often require the drive to erase huge blocks.

New techniques try to avoid this by basically turning random writes into sequential ones; once you've erased a 4+MB block, you put all new writes into that block (you can turn a 0 into a 1 without an expensive erase cycle) and remap it similarly to how it's done with wear leveling. I'm not aware of anyone actually doing this yet, though.

Re:The serializing of the random read-writes

[hairyfeet]

Which is why I have been wondering: You know how a HDD will have a bit of RAM as a cache to make write more efficient,why aren't they doing that for SSDs? It seems like it would me a lot more efficient if lets say,the SSD has 4Mb blocks to have 8Mb of cache on them so the data can be cached and written in efficient blocks. I'll admit I haven't gotten to read up on the algorithms used with SSD so I don't know if there is a technical problem with that idea or not,but it would seem to me to be a "best of both worlds" kind of solution.

And speaking of "best of both worlds" what happened to everything is going to be hybrid? A couple of years back all you read was they were going to add anywhere from 256Mb to 8Gb in addition to the 8-16Mb of RAM cache on HDDs to boost the data access and make them even more efficient at writes. What happened? I know I would personally like a hybrid that had,say 8Gb on it so I could have the OS stored in flash with my data and swap stored on the platters. But that is my take on it anyway,YMMV