Samsung Mass Produces 128GB SSD

Lucas123 writes "Samsung Electronics said today it is now mass-producing solid-state drives with a 128GB capacity, and it will begin production of a 256GB product later this year, ahead of its scheduled 2009 release. Samsung's 128GB and 64GB SSDs are available in 1.8-in. and 2.5-in. Currently, solid state disk costs about $3.45 per gigabyte and spinning disk costs about $0.38 per gig."

Comments

Still no deal

[Daimanta]

And still it is about 10 times more expensive than a hdd. If this doesn't get any cheaper, it won't get any popularity. If a new tech wants to replace an old tech it needs a significant and intrinsic advantage otherwise it will be adopted at a snails pace.

Re:Still no deal

[grasshoppa]

SSD does have significant perceived benefits;

1) Faster reads
2) Lower power
3) Quieter
4) Cooler

That samsung is producing these at all indicates that there is a demand for them. I think in 5 years, a majority of HDs sold will be SSD.

Re:Still no deal

[von_rick]

It wasn't until 2007 that we saw the laptop hard drives hit the 250GB capacity, and they didn't hit the $0.38/GB range until a few months ago. In comparison SSD would be reaching the 250 limit in a much shorter period and as higher capacity drives flood the market, the lower capacity SSD drives would become affordable before you know it.

Re:Still no deal

[Entanglebit]

...If this doesn't get any cheaper, it won't get any popularity.

If this doesn't get any popularity, it won't get any cheaper.

Re:Still no deal

[moosesocks]

We've gone from being several orders of magnitude more expensive to only being a single order of magnitude more.

Closing the final gap might take a bit of time, but I feel that we should be able to do it in time.

Re:Still no deal

[John Whitley]

How on earth do zero seek time and no moving parts not qualify under "significant and intrinsic advantage"? Zero seek time alone represents a sea change for mass storage -- access many orders of magnitude slower than the rest of the system has been a major assumption encoded in much software (and hardware) architecture for decades. We'll be feeling the repercussions of the end of rotating media for decades more. Yes, the price needs to come down for SSD's to annihilate traditional hard drives... but SSD's will steadily eat up HDD territory in the mean time.

Re:Still no deal

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget that platters, after decades of development, still have lots of failures thanks to complicated moving parts. I think reducing failure rates is a key reason we'll end up with SSD.

Re:Still no deal

[martinw89]

Yeah I know, hard drives were never adopted because they were so expensive. Cassette tapes ftw!

What? They ar..? Ooops, it seems I was misinformed.

Re:Still no deal

[ichigo 2.0]

You seem to have read the GPs post but failed to understand it.

I urge you to re-read it.

Re:Still no deal

[Anonymous Coward]

1) Faster reads

Not necessarily. Sustained read speeds are still faster on (most) spinning disks (vs. most SSDs). They do have orders of magnitude better access time resulting in better random read performance, but that wasn't what you said.

2) Lower power

Not necessarily. A 200GB HDD uses about the same power as a 32GB SSD. While these numbers do not scale linearly with size, you can expect SSDs to consume more power as sizes go up (e.g. due to more complex wear leveling algorithms). These performance numbers of course will increase as the technology matures, but for now it is still only a perceived benefit.

I do agree with your expectation about SSDs in the future, but you don't need half-truths to reach that conclusion :)

However, I don't expect the spinning disk do the dodo just yet; seeing as they're still cheaper per unit of storage, I expect that 2-disk setups will become the norm: SSD for the OS, and HDD for data - which is what I've been doing in my own systems for the last 2 years (using CF->IDE converters)

Does anyone know about the retention rate for these SSDs? I can let an HDD gather dust for ten years, and then still hope to retrieve the data succesfully. Can I expect the same from SSDs?

Re:Still no deal

[Daimanta]

"How on earth do zero seek time and no moving parts not qualify under "significant and intrinsic advantage"? Zero seek time alone represents a sea change for mass storage -- access many orders of magnitude slower than the rest of the system has been a major assumption encoded in much software (and hardware) architecture for decades. We'll be feeling the repercussions of the end of rotating media for decades more. Yes, the price needs to come down for SSD's to annihilate traditional hard drives... but SSD's will steadily eat up HDD territory in the mean time."

Well, what does this mean in real life? Zero seek time means reading it will be a lot faster. No moving parts means it will be less likely to break down.

But I don't care if I have a slower HDD and NONE of my harddisks have failed me. Unless SDDs become about the same price as the HDD and can carry an equivalent amount of data(certainly not less) it just isn't very interesting for me. I simply cannot justify the difference in costs. I mean, what's 128GB in a world of HD movies? It's nothing. Unless this becomes cheaper, it will face the same hardships as blu-ray. They are both better, but a reasonable person cannot justify the extra spending right now.

Re:Still no deal

[TooMuchToDo]

You are not the target market. High-end, bleeding edge enterprise users are who this is targeted at, and those who will spend whatever it costs to get that sort of performance. Consumers are cheap, so they'll get the benefits last.

Re:Still no deal

[Yvan256]

Wait, which one is the chicken again?

Re:Still no deal

[grasshoppa]

I said perceived. Not actual. Add to that list reliability.

