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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."
Don't buy any other similar products. Ours will come out Really Soon (TM). At least we hope so.
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.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
I like the idea of the SSD, but I think they need to concentrate on lowering costs down to earth before flaunting their capacity achievements. Hell, any monkey can build a 500-TB mega-RAID stripe with a large enough budget.
When this SSD is cheap enough that I can buy 3-4 of them and stripe that into a bus-raping powerhouse, for less than a mortgage payment, then we'll talk.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
...if it can cope with high definition capture it'll be handy for me and my shutterbug family who're always out with various still and video cameras. Nothing worse than shortdropping a notebook and killing the hard disk.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
For the price they currently want for these wizzbang solid state devides, I could buy a small data warehouse in Springfield, MA.
An arm and a leg, unofficial sources suggest.
U+F8FF
But it's a Multi-Level Cell based Flash drive, not a Single-Level Cell based Flash drive. The cells hold 4 states, not 2.
...frankly, we don't really know yet. We won't really know, as such, until they start to die - which could well be 5-10 years, and if so, that's really not bad - and you might not see the same type of can't-write-blocks failure, but rather a more conventional can't-read-blocks failure. Which would be about as bad as a hard disk crash (and we might have to develop whole new data recovery techniques).
High capacity, yes, and apparently high speed as well. Excellent... but also lower reliability. SLC Flash is extremely durable these days, but MLC Flash is not, last I checked, even one tenth as long-lasting.
How much lower? Well...
Maybe it might last years longer than a hard drive owing to fewer moving parts. Perhaps it will slowly die, but good write levelling will largely mitigate the issue and overall it'll come out better, or about the same. Or perhaps we're looking at a flaky brick with lower reliability than a Quantum Fireball.
Early adopters, start your engines, because someone's gotta find out.
For enterprise use, it might be wiser to stick to more conservative SLC flash. Past that, all bets are off.
But we're seeing the beginning, here. Hard drives are, slowly, on the way out. It'll be a long phase-out where they are much more cost-effective for a long time... but it is coming. And I, for one, welcome our new nanosecond-seek-time overlords.
Well, since the technology isn't developed, is it really that surprising that we read a story about 'Worlds Fastest' every couple weeks?
Solid State Drives for computers? They aren't really out of beta!
This drive could cost $5,000 based on a 128GB drive for $3,050 and 64GB drives from $900 to $1,150.
NewEgg search for Solid State SATA disks
I fully agree with your conclusion that capacity is king for moist consumers, but... ...this is a 2.5 inch drive.
I'd like to subscribe to your reality if it has Terabyte-sized 2.5 inch drives. Where do I sign up?
"The sum of all knowledge does not imply the knowledge of all sums" Kurt Gödel (paraphrased)
Remember the intended target market is the laptop crowd. 256GB is big enough to compete nicely. When it comes with those sort of performance figures, it's a no brainer if you have the money.
The current largest widely available 7200rpm is only 200GB. The majority of notebooks ship with 200GB of HD space.
"Ship with LESS than 200GB space" I mean. slashdot removed my less-than-sign.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
I dunno - I think once you hit that kind of capacity you can pretty much own the notebook market. Right now, mainstream notebook disk sizes are in the 160-250GB size range, with 320 generally available and I believe 500 GB drives are just starting to arrive. Most notebooks aren't at the high end of capacity, though.
I don't think SSD will make an impact in desktops anytime soon, but if I can put an SSD in my notebook and gain a little speed, some battery life, and better shock resistance without giving up any serious capacity (heck, my 2-month-old MacBook Pro has a 250GB HDD in it right now), depending on the price differential I'll probably be all over it.
Also worth thinking about (though it's not in the submitter's link) - I read a couple of releases on this drive yesterday, and though they aren't giving production prices yet they claim that multi-level cells will make it cheaper than the older models. Between that and the natural speed of price cuts, this drive may be at competitive HD pricing levels sooner than we expect. If I can get a 256GB SSD at a 25% price premium to a HDD of the same size (like you suggest), I think it would be pretty much a no-brainer. That 250GB HDD is only about $150 or so - maybe even less.
