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Samsung Launches SSD 830 Drive

Posted by samzenpus on from the new-toys dept.

MojoKid writes "Although they haven't been big hits with enthusiasts, Samsung's solid state drives have been successful due to strong relationships with a number of OEMs, including Apple. With the release of their new SSD 830 Series Solid State Drives, however, Samsung appears ready to make inroads with enthusiasts as well. The SSD 830 tested here is 256GB model, with eight 32GB Samsung NAND flash memory chips, 256MB of Samsung DDR2 SDRAM cache memory, and a new Samsung SSD Controller. The Samsung controller features a 3-ARM core design with support for SATA III 6Gb/s interface speeds. Performance-wise, the Samsung SSD 830 Series drive offered the best Read performance of the group that was tested, even versus the latest SandForce-based SSDs, though the SSD 830 couldn't quite catch SandForce in writes."

29 of 148 comments (clear)

  1. What will happen when they die? by Jane+Q.+Public · · Score: 2

    Does anybody have a backup plan for when their SSDs die? After all, unlike magnetic media, SSDs have a limited number of writes. AFAIK, none of them are rated yet for over a million writes, so they are bound to fail at some point.

    When SSDs were newer, I argued here on /. (against vociferous claims to the contrary) that I could write a program that would break an SSD quickly. The wear-leveling is better today, but since then such applications have actually been written and tested, and they work.

    1. Re:What will happen when they die? by Microlith · · Score: 4, Interesting

      AFAIK, none of them are rated yet for over a million writes, so they are bound to fail at some point.

      That rating, mind you, is per cell. Virtually all SSDs do some form of wear leveling and are over-provisioned to ensure that no one erase block gets worn out early. And the "backup plan" is pretty much the same as for a regular hard drive: duplicates on RAID for reliability and backups for failure recovery.

      I could write a program that would break an SSD quickly

      Sure, you can deliberately and forcefully break an SSD. But the amount of IO required to do so tends to go above and beyond what even the average enthusiast will do. And if your typical IO pattern is one that will break an SSD, then you should plan for it and determine if the speedup is worth the cost.

    2. Re:What will happen when they die? by 0123456 · · Score: 4, Informative

      Fortunately the Intel SSDs come with a 'wear indicator' showing how much life is left. Mine are all showing 99-100% life left, so unless I hit the Intel 320 8MB bug that randomly trashes the drive I don't see failure being a problem before I replace them.

    3. Re:What will happen when they die? by vadim_t · · Score: 4, Informative

      So? HDDs also die. They're guaranteed to in fact, since they have plenty moving parts that will wear out eventually. I've had quite a few drives die on me.

      SDDs at least in theory wear out in a predictable manner and can deal with the effects without data loss. Since flash fails on write, a SDD conceivably could (I don't know if any do that) reach a point where it says "that's it, no more redundancy left, read only access from now", which is a whole lot better than a head crash.

      Everybody should have a backup plan, regardless of storage tech.

    4. Re:What will happen when they die? by SiMac · · Score: 3, Informative

      Does anybody have a backup plan for when their SSDs die? After all, unlike magnetic media, SSDs have a limited number of writes. AFAIK, none of them are rated yet for over a million writes, so they are bound to fail at some point.

      Buy a new SSD? SSD failure is predictable. If you're lucky, your firmware will not try to write to blocks that are past their rated # of write cycles and so when your SSD reaches the end of its lifespan, your data will become read only. Even if not, you can still tell very easily if you're approaching end of lifespan using SMART status. I suspect that SSD death is much more predictable than HD death...

    5. Re:What will happen when they die? by DamonHD · · Score: 2

      Running a busy USENET server (I think I hovered at ~#10 in the stats for while) used to wear out normal hard drives too, back in the day; SSDs aren't especially novel in that regard IMHO. It's really only a matter of how frequent and comprehensive your backups are.

      And as my USENET data didn't last longer than about a week then I think I regarded backups as largely pointless except for some very low-traffic local groups and just threw away a drive when it died and let the new one fill up again!

      BTW, I've been running a server entirely on a mixture of SD cards and USB Flash for a couple of years so far, so good. I have taken efforts to reduce spurious writes but I still make sure that I have backups of critical stuff elsewhere: http://www.earth.org.uk/note-on-SheevaPlug-setup.html

      Rgds

      Damon

      --
      http://m.earth.org.uk/
    6. Re:What will happen when they die? by Terrasque · · Score: 2

      This might be of interest to you :

      SSD Write Endurance 25nm Vs 34nm

      --
      It's The Golden Rule: "He who has the gold makes the rules."
    7. Re:What will happen when they die? by Microlith · · Score: 2

      Depends on your perspective then, I suppose. Inexpensive for a server isn't exactly inexpensive for the average home user.

    8. Re:What will happen when they die? by 0123456 · · Score: 2

      The SSD (x25m 80Gb in my case) has been running happily for over a year - that's a pretty good run for something that makes me safe against basic power failures and is blindingly fast.

      I believe that 'basic power failures' were the primary cause of the Intel 320 8MB bug; from what I've read it seemed that when the power went out it didn't update the mapping table properly so the drive was toast when you rebooted.

    9. Re:What will happen when they die? by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 5, Informative

      Because they are somewhat more expensive, an SSD failure is a little more painful than an HDD failure; but the basic rules of "don't trust a hard drive" really haven't changed.

      The mechanicals sometimes last a decade if you get lucky, or die within days of install if you don't. Moral of the story: If you store anything on a hard drive, you don't love that something very much. You'd better have backups.