And for myself, I'd put my data on the most reliable device ( SSD ).

Re:Still no deal

[alexgieg]

NONE of my harddisks have failed me.

You're lucky. I have to replace my HDD roughly every year.

In fact, three weeks ago I purchased a new 160GB to use in my computer because my previous 250GB one has gone kaput. And I had purchased that one circa one year ago after my previous 250GB one broke. And that one after an 80GB one went to the grave. A 12 to 18 months average.

Why 160GB instead of 250GB? Well, I simply realized I don't need that much space, so why spend more? After all, it'll break anyway. "Permanent storage", for me, means DVD-R's, Gmail and Amazon S3. Mechanical, spinning, magnetic HDDs, have no place in the list.

Re:Still no deal

[poetmatt]

If you make the chicken out of SSD it all depends on how fast it lays its platters.

Re:Still no deal

[tepples]

1) Faster reads

Not necessarily. Sustained read speeds are still faster on (most) spinning disks (vs. most SSDs). They do have orders of magnitude better access time resulting in better random read performance, but that wasn't what you said.

To what extent does a typical desktop work load use random vs. sequential cluster reads, especially when it would matter? Consider for a moment that an SSD controller can stripe data across many flash chips, while a conventional drive can address only one platter at once due to head-to-head alignment limitations.

2) Lower power

Not necessarily.

I read that same Slashdot article from a week ago. I gathered from the comments that the faster random read of SSD caused more transactions to be performed per second, and that shortened the battery life as much as anything else.

I expect that 2-disk setups will become the norm: SSD for the OS, and HDD for data - which is what I've been doing in my own systems for the last 2 years (using CF->IDE converters)

Isn't the OS something that can be read sequentially, if you put the kernel, kernel modules, C library, and services in one big squashfs on the hard disk, like a less-extreme version of Puppy Linux's boot process? Then you get the sequential read speed advantage of platters for stuff that'll become resident in RAM anyway.

Re:Still no deal

[jandrese]

It's still pretty early in the lifetime to declare the SSD to be the "most reliable device". Granted, it's not that hard to be more reliable than a laptop HDD, but we don't have nearly as much data on SSDs (commercial notebook ones are barely a couple of years old).

Re:Still no deal

[TheRaven64]

NONE of my harddisks have failed me.

Either you've not been using computers for very long, or you buy much better drives than the rest of us. The last drive I had fail was two weeks ago. The one before that about one year earlier. I typically expect one or two to fail every year.

Re:Still no deal

[lgw]

There's no real reason to expect SSDs to be more reliable today. Bits get flipped in memory in ways they don't get flipped on disk. SSDs have a limited number of writes - which might in practice mean longer or shorter effective life than HDDs, but it's too early to tell.

SSD technology has the *potential* to be much more reliable, but any technology with decades of engineering behind it should be assumed to be more reliable than any new technology, until one has actual measurments to the contrary.

Re:Still no deal

[moosesocks]

I would take that Toms Hardware article with a huge grain of salt.

Their tests simulated a usage pattern that is pretty rare in practice, especially for a portable device. Although certain applications do indeed require long, sustained transfers, most data transfers are spontaneous and sporadic (which is where flash memory shines, thanks to the nearly-zero seek times).

To make a shameful car analogy, a long sustained transfer is like driving on the highway. You get pretty good mileage, even with an "inefficient" petrol engine.

Unfortunately, we don't always drive on the highway, and a typical usage pattern involves lots of stopping and going. Due to the rotational inertia of the platters, HDDs and Optical disks are inherently inefficient in this regard, as the disk either has to be kept 'idling' or spun up from rest whenever access is required. These effects can be reduced via caching or by reducing the rotational velocity to match streaming/continuous data (eg. a video DVD), but flash memory seems to have a pretty clear advantage here.

This snippet from the article destroys virtually all of their credibility;

Could Tomâ(TM)s Hardware be Wrong?

No, our results are definitely correct.

Although I believe their data, any scientist needs to keep an open mind for any inaccuracies or potential flaws in their methodologies that may be present. Computer hardware reviews are no exception to this.

I'm also wary of leaving any media to sit for 10 years. Longevity isn't a terribly strong point these days....

Re:Still no deal

[dgatwood]

I gathered from the comments that the faster random read of SSD caused more transactions to be performed per second, and that shortened the battery life as much as anything else.

In general, what eats battery power is writing and erasing flash. If you don't have enough RAM and end up paging to flash, that's going to cost lots of battery life (and SSD lifespan as well). There's also a wide range of power management among flash controllers from those that do little or no power management at all to those that only power up an individual flash part when needed. There's also the problem of computer filesystems being horrible in terms of minimizing writes to the flash. When you have to rewrite an entire 128kB flash block for a 4kB cluster write, you can see why this is inefficient.

More significantly, this means that even small improvements to write caching in the OS can make a huge difference in battery life. I would not be at all surprised if somebody turned around and did the same benchmark on a different OS and finds that the same SSD performs better than the hard drive instead of worse. Indeed, AnandTech did just that on Mac OS X and got very, very different results that showed the SSD providing a significant improvement in battery life.