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I don't requires that much disk storage space, I could get by on 40 gigs and 80 would never run out of disk space for my purposes, make an 80 gig SSD that would sell for less than 200 USD and I will use my disk platters for target practice...
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Don't be so wet; there's no need to puch a dampener on things.
2.5" HDDs are only in 500GB territory, that's only halfway there. If only prices would come down, they could easily stack a TB in 3.5" already. Prices aren't quite there yet but right now at newegg you got 80$/500GB = 0.63$/GB for regular HDDs and SUPER TALENT FTM20GK25H SSD 669$/120GB = 5.57$/GB so they're within one order of magnitude now. There's an incredible price development on SSD now and I figure they'll come close in a year or two.
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Uh, the last SSD review I saw that had considerably worse specs than this just barely came behind the VelociRaptor in the random write tests. Unless you've got a special disk trashing benchmark to make SSDs look bad, I'm fairly sure this wins on all counts. In fact, 20 random writes/sec sounds more like trolling than insigthful to me...
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I bought a new 120GB 2.5" disc last week - 256GB is "large enough" for now - if only the price was low enough...
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.
Hard drives have entered terabytes territory, and you think 256GB SSD drives are "large enough"?
Yup, even 64GB is easily large enough for my primary hdd on my laptop - I'd pay a premium far larger than 30% if the price/performance relationship was linear.
Until SSD drives cost only around 10-25% more than a regular drive of the same capacity, they're not replacing them at all. For most consumers, capacity is king, not speed.
But, the bulk of my content resides on network servers (same holds true for my less geeky friends - but for them, substitute 'usb drive' for 'network servers').
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
You can put your capacity in 50c blue ray disks (coming soon)there you go, you get your capacity and your speed
... am ... storage needs
How long does it take you to fill 1 terabyte ?
(cue 740KB is enough for anybody meme)
So you have your 1/4Gig of super fast, super quiet, super low power consumption.
And every week or so you can burn a couple of blue ray disks for all your
Once the prices come down and the tech matures a little more, a nice small 32-64GB SSD for the apps and a 1TB+ for storage should be a great overall solution. This could even happen in form of an elegant hybrid unit.
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For notebooks? Absolutely. Even most new notebooks are not shipped with 250 GB HD's by default yet (although it is usually an option for a couple dozen extra bucks).
However, if it takes 2 years until this technology becomes mainstream, you may by that time well be right.
On the other hand, hard disk prices are really really low. By the time SSD is only about 2x more expensive I'd most definitely start considering it, since that would still mean paying "only" some $150. That should well be worth the performance increase as compared to, say, spending double the amount of $$'s on a faster CPU or what-have-you. Currently it's more like 15x as expensive though, so for now I'll stick with regular harddisks.
Every expression is true, for a given value of 'true'
Large and very expensive SSDs?
http://www.gadgettastic.com/2007/10/05/fusion-io-launches-the-iodrive-640gb-pcie-hard-drive/
$19,200 for a 640 GB Hard Drive...is there even a market for such things now? Consumers are already used to having hard drives those sizes, hopefully it won't be too long until they find a good way of pushing those prices down and making them more accessible to the general public.
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.
With high capacity non-volatile memory, is it now time to redesign "personal computer" hardware and the operating systems?
Ouch! The truth hurts!
I don't think the average person has terabytes of data. As long as this takes off for the lowest common denominator and they buy it up, then the prices will come down.
How would this perform for index tablespaces and logfiles? I imagine lifetime/health will have to be monitored, but that's already being done with regular platterspinners.
Stop the brainwash
SSDs and spinning disks can still co-exist - in a year or two you will be able to run your OS and programs on a 100GB-200GB SSD and go buy a 2TB disk or 5TB array to store your data on that is less performance critical.
