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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."
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!
Why? You're not using it anyway.
My left nut is an unreasonable price.
"don't worry, son, that's why God gave you two."
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
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.
My left nut is an unreasonable price.
"don't worry, son, that's why God gave you two."
Two left nuts? Isn't that the cure for two left feet?
It isn't dead until Netcraft confirms it.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
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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W O W .
I never thought a Single Sided Disc (SSD)
would ever be able to hold so much data . .
Just try installing one flipped. Cutting the notch will surely be a bitch.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
You fail at acronyms.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
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.
Yeah, it'll be 1 to 3 organs, depending on demand. Demand for soft organs is red-hot right now, so it's pretty well sure to be a triple-donation. Probably the usual combo: eyeball, kidney, testicle. If they want bone, they'll take an arm or a leg, but we haven't done a limb-cut in days.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
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.
I wonder how many of today's /.'ers remember doing this. To the best of my hazy recollection, I never had a "single sided" disk fail to format both sides.
When I first heard about it, I used a second disc to mark the location and an X-acto knife to cut the slot. I recall it being several months before tools to cut the slots started showing up in computer stores.
I also recall discussions about whether spinning the disk "backwards" would dislodge dirt trapped in the liner and cause premature failure of the disk. In hindsight it sure didn't seem to.
Merde, il pleut encore!
If a 256GB SSD drive is only 256 million bytes, I'm a lot more concerned about the missing factor of ~1000 than the binary/decimal notation.
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
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.
Computer math doesn't work like regular math, like for example SATA2 which is 3Gbps. Now if I showed you a cargo ship with a capacity of 3000 tons, you'd think you could actually load 3000 tons right? And not that 600 tons of the cargo hold would have to be fixed support beams. But with computers it's somehow okay that 600Mbps is just parity bits and that you can't actually transfer more than 2400Mbps of data. And computers have been fucked with 1000/1024 at least as far back as the 1.44MB = 1.44*1000*1024 floppy which can't be right in any system and probably longer. Ignore it, honestly whoever started this has wasted more time for computer users than whoever dropped the century digits leading to the y2k problem.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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.
His Divine Shadow, but who's counting?
No beer, no TV make Lifthrasir something something
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?
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, you wouldn't necessarily expect to be able to load 3000 tons. Firstly, what type of tonnage are you talking about? In shipping, there are several different types of tonnage, or in other words, different values for the same thing, with at best slightly different names. For example, Gross Register Tonnage, Net Tonnage, Gross Tonnage, Thames tonnage, Panama Canal tonnage, Net Register Tonnage, and who knows what else.
Secondly, suppose a ship has a "capacity of 3000 tons". Could you fit more pillows or gold bars into the ship? Which one will fill the hold first? Can you fit 3000 tons of pillows into a ship with a capacity of 3000 tons? Can you fit 3000 tons of helium in? 3000 tons of depleted uranium? What if the ship is to be sailed from a salt water port into a freshwater lake? Does that affect anything?
Why would you pick tonnage of shipping as an example of regular math? Shipping measurements are all over the place. For example, how long is a ship? Well it depends on the shape of the ship, and where you measure it. Length at the waterline or length overall? With the ship loaded or empty? Heeling or sitting level? Salt water or fresh?
Just about everything to do with computers is simpler and more regular than just about anything related to boating.
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.
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
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.