This is, of course, comparing to drives at the 1.8" size, however. Those same tests with 2.5" drives showed the SSD being slightly worse than the latest hard drives, though still favorable compared to drives from a couple of years ago, and only on the order of 5% worse than the latest drives on average---nowhere near the difference seen in the Tom's Hardware test, and pretty clearly proving wrong what Tom's hardware said about 1.8" SSDs versus 1.8" drives ("As a result, the flash based SSD will lose the power consumption battle against 1.8" mechanical hard drives.").

Thus, the question of SSD power consumption becomes mostly one of how much of the wildly different results is due to better write caching, better hot files clustering, etc. in Mac OS X, and how much of it is due to differences in the workload between the two benchmarks used. Discuss.

Re:Still no deal

[Cardoe]

SSD does have significant perceived benefits;

1) Faster reads 2) Lower power 3) Quieter 4) Cooler

That samsung is producing these at all indicates that there is a demand for them. I think in 5 years, a majority of HDs sold will be SSD.

You missed the recent article here that discussed SSD's actually using more power since they're always in full on mode so to speak while spinning disks only are in full on mode when the disk needs to be spun

Re:Still no deal

[tchuladdiass]

Just wondering, how hot do your drives run? I haven't had hardly any significant drive failures in my home equipment in the last 15 - 20 years or so. But then again my drives run at close to room temprature (either because of the drive brand itself, or the case has good cooling). For people that I know that had premature drive failures, the drives ran excessively hot (you couldn't touch them for more than a second or so).

Re:Still no deal

[alexgieg]

Just wondering, how hot do your drives run?

I have an HDD fan fixed to it. It's always at a comfortable temperature when I touch it, and checking the SMART fields tells me it's usually in the 25-35ÂC (75-95ÂF) range. So, I don't think it's temperature related.

On the other hand, the 40GB HDD I had before the 80GB one went working without any problem for 5 years or so, I don't remember well. It was my best HDD, and it's possible I've just been unlucky since then.

Re:Still no deal

[Daimanta]

I have been using computers since 1992 and I have never seen any drive fail here.

Disclaimer: I'm Dutch and and the current amount of harddisks working now is 7(3+1+2+1). 2 of them are over 6 years old. And I have a computer running a CRT screen from 1993. I must be the guy with all the luck or hard drives really don't fail that often. I do not buy special drives. I like my hard drives big and cheap.

Re:Still no deal

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anyone know about the retention rate for these SSDs? I can let an HDD gather dust for ten years, and then still hope to retrieve the data succesfully. Can I expect the same from SSDs?

This is far from a definitive answer, but I have various SSD storage devices (16 MB pocketdrive; 4 MB Memory Stick) that are coming up on 10 years old, that still seem to work fine for the rare occasions that I use them. So I'd say there's at least a chance.

Re:Still no deal

[Jeff DeMaagd]

Seek time is reduced by a vast amount, but it's not zero, and slower bulk read/write speeds largely negate that advantage.

No moving parts is nice, but that doesn't mean drive failures are eliminated. I've had some fail or cause trouble because of a poor connection, and a couple fail because something on the circuit board died.

So far, the promise of zippy SSD at low power consumption currently means considerable weeding to arrive at something that actually fulfills it. The high speed flash chips cost more money than the low speed ones

Re:Still no deal

[squiggleslash]

It rather depends on the application. If the technology offers the right mix, yes, it will replace a different tech for the same application.

As a basic example: yes, a 160Gb MP3 player with a spinning, magnetic, disc may be the same price as a 16Gb flash MP3 player, but few people have any reason to pick the former over the latter. The latter is going to be smaller, will consume less power (or the same with a smaller battery, reducing device size further), and considerably more robust, as you need for a product that can expect to be knocked around. The former adds capacity but for little benefit given there are few people (outside of Slashdot) who have music libraries larger than 16Gb.

For laptops, it's not hard to see why a 32Gb flash system would be more advantageous than a 160Gb spinning disc (current prices for SATA 2.5" drives seem to give you around 160Gb for $100, and 2x16Gb SD cards also cost around $100.) Again, the application - a low power, quiet, portable device that takes knocks with "enough" capacity for a decent operating system, apps, and personal files - is well suited to the technology.

The thing that bothers me about a lot of people is that they get obsessed with a number rather than the full picture. It's easy to focus on one specific and forget that there's a wider picture out there. As an example, looking at DVD:

Is DVD's successor:

1. HD movies provided via Blu-ray discs?
2. Online movie libraries, at DVD or better quality, provided on an all-you-can-eat monthly subscription basis or as decently priced PPV?

HD enthusiasts get very upset when you suggest that picture quality might not be the be-all and end-all of a successor to DVD. VHS beat out Laserdisc, it was cheaper and recordable, and thus more in line with what consumers wanted at the time than expensive, read-only, discs. Betamax's perceived advantage over VHS (which historians question) was higher picture quality, but VHS had better capacity tapes and that, ultimately, won consumers over: Betamax just couldn't do what consumers actually wanted.

Don't get hung up on price-per-byte. If the cost for an acceptable amount of capacity is low enough, and the advantages of the technology for particular applications are considerable, people will use it.

Re:Still no deal

[Fulcrum of Evil]

What sort of PSU is in your PC? I bet it's cheap crap or else your power is crappy in other ways.