But does it blend?
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Replying to myself here, about the comments made so far.
First, I didn't see it was for a 2.5" drive. As most of you pointed out, 256GB of high-speed, low-power storage in a laptop is a very good thing indeed.
To the few who say that most people don't have terabytes of data, you may be right. However a quick trip to your local Costco will show that external drives are now at 1TB and 2TB. If you want something smaller you will have to buy a 2.5" external drive which is around 250GB for nearly the price of the external 1TB 3.5" drive.
My OS partition is 25gb and that's me being extremely generous, I used to work with 7gb but thanks to XnView's thumbnail database and Picasa being a complete moron application without the ability to re-direct the cache database there too - I'm keeping 25gb to be sure.
... stupid - it'll wear this sucker out in no time.
256 is more than enough.
That being said, you wouldn't want to use Vista on this drive, what with the read / write constant disk thrashing it does because it's well
(It's sad that I'm old enough to remember a time where the drive light did not flash, EVER unless you did something, you could actually sometimes spot a machine with a virus just with un-authorised disk access back in the 6.22 days...)
Early adopters, start your engines, because someone's gotta find out.
I was rather expecting a "iWantOne" tag on this article, because I DO.
I've been an early adopter on hard drives more than once. Back in '98 my laptop had a 23gb (yes, 23) HDD in it, and that was awesome to have that kind of portable storage. It made that nasty "I'm about to die" click about ten times a day, for every day of the two years I owned it too, when I sold it in working condition.
If it's not too painful I may bite. My laptop syncs with the backup every night so I'm not too worried if it tanks. In fact I hope it does. That means they'll give me a new, better one a couple months later. Maybe more than once. That can be one advantage of early adopter. By the time things settle down, you have the same thing that everyone else did, but you've just had it a lot longer. (at a price of course)
Too bad TFA didn't give a guesstimate on MSRP. One thread I found suggests $8k which is a little steep even for me.
One person tested a MBP booting off a 64GB SDD. OMG. The gear didn't even have a chance to spin. A good chunk of the boot time was taken waiting for hardware to come ready.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
this flash type memory is not being incorporated into existing platter based HDDs? It would seem to me that a few (read 8 - 64) GBs of flash memory coupled to a .5 to 1 TB standard HDD would be a great easy to use product.
No, SSD's have always shined at random *reads*. Small random writes have traditionally been where they're very weak; you might manage 160MB/s writing large chunks, but if you're droping 16k blocks all over the place (as, e.g, databases are apt to do) you'll be lucky to manage 1MB/s because of the overhead each write incurrs, certainly on cheaper drives aimed at portable use.
Hence, it's a perfectly reasonable question; depending on how they've implemented it, they could be anywhere from 20-20,000 random writes/sec.
I guess you're right ... if we're talking about 8 gig SSDs in tiny, underpowered but portable netbooks. SSDs have been in use in cellphones for awhile .... as flash memory. The EEE is only slightly more functional than a full featured palm device or blackberry, and both use flash memory as well.
... I certainly don't think it would be sufficient for a full function computer...
I was talking about home computers, work computers, computers that do more than just check email and the occasional word processing... I've got a solid state 'drive' as a flash drive right now bigger than the 'hard drive' on some of the entry level EEEs
You can't just compare different markets. As another poster said, you can buy CD-R for less than a penny each. What you are referring to is how record companies have used the lower medium price to make an even larger profit off of the content.
However, how does an oligopoly selling copyrighted content compare to a commodity market? Basic economics tells you they don't, and you can count on one of two things happening. A) SSD prices fall in line with hard drives. Or B) hard drive capacity moves beyond the needs of most consumers and SSD takes up that niche while being only marginally more expensive per GB than hard drives.
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Agreed, GP needs a lesson in humidity.
"Slow down, Cowboy! It has been 3 years, 7 months and 26 days since you last successfully posted a comment."
