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Samsung Mass Produces Fast 256GB SSDs
Lucas123 writes "Samsung said it's now mass producing a 256GB solid state disk that it says has sequential read/write rates of 220MB/sec and 200/MBsec, respectively. Samsung said it focused on narrowing the disparity of read/write rates on its SSD drive with this model by interleaving NAND flash chips using eight channels, the same way Intel boosts its X25 SSD. The drive doubles the performance of Samsung's previous 64GB and 128GB SSDs. 'The 256GB SSD launches applications 10 times faster than the fastest 7200rpm notebook HDD,' Samsung said in a statement."
My left nut is an unreasonable price.
I don't need no estinkin'
Jeepmeister
Damn -- How can I bitch about how expensive it is when they won't even tell me!
Caveat Utilitor
So it launches applications 10 times faster [sic] (should say in 1/10 the amount of time), but the article only claims speed improvements of about 3.5 to 1. People need to seriously examine how they quote or accept statistics.
Jim Elliott, vice president of memory marketing at Samsung, said the new 256GB drive can store 25 high-definition movies taking up 10GB of space each in just 21 minutes, which he said is a significant advancement over a 7200rpm hard disk drive, which takes about 70 minutes.
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Just imagine the power savings as well. Also, they should last an order of a magnitude longer than media that needs to spin all the time.
As soon as these get cheaper and have more capacity, spinning media is dead.
The spinning disc is slowly beginning to wind its way down.
This guy's the limit!
to put some of these into my servers
ditto, but im waiting for permanent data erasure to become a little more mature. i understand the wear leveling incorporated into SSD can cause current programs to stumble.
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
Spinning media already is dead. It's just that no one's told it yet.
Actually, spinning media will continue to be used in servers that need huge capacities of storage. But for cheaper devices, the speed, energy efficiency, durability, and price of solid state drives will effectively make using spinning media obsolete in the next few years.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
The ComputerWorld article says "and are available for resellers today". The Samsung press release says, "announced today that it has begun mass producing". I couldn't find them in any of the usual places.
The Samsung website is particularly un-useful and hard to navigate, though I suppose it's appropriate that they require you to use Flash for this one.
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OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
It isn't dead until Netcraft confirms it.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
W O W
I never thought a Single Sided Disc (SSD)
would ever be able to hold so much data . . .
We are Dead Stars looking back Up at the Sky
I know the impetus is to produce big and fast SS drives, but I'm more interested in cheap and fast ones. My desktop machine has 11 Gb of system and apps and <1 Gb of user files. I would be perfectly happy with a 16 Gb SSD that had great performance, was cheap, and was reliable. Reliability is a big issue. Although theoretically a device with no moving parts should always be more reliable than one with moving parts, in reality SSD technology isn't as mature as HD technology, so the failure rate may actually be higher, and there may be no way to recover from a failure.
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All these flash drives and solid state drives keep advertising capacities in powers of two: 64 GB, 128 GB, 256 GB. So why do they still say a 256 GB SSD is 256 million bytes?
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Me neither. We spent weeks (which translates to tens of thousands of dollars) benchmarking and optimizing a database app. The thought of accelerating it by a factor of 5-10x with a simple hardware upgrade is stunning.
1 TB of SSD today = 17 * $150 = $2,550.
1 TB conventional storage = $95.
SSDs are still over 25 times as expensive. They will improve quickly, but they need to hit a moving target to kill conventional drives.
ditto, but im waiting for permanent data erasure to become a little more mature. i understand the wear leveling incorporated into SSD can cause current programs to stumble.
The mean time to fail in the new SSD's is a bucket load better that most regular HDD's.
http://www.google.com/search?q=ssd+mean+failure+vs+hdd
Between the 10,000-100,000 writes and the logic used to try not to rewrite the same place over and over they do quite well.
SSDs are still over 25 times as expensive for 1 TB of storage. Fixed that for you.
64 GB SSD today = $150.
80 GB hard disk = $40.
If you need only 64 GB of storage, as most handhelds, laptops, and desktops do, SSDs are only about four times more expensive today. You can expect SSDs to become cheaper than hard disks in about two years, at least for the smaller capacity drives.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Wonder how many hours this drive would last if used for swap or a database container until the flash cells wear out and start returning errors.