Re:Still no deal

[alexgieg]

What sort of PSU is in your PC? I bet it's cheap crap or else your power is crappy in other ways.

Might be the power line, since it has no ground, but it surely isn't the PSU, a very good Seventeam one.

Any suggestion on how to improve the energy that enters the computer? Preferably one that doesn't includes destroying the walls to add a ground.

Re:Still no deal

[Fulcrum of Evil]

dual inverter ups that isolates your PC from the grid. Make sure it's something that doesn't just switch over to dual inverter when the power is out. If I knew what to suggest, I'd say to check the electric supply for noise and voltage drops, since these can harm your PSU and cause disk failures at an accelerated rate.

Re:Still no deal

[alexgieg]

Thanks! I'll look into both things.

I'll wait until they're cheaper

[xgr3gx]

They'll be cheap enough for me when AOL sends it's latest bloated version on a 128GB SSD disk in my junk mail. HA, that would be sweet.
Like the old days of free DVD/CD cases.

Re:I'll wait until they're cheaper

[tchuladdiass]

um, old days of cd cases? I remember the good old days of free floppies!.

Expensive.

[Psionicist]

> spinning disk costs about $0.38 per gig. That's remarkably expensive. In Sweden the price is _almost_ below 1 SEK per GB, and that is including our 25% VAT. The Seagate Barracuda 1 TB for example is 0.13 USD per GB excluding VAT.

Re:Expensive.

[cnettel]

I am quite sure that the comparison is done against 2.5/1.8 disks, not 3.5.

Re:Expensive.

[Carnildo]

They might be referring to server-grade hardware, which is generally much more expensive than consumer-grade stuff.

Anyone just like the powers of 2?

[Sybert42]

Yes, they may or may not be faster. Yes, some people like them just because they seem "elegant". What I like is the powers of two. We may not get the gibibyte-type names to catch on, but it'd be nice to just know that you can assume powers of two like with RAM.

Re:Anyone just like the powers of 2?

[Carnildo]

Actually, solid-state disks are marketed using metric gigabytes instead of binary gigabytes. The chips are manufactured using binary gigabytes, and the difference is used for a set of spare sectors that are used for wear-levelling or to replace defective and worn-out sectors.

Re:Where's my $30 SSD?

[sexconker]

Why?

SSD drives are slower and more expensive and smaller (capacity) and not that great on the power like they promised.

I just want a cheapie

[drinkypoo]

I'll settle for about 8GB or so. I would have already used a CF to IDE adapter but they seem to be expensive and mostly incompatible. I want to slap it into my old Thinkpad (Mobile P3) which is already a power sipper. If I could get a mobile IDE to CF, I guess I could just slap my 10GB microdrive in there instead, for my purposes it's probably just as good.

Re:I just want a cheapie

[Carnildo]

I would have already used a CF to IDE adapter but they seem to be expensive and mostly incompatible.

You're looking in the wrong places, then. The CF interface is pin- and signal-compatible with the IDE interface, so any adapter is simply a CF socket, an IDE header, and a set of wires connecting the two. Cheap adapters are flimsy, but not incompatible.

Re:I just want a cheapie

[Shrubbman]

Dude, check eBay. There are PLENTY of CF -> 2.5" IDE adapters to be had CHEAP. Sure they're not exactly name-brand products, getting shipped out of Hong Kong or wherever, but hell I've got a 10 year old Compaq laptop that's currently running off of an SD card sitting in an SD->CF adapter plugged into a CF-> 2.5" IDE adapter. The old hard drive I had for it was riddled with bad sectors, cost me less than $20 to get that old box up and running again.

Just did a search for 'CF IDE adapter' and the first half-dozen items popped up were all $5 'buy it now' with free shipping.

Re:I just want a cheapie

[Yvan256]

Here you go, CompactFlash to 44-pin IDE adapter:
http://www.logicsupply.com/products/cfdisk_2g

Re:I just want a cheapie

[Anonymous Coward]

Be careful with the cheap CF-to-IDE adapters, in the long term. The newer SSD drives implement wear leveling to avoid writing repeatedly to the same location of the drive in order to extend its lifespan. I'd be worried about the lifespan of a CF-to-IDE solution that isn't read-only, as the average CF device doesn't have wear leveling.

Re:I just want a cheapie

[merreborn]

Looks like they can be had for around $4, shipped:

http://cgi.ebay.com/CF-to-44-Pin-2-5-LAPTOP-IDE-Hard-Drive-Adapter-bootable_W0QQitemZ150268212084QQcmdZViewItem

Re:I just want a cheapie

[zeet]

Careful - some of them don't have the pins wired for DMA. Make sure that's listed specifically as a feature or you'll end up with slow card performance.

Re:I just want a cheapie

[drinkypoo]

I bought two, neither worked with my microdrive. thanks though.

Re:Where's my $30 SSD?

[drinkypoo]

SSDs ARE that great on the power, benchmarking runs which occur for a period of time are not interesting, it's those which actually deal with real-world workloads in which we are interested. In most scenarios the disk is accessed very infrequently and with a little tuning it could be pared down even further.

power consumption...

