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

[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]

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

[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

[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:Expensive.

[cnettel]

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

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?

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.

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: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.

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: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.

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.

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'.

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

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.