Samsung 256GB SSD is World's Fastest

Posted by ryuzaki0 on Monday May 26, 2008 @01:00AM from the i-write-faster-with-a-pencil dept.

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."

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Re:Random write ops? by Fweeky · 2008-05-26 02:10 · Score: 5, Interesting

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.