[nblender]

imagine a world full of computers with SSD's instead of spinning platters sitting idle all night long... Wonder what impact that will make to power consumption overall... How many people really have their OSes set to spin down disks when not in use?

Re:power consumption...

[Anonymous Coward]

How many people really have their OSes set to spin down disks when not in use?

Why would they? The power benefits of that are negligible anyway. Hard drives pull a lot of power when spinning up but once they are running it's practically nothing.

I never spin my disks down, even on laptops (except when putting in sleep mode). In my experience it severely shortens the lifespan of the drive.

Re:power consumption...

[backtick]

Power consumption for SSD's is currently worse than for standard laptop drives.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-hdd-battery,1955.html

Re:power consumption...

[Spatial]

Hard discs only use around 10, maybe 15 watts, which is fairly paltry compared to most of the other devices in a computer. Just turning down the brightness of your monitor saves about the same. As a percentage of the total power consumption of the average computer, a high estimate might be 12% or so.

Re:power consumption...

[ckaminski]

Didn't Toms Hardware or Ars Technica just do an expose on how SSDs are not completely as low-power as advertised?

Re:power consumption...

[Ant P.]

How many people really have their OSes set to spin down disks when not in use?

I try to, but at the same time my OS writes log data to disk every few minutes so it never really happens.

Wrong direction

[LordVader717]

We don't need higher capacity. What the market wants is for their 32GB drives to come down in price under the 100$ mark. I'd love to replace the hard drive in my notebook to a flash drive, but if it means splashing out hundreds of dollars for one, when there isn't really that much of a glaring advantage compared to a 30$ hard drive, I have to get back down to earth.

Re:Wrong direction

[TheRaven64]

My current laptop has a 160GB disk, and I use most of it. The part of the market that I am in wants 256GB laptop flash drives.

Re:Wrong direction

[EvilIdler]

If I could replace a 250GB/320GB laptop drive with a 256GB SSD for less than $200, I'd do it in a heartbeat. The prices are crawling closer to that sweetspot every week, so we just need for manufacturers to do that doubling in capacity one more time.

Re:Wrong direction

[trolltalk.com]

Mine has twin 320gig hds. At the price of hard drives, it's cheaper to just buy new ones every year, and get a usb or firewire adapter to pull data off the old ones / use them as an external backup.

Re:Wrong direction

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd love to replace the hard drive in my notebook to a flash drive, but if it means splashing out hundreds of dollars for one, when there isn't really that much of a glaring advantage compared to a 30$ hard drive, I have to get back down to earth.

It wouldn't splash out like that if you weren't using a currency that's being liquidated.

Re:Wrong direction

[blahplusplus]

"We don't need higher capacity."

People have been saying that forever in computer land, we're not at 2-4GB of RAM as a norm, 3+Ghz processors. There are applications not yet thought of or which require a little more time for significant advances using current computation.

Don't underestimate our 'needs', we'll find ways to use that space no one has yet dreamed of. While the average bear might not need that much, a significant size of the market will always want more.

Re:Wrong direction

[Tumbleweed]

What the market wants is for their 32GB drives to come down in price under the 100$ mark.

OCZ just announced their 'Core' series of SSDs, and the 32GiB part is supposed to retail for around $170 or $180, I think (though I can't yet find them for under $209 (yet - these were just announced), so we're pretty close.

For me, this will be a great upgrade for my old Mac Mini (Core Duo generation), which will attach to a NAS for main storage. If they had these in ATA versions, it would be a fantastic upgrade for my old ThinkPad T40, as I certainly don't need anything more than 32GiB in my laptop (though I know some people do). Sadly, they are only available in SATA versions. :(

Re:Wrong direction

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is that 32GB mlc drives are slow (and slc costs a lot more). At 128GB they become hell of a lot quicker (think raid).

Re:Wrong direction

[HTH NE1]

If they had these in ATA versions, it would be a fantastic upgrade for my old ThinkPad T40, as I certainly don't need anything more than 32GiB in my laptop (though I know some people do). Sadly, they are only available in SATA versions. :(

If I had mod points to give, I'd rate your Informative. That's just what I was going to ask about. Two ATA drives each at 128 GiB would be good for stress testing in my Series1 TiVos that lack LBA48-compatible kernels (for as long as cable still provides SD channels).

For the SATA unit, I'd just use 1 TB drives.

Re:Wrong direction

[LordVader717]

Everybody wants more storage, but not at a cost which is about as much as you want to spend on the laptop itslf.

IMO, it would be better to have the 32 Gig flash drive, and carry around your videos on an external drive for when you need them.

Put this in an iPhone

[Takehiko]

Hopefully Apple will put these in the next round of iPhones. Then I can finally replace my cell and iPod with one device!

Re:Put this in an iPhone

[WeAzElMaN]

Flash memory (like that used in the iPhone) and SSDs are two different beasts.

Re:Put this in an iPhone

[drtsystems]

Flash memory (like that used in the iPhone) and SSDs are two different beasts.

False.

Re:Still no deal - maybe

[scsirob]

It all depends on your requirements. If you have a need for massive amounts of random access I/O then SSD may be cheaper than harddisks already. If you don't need huge capacities but 10.000 I/O's per second then you'll need 60 or so enterprise-class 15krpm disks. That's a lot more expensive then a single SSD (or two if you want to put them in RAID-1).. And that is without counting power- and cooling requirements.

