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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
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 transfer speed they tout is probably the peak transfer speed. But the time it takes to launch a program also depends on factors besides the transfer speed. Like seek time for example.
Hard disks have to position the heads at the right sector before starting a read. Maybe these SSDs don't have a solid state analog to that activity and are thus faster by however long that takes.
I don't know the specifics, but I'd guess that comparing overall program access and launch time to peak transfer speed is apples and oranges.
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.
Ah yes, but you don't have the seek times of the 7200rpm drive which are at best ~7ms. And since opening an application involves opening lots of different files (in different physical locations on the drive), this is where launching an app can be 10x faster.
So for straight writing a single, large, contiguous piece of data, it's only 3.5 times faster. For loading 200 random, tiny files, it's ten times faster.
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.
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?
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?
This is somethat that a lot of people tend to overlook, either because they don't understand how a hard drive works, or because they don't stop and think about it. Loading programmes, especially ones which rely on libraries, translation files, multimedia, etc... at other locations on a disk would greatly slow down a HDD in comparison to an SSD.
Contrasted with SSDs, which are pretty much random access devices, in order to read each of those files from an HDD, there are basically 3 time factors to consider.
1. Seek time. The time it takes to move a reader head to a specific track (ring of data on a platter). Assuming that there is only this read taking place, you can pretty much assume that the reader head moves from its current location to the correct spot on the disk right away. Things are not always this pretty, though.
2. Rotation time. On average, you will have to wait half a rotation for the correct spot on the disk to spin around to the reader heads. There may be algorithms designed to mitigate this by reading even as it waits. In case the read is large enough to span a significant portion of the track, it can append that buffered data later, but I don't know if this is done or not.
3. Read time. This is the amount of time required to read the data off of a single track, and can take up to 1 rotation of the platter to complete.
So while the GP has a point in that people need to be careful about what kinds of statistics they believe, he/she glosses over the fact that reading a single piece of data with an HDD is hardly a random access, constant time operation (or linear time for n pieces of data).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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