10k*256GB / 200MB/s write speed = 151 days at full write 24/7. And you'll probably get some nice warnings without data loss since the typical failure mode is that they can be read but no longer written. Of course if you're using swap even nearly that much, you're doing it wrong. I'd be very surprised if my swap use exceeded 10GB/day, in which case it'll take me some 700 years to hit the write limit. And if you're running a heavy database there are drives for you, just not this one. So who do you work for? Western Digital? I think they're the only ones that haven't realized the boat is leaving and they're lost in the mountains.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Where can you get a 64 GB SSD for $150? I'd buy about 10 of those right now if I could find 'em.
I don't respond to AC's.
1 TB of SSD today = 17 * $150 = $2,550.
1 TB conventional storage = $95.
SSDs are still over 25 times as expensive. They will improve quickly, but they need to hit a moving target to kill conventional drives.
A perfect choice for RAVED - Redundant Array of Very Expensive Disks.
I am anarch of all I survey.
Disk I/O is the one area I still have an easy time slamming modern computers on. Most others, it isn't too expensive for me to simply get enough power that handles what I want in realtime without slowdown. Multiple VM, no problem quad cores are cheap. Big audio projects? Hell I can get 4GB of RAM for less than a month's Internet access... However when those projects start hitting the disk, I start having problems, even with a RAID array. The sequential stuff isn't it, it's the random access that kills it.
Audio only takes 172Kbytes per second per track (for 32-bit floating point). So you figure that doing something with, say, 64 tracks isn't a big deal right? Only about 11Mbytes/sec, way under what a single disk can take. However you can find that it'll choke. Reason being is that the audio isn't all nice and sequential. It's written to disk as 32 separate stereo audio files. Also you maybe have some of them reading, some of them writing and so on. The disk gets overloaded trying to seek to the information in time.
VMs are the same thing. Two VMs running computations at the same time on a system works at full speed. They each use a core of the CPU, there's no problem. The do contend for memory bandwidth, but that is plenty high enough. Likewise one VM doing disk access happens at near native speeds. There's not a lot of overhead to read and write to the disk. However get two VMs doing disk access, man things grind to a halt. Your drive is dancing all over trying to service the simultaneous requests from different areas so throughput grinds to a halt.
An SSD would just be amazing for apps like this. Not because it has so much more bandwidth, but because it's bandwidth stays much higher under intense random access. Where a harddrive might obtain 50MB/sec in sequential read, the same drive might struggle to pull even 5MB/sec in random reads. For the SSD it might be more along the lines of 200MB/sec for sequential and 180MB/sec for random. Even though it isn't full speed, it's close enough as no odds. With that, the VM and audio work would have no throughput problems.
http://tinyurl.com/cheapssd
Probably nothing like a Seagate, but, technically they are SSD drives. I imagine they are probably more like big thumbdrives with a run-of-the-mill SATA controller slapped on them.
Mir tut es leid, Menschen daß Einfältigfehlersuchenbaumfolgendenaffen sind.
Those are MLC flash, random writes are going to be horribly slow and will reduce the wear life to months in a server application. Would be perfectly usable in a netbook/laptop application though.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Giga is an SI prefix. It is defined as 10^9 and abbreviated as a capital G. So to say you have 200G of something implies you have 200,000,000,000 of them.
Computers do it wrong. When computers say Giga they mean 2^30, not 10^9. That's wrong, for that you use IEC prefix of gibi, abbreviated as Gi.
The reason is that back in the day, computers had little memory. Thousands of bytes was all. So when talking about thousands of bytes, programmers started calling them "kilobytes". After all, it is close. 2^10 is close to 10^3, only 2.4% error. Well memory kept growing, and the incorrect prefix usage kept going on and they kept using bigger ones.
However this has two problems:
1) The error grows. At the giga level it is about 7% off. The large you are talking about, the more the difference between the base 10 prefix and it's "closest" base-2 amount.
2) You get confusion between levels. For example suppose your computer shows you something in megabytes. It says you have a file that is 2000 megabytes. Well that's 2 gigabytes right? Wrong, 2 gigabytes is 2048 megabytes. So it is rather unintuitive to humans. We work in base 10, the numbers displayed are base 10, but the prefixes are used wrong.
Really, the harddrive makers are right. Computers should display amounts according to the base 10 prefixes. Computers have no problems with base conversions, they should be doing that for people.
And please stop calling them disks! Disks are cicular objects.
Good luck with that. People still "dial" phones, even though phones with dials haven't existed for decades.
If you need only 64 GB of storage, as most handhelds, laptops, and desktops do
My laptop has a 250GB drive that's almost full with work files. I haven't had less than a few hundred GB of storage on a desktop for almost a decade.
Hell, even my iPod is 80GB, and almost full.