Where are my $12 sockpuppets?

[Anonymous Coward]

They must be here

Compare to LCDs

[Erioll]

It may be more worth it to compare the adoption of SSDs to how the adoption of LCDs occurred. For quite a long while LCDs were much more expensive than CRTs, with arguably worse performance in some significant areas (response time and color accuracy), but they were THIN, and they were absolutely flat, and they were (generally) lighter.

And now they've taken over, and dirt-cheap LCDs are easily available. So being a much more expensive technology initially is not necessarily a barrier to many consumers who want "the next big thing" because they want the specific advantages.

For myself however, I'm interested to know how they've addressed some of the traditional weaknesses of SSDs, such as number of times you can write to any specific memory element, write speed in general, and lifetime of the memory when no power is applied (this limitation exists for HDDs too in that over time the files will become corrupt (random bit flipping due to the magnetics), but I want to know the numbers for SSDs too).

Re:Compare to LCDs

[khellendros1984]

Write limits are rather high now...100k or so per memory block. The drives also tend to have write-balancing algorithms, which spread the writing more evenly over the storage device, so a cell is written to less frequently. Essentially to the point that a hard disk drive is likely to fail before the solid state drive.

Re:Compare to LCDs

[Hatta]

LCDs are still inferior to CRTs in terms of picture quality.

Re:Compare to LCDs

[abstract daddy]

Clearly you have not used LCDs. I would never go back to a CRT.

Re:Compare to LCDs

[Mad Merlin]

Clearly you have not used LCDs. I would never go back to a CRT.

Or, (much more likely), he's only used an LCD with a TN panel. TN panels have only 6-bit colour per channel, terrible viewing angles (vertical in particular) and are extremely common in any LCD smaller than 24" or that costs less than $500.

Needless to say, LCDs with TN panels are trash. LCDs with IPS or PVA panels are quite nice, though. Unfortunately, TN panels are infesting higher and higher up in the LCD market, 2 years ago it was hard to find a TN panel in anything larger than 19". At the same time, widescreen LCDs are taking over as they're cheaper to produce, so anyone who wants a monitor with a useful aspect ratio has to look pretty hard to find it.

All in all it's a pretty dismal time for LCD technology, I'm hoping the next generation of display technology (LED from the looks of it) fixes the above problems.

Re:Where's my $30 SSD?

[GreyWolf3000]

Tell me *you're* not a twitter clone...

Re:Where's my $30 SSD?

[sexconker]

In your typical scenario Vista, Norton, and Google Desktop Search will be probing/indexing/scanning your hard drive non stop while your typical users browse the web, watch videos, and download crap in the background.

Won't somebody think of the utility industry?

[GuyverDH]

>
Once these become mainstream, think of the poor software utility companies like GRC (spinrite) and Diskeeper Corporation..... One of their main revenue streams gone....
>

Perhaps a mix

[PIPBoy3000]

I wonder if we'll see a mix of drives in PCs for different applications, or HDs will end up having a massive SSD cache and information moves from drive to drive as appropriate.

Key read-only OS files would remain on SSD. Bigger files that are rarely used would be on the hard drive. The tricky part would be to minimize the number of times you spin up your hard drive. You could potentially leave it up to the user and have a deliberate mounting process when it's time to do backups or archiving.

Re:Perhaps a mix

[JCSoRocks]

Actually the idea of hybrid drives has been around for a while. Vista (i know, i know) was actually designed with it in mind. I've always thought it was an interesting idea. Almost like a third layer between the CPU and the hard drive (aside from RAM and cache).

Although it'd also be nice to just give yourself a hybrid type setup. 100+ gig SSD drive for OS, Apps, Games, etc. and then a 1TB HDD for file storage.

Choose the right tool

[symbolset]

I mean, what's 128GB in a world of HD movies?

Stop using your media center to store your media. That's what media servers and networks are for. Media centers are supposed to be slim low power units that need no fan but have killer presentation hardware (amps, surround sound, killer video resolution) and just enough CPU and storage to operate and present the media. Games are not "media." For those there are answers too - Google "eee Crysis youtube" for details. There's no need to have that monster kilowatt game machine (you gluttonous twits) running its shrieking fans in the space where you enjoy your content.

Early adopters pay premium prices, that's all this is. They charge the premium prices because they can get them. The more they sell, the more the price comes down. By the time a 128GB SSD is $20 you'll never believe they weren't useful, but be right here saying how nobody will need that $900 1TB model.

Re:Choose the right tool

[Anonymous Coward]

But what if I want to run Crysis on my widescreen tv at 1920x1080?

Re:Choose the right tool

[symbolset]

For that you will need to get the Atom PC with DVI out for the media center. You'll also need a beefy gaming rig for the back end if you don't want it to be a slideshow.

but you knew that...

Re:Choose the right tool

[Anonymous Coward]

Couldn't have said it better. The ongoing power-inefficiency trend is making me literally sick.

$0.38/gigabyte? Maybe five years ago BRO

[Anonymous Coward]

Last I checked, cost per gigabyte was around $0.12/gigabyte...

SOLD!

