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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."
I am quite sure that the comparison is done against 2.5/1.8 disks, not 3.5.
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.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
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.
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?
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.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
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.
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
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).
I read the internet for the articles.
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
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....
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
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
LCDs are still inferior to CRTs in terms of picture quality.
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