Unless flash has changed a lot since I last looked at it, this isn't quite true. To write a 2KB page, you first need to erase a 128KB block, but you can then write into the remaining 126KB without needing an erase first. If you're using something like LFS or ZFS on your disk, this translates to very fast writes. If you're using a filesystem that doesn't have copy-on-write semantics, then this will still be quite slow because you will rarely encounter this kind of access pattern (you will be more likely to read 128KB, modify 2KB in a buffer and then re-write 128KB, which, as you explained, is very slow since it requires a 128KB read followed by a 128KB write just to write 2KB - the same reason that RAID-5 is slow for writes).
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Mod parent up.
We are far past the point where the average consumer cares very much about capacity. What do you think they are going to do with 2 terabytes? Unless you are talking about someone who is frequently downloading movies and the like, I don't see how they would use that content. OK, there are probably a handful of people who are doing their own hi-def video editing or processing the output of large sensor arrays, but in what would do you define these guys as "most consumers?"
The reality is SSD doesn't have to come anywhere near the price of hard drives. It just needs to provide enough capacity (256-512 GB today) at a reasonable price. If you tell a consumer they can get a regular old hard drive, or pay 10% more for a SSD that doesn't fail when dropped and runs way faster, a lot of regular consumers will pony up for that.
What you said doesn't contradict what I said at all. You can definitely achieve much better performance by not scattering your writes; sequential access is very fast. For random writes, you're going to have to seriously buffer to avoid wasting erase cycles. Fortunately, the same algorithm that avoids erase cycles for performance is also the same algorithm that does wear leveling. I don't know too much about ZFS or how copy-on-write would help except on a purely abstract level.
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Actually $80/500GB = $0.16/GB, so the gap is even wider between the Super Talent's $5.57/GB and say a Seagate 7200.10. Right now the price per gigabyte of SSD vs traditional is almost 35x higher, but it'll certainly come down drastically in the next few years. When it gets down to under 5x higher, I think it'll really take off.
Not every machine needs to be storing lots of audio or video. If you can fit a Knoppix installation into a CD holding what, 640mb? 256gb is way overkill. If anything having desirable but smaller storage might discourage software bloat, leaving Linux and the *BSDs looking pretty good and leaving Vista in the dust.
you should try reading the comment thread (similar to reading the article) before posting. Really, it would help you avoid looking stupid.
That type of functionality can be put into a filesystem.
Is this raw access, or over a filesystem? If it's the former, you have a benchmark which doesn't mean much in the real world. If the latter, which filesystem was used?
Choosing the wrong filesystem type will indeed get you non-optimal performance.
Capacity? Sure, 256 GB drives are down to $100 thee days, but do you know a lot of consumers that can fill a 256 GB drive? I've got my entire music collection from over 25 years of collecting music in FLAC format, and it's just now filling a 320 GB drive.
I don't respond to AC's.
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My current laptop has a 160GB drive. May last one had an 80GB one, and that was only slightly too small. For portable use, I'd take a reliable 160GB SSD over a mechanical 500GB hard drive. At home I can always throw a few 750GB mechanical disks in RAID-Z for longer-term storage and not care if one of them fails.
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is the job of the disk controller which takes the read (or write) request sorts the requests by the sector address, takes the current position and direction of the head positioning mechanism and performs the requests in the physical sequence.
You may request something but other requests may get done first because the heads are positioned better.
IBM made their money by doing that and protected it with measures that skirted with antitrust violations throughout the sixties and seventies.
Its a kinder and gentler way of doing it and it was originally done to preserve the hardware and stop needless thrashing. That it ended up being more efficient for multi-tasking/multi-processing computers was just icing on the cake.
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How about random reads? I've benchmarked a 16G Samsung SSD and the standard Linux file systems (ext2, ext3) seem to cache read blocks in the (main memory) file system buffers.
Doing so seems to diminish some of the the possible overall system performance improvements - if I have a SSD I want to use the main memory for either HD io caching or programs. Caching disk blocks from the fast SSD in main memory seems suboptimal.