[Anonymous Coward]

Also don't forget, the fact that it has no moving parts means the odds of a drive failure plummet.
 
I'll happily pay a premium to never have to worry about that shit again.

$3.45 per gigabyte?

[VeNoM0619]

$3.45 per gigabyte and spinning disk costs about $0.38 per gig

Newegg is showing me anywhere from $12-25 per gigabyte.
Someone want to check my math? Are we talking US dollars? If you find a place that sells for $3.45/g then a 128GB for $441.60 definitely sounds affordable.

Vista not a sensible idea in 32GB

[Dr_Barnowl]

My Vista eats around 15GB of disk space, much of it in cache folders for compatible binaries : the World Wide Wisdom assures me it would be foolhardy to delete these.

Initially I stuck it on a 60GB partition, assuming that this would be a handsome spread of sectors for it to wallow on, providing headroom for defragmentation and plenty of room for applications. It's now getting a little crowded in there. Software developers are not going to be install Vista on one of these babies and get any sensible amount of use out of it, particularly if they develop tools used with any large data sets, or any large codebases with big histories managed by one of the new DVCS tools, which like a lot of disc space to sit in.

128GB sounds about right to me ; it's enough to be functional, but with precious little room for frivolity. I suppose I can put my frivolity on external drives.

Re:Vista not a sensible idea in 32GB

[xtracto]

Your message should read:

subject: Vista not a sensible idea.
Body: n.t.

All the other gibberish you write is redundant. :)

A 'disk' is like a 'carriage'

[Ed Avis]

We'll know that the new technology has taken over when people no longer need to refer to it as a solid state 'disk'.

Re:A 'disk' is like a 'carriage'

[RustinHWright]

I call 'em "flash drives". Or, for the itty ones, "USB keys" or "keydrives".

Re:A 'disk' is like a 'carriage'

[Anonymous Coward]

The same way we quit referring to automobiles as "motor carriages"? Oh, wait...

Another car analogy died... Slashdot mourns.

Re:A 'disk' is like a 'carriage'

[Ed Avis]

'car' is not an abbreviation of 'carriage', although they share a common root.

Mod parent down, please.

[RustinHWright]

Dude, you're delusional. Walk into Fry's or Safeway, for that matter, look at the dozens of flash drives for sale and the speed with which people are grabbing them and them tell me again that this technology "won't get any popularity". "Adopted at a snail's pace"? On what planet?

Other hard drive makers

[Anonymous Coward]

Time to sell western digital stock..............

replacing a HD every year

[RustinHWright]

I always wonder about those of y'all who talk about constant drive failures. Maybe I've just been very very very lucky but I haven't had a drive failure in almost ten years and I've subjected my drives to being thrown in a messenger bag and being carried around, use in places with quite a lot of dust, and, in one case, having to survive a fire severe enough to have cracked the plaster off the ceiling for about a hundred square feet. Admittedly I only buy things like La Cie Porche externals (got four at the moment) but that just makes me suspect all the more that y'all are getting what you're paying for.

Re:Where's my $30 SSD?

[RustinHWright]

You can buy 16GB flash drives today. But you're right; the prices need work.

The Savior of an Inept SQL Author

[llZENll]

With IOps an order of magnitude higher than standard disks, SSDs are primed to take the DB and file server markets by storm. Especially since performance usually trumps cost there. When it costs you $500/hour to optimize your DB or millions for downtime, spending $3 per gigabyte is a no brainer.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-memoright,1926-11.html

Re:The Savior of an Inept SQL Author

[Barny]

Or throw 64GB of ram at your server :)

SSD will only help when the DB is too big to fit into the largest amount of ram you can cram into one box, see EVE Online for an example, they use a 300GB SSD to store their game DB on.

I doubt it

[Sybert42]

Would they exactly round down to the nearest power of ten? This is by sector--there is no way you are happening to get exactly a decimal-rounded number of usable bits or bytes. Nobody is claiming that you'll get full file usage with all the filesystem metadata and sector granularity anyway. At heart, you have a power of two stored in binary gates versus an arbitrary amount of magnetic zones or optical zones in a circular track. That's why you get 120G versus 128G, for example.

Re:I doubt it

[robosmurf]

Yes they do. For exactly the same reason that they do it for hard disks: they get to sell you something that seems to have more capacity than it actually does.

The size and number of chips is pretty arbitrary, so they don't need to have the storage actually be a power of two.

StreamMyGame.com

[tepples]

You propose an architecture containing a media server and a media extender. For example, Apple TV and Xbox 360 use this setup. In general, the media server is connected to a tiny monitor (17" or 19" diagonal visible image) compared to the extender's monitor (32" diagonal visible image). This architecture has its advantages for passive media such as video.

StreamMyGame.com looks interesting. But all I had were questions:

1. How many media extenders support it? PS3 does, and Windows PCs do, but they're loud, as you complained in the parent comment. Eee PC does, but it has no SDTV output.
2. The system requires PCI Express on the server for high video memory bandwidth in both directions, but my PC is still AGP. So it appears I'd need a new PC. How easy is it to get games designed for Windows XP to work on Windows Vista, which comes with all new PCs?
3. It appears that StreamMyGame requires a connection to the Internet, not just the LAN, for every 10 seconds that the game is running. That ties up the phone lines for people whose families live in an area where the fastest home Internet access is dial-up.
4. This page claims that games have to be 32-bit. Wouldn't that rule out everything released after Super Mario 64?
5. Does StreamMyGame forward four gamepads plugged into a USB hub, or only the keyboard and mouse?