Are you from the past?
This TinyURL redirects to:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&SubCategory=636&N=2013240636
Actually there is a row access time which can be quite high, as high as .5ms for MLC which compares with 2.5ms for 15k rpm drives. Add to that the relativly low IOPS for MLC (less than 100 according to this review using the database server IOMeter profile which is 70/30 read write if I remember correctly) and for a server load they lose bigtime to drives considering they get worse performance, have significantly lower MTBF, and have way less GB/$. SLC is a bit harder to quantify as the best units have MUCH higher IOPS per unit than disk so you have to figure out how much capacity you need and how reliable you want it to be as well as how much power budget you have.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
One problem is they write in blocks (128kb?) and the entire block needs to be erased to modify a single byte.
That chews those writes faster than you'd expect, and write leveling can only do so much especially if the drive is mostly full.
No fans? Do you want some roasted nuts? :P
Here is a Mil-Spec approved permanent SSD erasure device: http://static.howstuffworks.com/gif/hammer-1.jpg
Calibrated motor? You think that they have to specially make motors which run at exactly 7,200rpm? O_o
They just use a feedback mechanism for precise positioning and speed.
Flash on the other hand chews up massive amounts of space on silicon.
That is quite expensive.
SSD = 220MB/s transfer rate
DDR2 800 RAM = 6400MB/s transfer rate (peak theoretical)
Nope.
Just disrupt the deflector shield with a tachyon burst.
Not at all. Solid state drives are still orders of magnitude slower than RAM (i.e. main memory).
We spent weeks benchmarking and optimizing a database
And just think of all the people who have crappy unoptimized databases who can just buy these and leave their design as-is!
I could be wrong, but you sound like you're being sarcastic, which is a pretty stupid attitude to have here.
Let's say you have a crappy unoptimized database. You can spend tens of thousands of dollars' worth of programmer time to fix it up and optimize it so that it runs fast on your current hardware. Or you can spend perhaps one tenth of the money to upgrade to a super-fast disk, achieving the same end result. Which one is the smarter move?
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
And of course every time someone levels this criticism it completely ignores the complimentary question: how many hours will a mechanical spinning-platter HD last doing all out full-speed sustained reads and writes 24/7?
At least flash drives have a predictable failure timeline, whereas HDs simply have a vague MTBF and could easily fail much sooner (or much later!) than that.
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
What about RAPED? That seems more appropriate...
(Reduntant Array of Patently Expensive Disks)
Don't think so
DLT Tapes ($25 for 40 GB + cost of drive) are now more expensive than hard drives.
They are even deader than spinning disk.
I recently did some research before buying an SSD and the cheaper SSDs show some odd behaviour, namely, their reads are very sawtoothed (ie not sustained high thruput). Admittedly, the greatest speedup is in random access (no rotation/seek time), but the xfer is important too. I ended up going with a smaller, but very fast 16G mtron 7500 pro, as it's more than enough for system, swap and frequently used (db's etc). Bigger would have been nice (for warcraft and vm's), but it's not great loss. A good ssd for a system drive is a thing of beauty, and can be retained as other hardware is upgraded, of course.
Here is an even more permanent erasure method.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
Reads are byte word size
The caveat is that it is necessary to erase the whole block to write a byte when a bit needs to be changed from its erase state. e.g. :
If the erase state is 0 and a bit needs to be cleared (it holds a 1 in or scenario, and we want it to be zero) then it is necessary to erase the whole block. This (obviously) means copying the block contents to RAM, zeroing the FLASH page in which the byte resides, and then writing the page back to FLASH. It sounds worse than it is, and ultimately the overhead doesn't put a dent in the difference between using spinning media and FLASH. For example, what is the overhead to change a single byte on a hard disk?
Update the metadata (itemization of steps not included; you get the idea.)
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
To the cousin poster - would you propose that we do monthly-rotating daily backups of our small business server to spinning hard drives? Keep in mind that they need to be easily archivable and the cost of the media is more important than cost of the hardware.
Are you doing off site? How many gigs are you backing up? You might find that a raid NAS array, possibly off site to be cheaper than you think - and fully capable of keeping all your backups. Or price a dozen or so external HDs.
So, you're agreeing with me? They're the ultimate in high volume, cheap, slow storage.
And hard drives will rule the world for a while when it comes to on-line, random access, but not requiring especially low latency.
Still, I find it interesting. Right now, on Newegg, the largest HD you can get is 1.5TB for $140. For $278 you can get a 128GB SSD. Call it $2/GB.
