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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.
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!
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.
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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.
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
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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You are comparing to the wrong technology. SLC drives are extremely expensive, but this is a MLC drive. You should look at these items instead to extrapolate cost:
Super Talent MLC Solid State Disks on Newegg
The Samsung drive is much higher performance than these, but the fabrication costs should not be too far off. I'd guess $1500 for the 256 GB model when it comes out.
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Don't be so wet; there's no need to puch a dampener on things.
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.
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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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.
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.
Right?
And if hard disk storage had ever been that expensive, it would have meant the abandonment of the hard disk technology forever.
Right?
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
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.
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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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A most interesting and pertinent question! I think that if such a memory reached the speed of RAM with the capacity of a HDD then we could merge the two concepts into a central memory that would be used for anything. The first real gain with that type of design is that instead of loading (uncompressed) files (from the HDD to the RAM) you could simply point to them, and directly access them. Virtual machines could benefit greatly from that by pausing and resuming their execution instantly, for all their virtualised RAM would be written in a file that would simply pointed to. The same could happen for regular programs. They could have all their memory space in a file (the OS would take care of it), and if the program was to be prematurely killed you could resume its execution state.
Likewise, it would remove the concept for RAM space, as well as for virtual memory, that is, the OS wouldn't use a single file to put everything in, but rather as many files as it needs for each program (for example). With such a concept the execution for everything I mentioned (programs, OS, virtual machines) could be paused and resumed instantly.
As for the actual booting of the machine, I'm sure a clever use of it by say copying read-only pieces of memory that are hardware/configuration-independent to another space in memory where they could be modified (or not, maybe you could have a partially read-only OS) would greatly speed up things.
Somehow I can see that happening in embedded devices, not so soon with desktop machines, but we'd have yet to wait for SSD memory to be fast enough.
You just got troll'd!
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
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.
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
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Well, that's a price drop alright. Until recently, you had to give an arm, a leg and your firstborn.
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High-end SSDs have a RAM write buffer, but it complicates the controller significantly. I expect sophisticated controllers to trickle down to all SSDs eventually.
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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.
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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
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