Discounting microsoft bloat, when I look at stuff like this I think about people like my parents and grandparents.
You know, people who after having and using their machine for four years still has 80% of their 80GB HD free. Where the biggest increase in HD usage in the last year was microsoft patches.
For power users like me that DO get into games, video, and music on the computer, a 250GB SSD is enough to last quite a while. Heck, from initial build I'm likely to throw my OS and programs on the SSD and get the cheapest per GB HD(or two) for the rest of the stuff.
Going from 10GB to 100GB was 'Big', it enabled the start of consumer video. Going from 100GB to 1TB enables HD storage for the movies most people would watch in a month to a year. Current broadband speeds enables the downloading of HD streams in useful periods of time with a queuing system.
Basically, I'm saying that we've reached the point with HD storage that the majority of people don't need any more. They won't use what they already get on a bargain machine. It's like with CPUs. If you're not a power gamer*, the bargain basement machines will all run a cleaned up windows** and associated software with good speed. Or even one of the easier versions of linux and open office.
*My grandmother loved bejewelled. Mom does various solitares. They 'game' a lot, but their games aren't exactly demanding on computer systems.
I don't read AC A human right
Yes, but you could consider those external drives the equivalent of aftermarket turbochargers.
The vast majority of people don't need one, but those that do want the best they can afford.
In this case, the 'vast majority' of people who are getting them are the ones with enhanced storage needs. The second vast majority are the ones who simply get a 8-16GB USB stick and use that for their backup and sneakernet data transfer needs.
Plus, it's a lot more broken down that way - you only have around three factors to consider instead of the dozens for a full computer.
1. Storage capacity
2. Size (3.5" requires a wall wart, 2.5" doesn't)
3. Price
When it's that simple, many WILL figure out the price/GB, figuring if they end up buying a larger one for $10 more, but double the capacity, they're spending $10 as 'cheap insurance' against the unit being insufficient.
I don't read AC A human right
to my knowledge, SSDs use flash memory which used to (?) have the limitation that it "wears" out on write-erase (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_memory#Memory_wear).
Was this limitation removed? Or are there improvements that make the limitation irrelevant? How would a SSD compare from this point of view to a standard HDD?
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Who the hell is going to install Crysis on a laptop?
Isn't that the other way around? I thought flash memory's "blank" state was all 1s?
I've been waiting for something to get around the hard drive speed bottle neck for a long time. I do a lot of data analysis on huge data sets, mostly financial market data. I end up doing a massive amount of reads and writes to hard drives which slows things down a lot.
My main fear with SSD's is the wearing out of blocks and bits. Typical data sets I work with are about 2 gigabytes. I run scripts against the data to look at various patterns and generate forecasting data. I could read and write that data six or eight hundred times in a day's testing. Well over a terabyte a day. How soon before an SSD craps out on me at that pace?
I would love to have an SSD for the blazing fast access times, but I don't want to have to replace it every six months. I'd pay extra for it, probably 2 to 3 times the traditional hard disk amount. But it has to last a few years at least. The other option of going 64 bit, adding huge amounts of DRAM, and running a RAM disk isn't financially sound at the moment.
Some SSD love from Toshiba from CES 2008: http://flickr.com/photos/barl0w/2179248913/in/set-72157603667187312/
Considering that hosting has been buying solid state drives for years already, this one seems pretty clear cut.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
So use O_DIRECT like some databases do.
Apparently, you have no experience with high performance drives. 15k SAS drives max out around 300 GB.
See Cheetah capacities
SATA's and lower performing SAS drives come in higher capacities. I've never understood why. If some storage expert would like to explain I'd love to hear it.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
So, Dell is about to offer up their MD1120 - same exact thing as the MD1000 but with 24 drives - 2.5" each.
If you didn't care about redundancy, for a DB this thing would be perfect... Mix and match slower sas drives in an array that doesn't require such fast IO, then on your data intensive VD, have SSD's!