I have to replace my HDD roughly every year??!

[ProfessionalCookie]

What on earth do you do with that 160GB? I've never had a drive fail in less than 3 years. And I wouldn't trust DVD-R's more than I trust a magnetic drive. Kudos for backing up though ;) Everyone should.

Re:Where's my $30 SSD?

[xiox]

You can get 8GB USB flash drives for £28, which is around $56, so we're getting there...

Magic bits?

[tjwhaynes]

There's no real reason to expect SSDs to be more reliable today. Bits get flipped in memory in ways they don't get flipped on disk.

Ummm - you what? SSDs are a replacement option for spindle-type drives so they should be seeing the same sort of activity. Maybe the location of each write might vary as the drive controller for SSDs is interested in equalizing access around the memory. But last time I looked, bits are "on" or "off" unless you count the "evil" bit...

Cheers,
Toby Haynes

Re:Magic bits?

[lgw]

It's very easy for stray radiation to flip a bit in memory, not so much on a modern GMR HDD. Ultimately, you could make an SSD more reliable than an HDD, but the SSD tech is very new.

Re:Magic bits?

[default luser]

It's very easy for stray radiation to flip a bit in memory, not so much on a modern GMR HDD.

You are comparing flash memory to DRAM, which tells me you have no idea how flash memory works.

With flash, when you write data, you need a very high voltage compared to say, DRAM. This is because the electrons used to write to a flash cell need to tunnel through a thin gate insulator. This makes the amount of energy required to write a bit in flash much higher than what is required to write a bit in DRAM. Flash should be as robust against background radiation as magnetic disks.

I don't think drinkypoo is a twitter sock

[tepples]

Tell me *you're* not a twitter clone...

Can't be. Grandparent post was roughly 312 characters long, over twice as long as a typical microblog post. (wc ftw)

But seriously, willyhill keeps a fairly comprehensive list of the sockpuppets of twitter (104583), and drinkypoo (153816) isn't on it. In fact, apart from Erris, most of the alleged shills have UID > 1.25M. You could try comparing drinkypoo's posting history here or on Everything 2 to those of other alleged shills. Or you could just claim that I'm Twittacus.

Re:Where's my $30 SSD?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, that's not at all true, but it's a nice attempt at FUD. For no reason I can discern, too. Welcome to Slashdot :D You'll fit in just fine.

Who needs a lot of storage

[Anonymous Coward]

I keep all my media and most of my large files on a server in the corner of my room. I usually grab a couple movies and maybe some music and put them on my hard drive when traveling other then that I just pull it from the network. I can even access these files online if I have too. So why would I need a big ssd drive. Personally I find that 64Gigs is more then I need for everyday use. I would not put an ssd in my server but I would certainly put it in my Laptop or desktop. I don't know why people whine about hard drive size heck even 32gigs would be fine for me

just bought one!

[nazsco]

because of noise.

some months ago I got 2 sata 400gb and put them in mirrored raid. now my pc is useless to watch movies at night in my small room...

today i got me burning a dvd to watch some crap on the living room. so, while the dvd burned i just ordered the cheapest SSD i could find that can handle a ubuntu install, and a sata board. I'm moving the 400gb HDs to the server far away and putting the SSD on the desktop.

hell i'm telling anecdotes here instead of trolling... need to review life.

Re:just bought one!

[ROBOKATZ]

FYI, WD Caviar drives are virtually silent, and if you want them actually silent, there is a utility you can tune them with.

Not all operating systems need to swap

[tepples]

If you don't have enough RAM and end up paging to flash

Then you must be running Windows. Some operating systems can run usefully with no swap. Specifically, I have run Puppy Linux as the primary OS on two nine-year-old PCs that had been upgraded to a quarter gig of RAM, and it doesn't swap. Give an SSD-based laptop a more efficient workload to run, and it will run more efficiently. Asus knew this and took it into account when building the Eee PC line.

Re:Not all operating systems need to swap

[ROBOKATZ]

I guess if you don't run any programs, you'll never need to use the page file.

Re:Not all operating systems need to swap

[tepples]

I guess if you don't run any programs, you'll never need to use the page file.

I recognize a hint of sarcasm. But seriously, not all programs are big enough to need the page file. If your OS occupies 64 MB, your web browser occupies 64 MB, and other open programs occupy a total of 64 MB, what good is a swap file on a 256 MB machine?

32GB SSD for ~$110

[ZxCv]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820211244

and

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822998003

Hah, ok, so its a 32GB CF card and a CF->IDE adapter. But regardless, the combo works remarkably well, today, for tolerable prices.

Re:32GB SSD for ~$110

[neurovish]

with the CF card and adapter, you're at $3.44/GB. Not necessarily a huge savings over price mentioned in the summary.

OCZ Core series SSD drives

[the grace of R'hllor]

OCZ Core series drives come to that mark. RSP of $479 for the 128GB model. See their press release, or a news message