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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.
If the SSD's price only increases very slightly with greatly increasing capacity, they already lowered the cost.
Also, it doesn't help to have cheap 32GB SSDs when nobody buys them and you can't really launch into mass production because you are stuck with a niche market. To drive down the price you need to be able to produce them en mass and in order to do that you need to catch up (or outstrip) existing technology.
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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.
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?
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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.
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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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.
Agreed, GP needs a lesson in humidity.
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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.