It wasn't that long ago that the HD was ~$300, and the SSD, $3k for a 80GB one. Matter of fact, Newegg still lists a 64GB model for $825. Back in 2004, a 250GB HD cost $250. Anyways - we're looking now at SSDs being available that are 'only' 1/12 the size of the largest consumer HD available at this time, for about double the price. Go back around a year, and you're looking at 10X the price for 1/12th the capacity. We went from a 120X disadvantage to a 24X advantage. That's a massive catchup, relatively speaking.
Keeping with Newegg - you can get a 120GB 2.5" drive for ~$50. So it's 5X as expensive to get the SSD - but the SSD is shockproof in comparison, and is demonstratively faster. Go large on the HD? 500GB for $110. Around a 12X disadvantage. At this rate I'll predict that SSDs will replace hard drives in laptops around 2010-2012. Leaning towards 2010. Shortly after that it'll take the server market, at least for systems that lean towards reads. 2016 or so for standard desktops.
I don't read AC A human right
One thing to remember is people like my parents and grandparents. I use over a TB of HD space. My parents haven't even used over 50 yet, and my grandparents even less.
Due to the mechanical components of hard drives, they aren't going to get much cheaper, even/especially in bulk - some of the bottom end we see are the manufacturers putting their old drives on fire sale.
Once the manufacturers can get a 40-80GB HD for LESS than they can get a hd*, I predict they'll start switching. They're already on the poor side for GB per $.
The cheapest laptop HD on newegg is $50 for 80GB(.625). Lots of 320GB($70,.22), 500GB($110,.22). The cheapest 3.5" HD is $36 for 80GB(.45). $42 for 160GB(.26). A 1TB one runs $95(.095), so per GB it's a much better deal, delivering 4 times the GB per dollar over the 'cheap' 80GB. The cheapest SSD is $20 for 4GB(5). Not very efficient, not even very fast. Going up - $145 for 64GB(2.27). $278 for 128GB(2.17) Not much economy of scale gained, but that's to be expected. 32GB seems to be where the SSDs start flattening out($84,32GB,2.63) at the moment.
Going by this - I figure 3 years before you start seriously seeing SSDs replacing hard drives in laptops - and it'll start on the low ends for cost savings, and the high end for performance.
It'll be another 5-10 before they start doing the same to desktops. Still, I figure upgrading will become common again - fast flash for OS and programs, cheap big HD for most multimedia.
*As long as it can be expected to last long enough that they don't have to do warranty work, and performs at least as well.
I don't read AC A human right
Hmm, nice calculations. I agree it's going to ake a while for flash to overtake SSD, and hopefully eventually we'll get dual/hybrid drives with maybe 32GB or 64GB of fast flash for OS and key programs and maybe 1TB for media and mass storage, which would be awesome. That is something I would love to have in a laptop, and hopefully in most cases the HDD wouldn't even need to spin up unless you're playing a movie or something, and you can even have it use the flash as a giant cache and the OS could copy the movie to the flash to take advantage of HDDs sequential access advantage and then not have to worry about the HDD for a while.
All your base are belong to Wii.
SSDs do not allow you to directly read/write/erase flash memory. The firmware includes a flash translation layer that lets the host read/write 512 byte sectors just like any other drive. Sectors do *not* have a fixed location on the disk. Writing a sector simply appends it to the current erase block, and updates the translation table (also an append). When it runs out of blank blocks, it picks one to erase based on its wear leveling algorithm and garbage collection, and copies any live sectors to a fresh erase block. Just like a HDD, there are plenty of spare erase blocks, which are needed for the copying garbage collection and for when erase blocks go bad.
While the basic function of FTL is open, the wear leveling and garbage collection algorithms are fiercely proprietary. (The best ones actually count how many times a block has been erased and keep the counts even - and do this at high data rates.) This is OK for now because there is also fierce competition, and the code runs only in firmware on the device - not on the host. (Same as the controller code on a HDD.) Should the SSD market ever shake out into a monopoly, the basic FTL ideas are available.
It seems (to me anyway) that people dont think a single byte being defective is a big deal, when in fact its dead blocks which are somewhat larger.
Logs, most databases and many other things have frequent small writes.
It means that the SSD can be fried somewhat faster than people think.
Wear leveling just means it all fails at the same time instead of some bits failing sooner than others.
Hello there, reporting in from Eastern Europe. Rotary-dial phones have been uncommon here for a long time too. My suggestion would be to take what you see in movies less seriously.
Deus est fatalis