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

[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.

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.

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).

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.