That would be pretty slick.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
I do hope that operating system and application programmers will be wise and start to program to cater for faster system drives and slower storage drives. It's a shame if a game uses a real fast drive just to load some levels. Safe the big number data on a "slow" moving drive and store the engine and some much used textures on the main drive.
256 GB SDD (or a spanking new 300 GB Velociraptor for that matter) can be lots of fun, but not if each and every game stores 40 GB of uncompressed game data on the drive. This could easily fit on a single layer, single sided BD disk, so this cannot be far off.
I don't want 256Gb next year. I want 64Gb right now for about a quarter of the price.... I can manage with 40Gb on my laptop. 2Gb of MP3's is enough, 2-5Gb of operating system, a few movies, which have to be "replenished" at home after viewing. All in all, you can make a laptop work just fine with 32 or 64Gb. The biggest laptop drives are now 160 or 200Gb. So why go larger? Just provide bigger sequential speed, better random access speed, bump-proofness. Bigger size next year is fine.
NOR flash clears to 1 and can have individual bits set to 0. NAND flash clears to 0 and can have bits set to 1.
How to enable garbage collection on a system without protected memory: #define malloc() ((void *) rand())
If you fix things so that every 2Kb block on the disk can be remapped then those 2Kb writes can mostly be tagged onto the end of recently erased blocks, no erase needed.
(In practice NTFS usually uses 4Kb blocks so you'd optimize for that but the argument stands...)
This would also help a lto with wear levelling, etc. as you'd write the entire disk in a round-robin fashion, remapping blocks as you go.
The controller would need static RAM to hold the remapping table but that's no big deal these days.
No sig today...
I still haven't seen anywhere to buy it or heard anyone getting their hands on an ioDrive from FusionIO, but they are complaining about too high demand in Q2 (they started shipping it to big screaming customers the 7th of April).
But they have done it right: Straight into the PCIe and it comes with a Linux-driver. I just want to be sure about that it will do wonders for my databases before buying one. It's expensive, but compared to getting a machine with 60 GByte RAM or a SAN it's a bargain. And it's faster than any RAID-card, it's said, and you can RAID them if that isn't fast enough for you.
I'd like a USB dongle with, say, eight slots for SD cards in it. I can fill the slots up with cheapo cards and the controller would treat them like a RAID.
I'm sure performance would be competitive with a hard disk and it would only cost me $100 for cards to make a drive big enough for system, some workspace and swap file. Seagate's Raptor drives have had similar capacities and it hasn't held them back.
No sig today...
Have you seen the average notebook buy in a shop? It's all a game of "find the biggest number".
... "disk capacity" is a number on the little label so it has to keep increasing no matter what.
As a geek I'm always being asked if such-and-such a laptop is "fast enough", if XX is enough disk space, etc.
People have no idea what the numbers mean, or how they compare to the numbers six months ago. They don't even know the difference between RAM and hard disk. All they know is they don't want low numbers.
Bottom line
No sig today...
After buying one of these things, it will be more like a lesson in liquidity.
Set your filesystem to use 128kb blocks, problem solved :) The ZFS or copy-on-write helps because your old blocks aren't written over, all changes are written to new areas on the disk. Let's use A-Z for 128k blocks and 00-3F for the 2kb pages in them, so you have 3,328mb. Let's say that A00-M3F are used. Now let's say you do random writes to data at A13, B27, E1F and L19. Normally you would erase blocks A, B, E, and L and re-write 4*128kb or 512kb of data. With copy-on-write you simply erase (if not already erased) block N and write to N00, N01, N02, and N03. That's one erase and 8kb written instead of 4 erases and 512kb.
> the new Samsung 256GB SSD features a sequential read speed of 200 megabytes per second (MB/s)
The article continues:
"That is at the hardware level. Unfortunately, some OS designs prevent reads any faster than 640k/s, 'since 640k per second is all the read speed anybody will ever need.' "
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