      The shape of the failure probability/time graph is likely a bit different for SSDs; but the "You'd better have backups" message, and the available means of taking those backups are pretty much exactly the same.

      Again, because of the somewhat higher cost, burning your way through SSDs is a little more painful than burning your way through HDDs; but anybody whose plans involve just trusting a hard drive has always been doomed.

    10. Re:What will happen when they die? by DamonHD · · Score: 2

      It's entirely fast enough for my purposes: I have front-end mirrors and CDN to serve data quickly to end users. It also handles my mail (including many thousands of SPAMs per day), and SVN and so on.

      And it does mean that I've been able to run the entire system off-grid, on a few solar panels propped up against a wall! B^>

      Rgds

      Damon

      --
      http://m.earth.org.uk/
    11. Re:What will happen when they die? by vadim_t · · Score: 4, Informative

      Maintaining a count of how many times any given cell has been written would take a lot more memory (not to mention processing power) than these devices contain.

      Bullshit.

      SSDs erase in extremely large blocks, like 256K. Having a counter per block is not a problem. It works out to 16K of memory per GB for a 32 bit counter per block.

      It probably doesn't even take an extra space, since a block probably already contains metadata and ECC, so a simple counter probably fits in there nicely, It won't even cause any extra wear because the only time you want to change the counter is when the block is being rewritten anyway.

    12. Re:What will happen when they die? by lucifuge31337 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Virtually all SSDs do some form of wear leveling and are over-provisioned to ensure that no one erase block gets worn out early.

      Still a kludge. I'll be waiting for a technology that doesn't wear out at all - or at least not within a human lifetime. Flash memory is still half-baked IMHO.

      So what exactly are you doing for data storage right now? Surely not a regular hard drive, because that doesn't meet your criteria either. Are you carving things into brass plates?

      --
      Do not fold, spindle or mutilate.
    13. Re:What will happen when they die? by TheLink · · Score: 4, Informative

      See these (their usages might match slashdotters more):
      http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/05/the-hot-crazy-solid-state-drive-scale.html

      These rates are probably for "normal users" (as in normal users who buy SSDs ;) ):
      http://www.behardware.com/articles/831-7/components-returns-rates.html
      http://www.behardware.com/articles/810-6/components-returns-rates.html

      Note the common failure modes are not very graceful, they're usually brutal and/or weird:
      http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r25491097-Dell-Laptop-and-SSD-Time-warp-issue
      http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?83778-Time-warp-drive-vanishing-after-3-days-data-gone-on-reboot...I-need-3-to-5-users-with-this-issue-to-help

      http://www.techspot.com/news/44694-intel-confirms-8mb-bug-in-320-series-ssds-fix-available.html
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X25-M#Past_bugs

      In contrast with most (not all of course) of the HDD failures I've seen you still can get a lot of data out.

      --
    14. Re:What will happen when they die? by izomiac · · Score: 2

      Since flash fails on write, a SDD conceivably could (I don't know if any do that) reach a point where it says "that's it, no more redundancy left, read only access from now", which is a whole lot better than a head crash.

      That's been my experience exactly. Every PC I've owned has "died" from a HDD crash, usually sudden. The last SSD I had hit its erase limit in about two years (small SSD and I'm prone to reinstalling various OSes monthly). The lovely thing was that I could run a maintenance tool and see exactly how many erases were left on each cell (BTW the wear leveling was only 1% from mathematically perfect). This allowed a simple extrapolation down to the day some cells would start hitting their advertised capacity, although the drive held out overall a bit longer.

      The initial symptoms were Windows blue screening on boot (1,000,000 writes per boot, so no surprises there), so I quick formatted the disk and reinstalling thinking it was probably Windows sucking again. From there the drive lasted a couple more days and became completely read-only. I keep good backups so I didn't need to salvage anything, but even now I can throw it in a USB enclosure and get my data off of it.

    15. Re:What will happen when they die? by aztracker1 · · Score: 2

      Have had that on two Intel drives now... :( The one in my laptop is still going, and I used crucual & corsair drives last turn around... won't go back to HDD for boot devices, too big a difference.

      --
      Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
    16. Re:What will happen when they die? by lucifuge31337 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      This is about upgrading; why upgrade to a crappy technology just because it's faster?

      I see you haven't spent much time in the computer industry. Enjoy your Windows 95 and ham radio license.

      --
      Do not fold, spindle or mutilate.
  2. Big questions by rsborg · · Score: 4, Informative

    1) How does this Samsung chipset compare vs latest Sandforce2 in terms of compressed read/writes?
    2) TRIM support?
    3) OSX friendliness?
    4) Cost?
    5) Size max?

    So far I've identified 2 use cases that have very nice sweet-spot answers - a) For a desktop with PCI-e, the OCZ Revodrive3 X2 just gives amazing performance, completely bypassing SATA and delivering unbeatable performance/cost ratio. b) For a laptop solution, I'm more interested in max storage/price/performance, and the 512GB Crucial m4 seems unparalleled in delivering this (expensive at $700, but can completely replace an laptop HDD).

    It will be interesting to see if Samsung is ready to challenge this market.

    --
    Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
    1. Re:Big questions by Nahor · · Score: 2

      A good garbage collection can't replace TRIM. Overwritten blocks are not the only ones that can be GC'ed. There is also the blocks from deleted files. And unless the FS uses those blocks first (which any recent filesystem will avoid to do to prevent fragmentation on hard-drives), they will eventually use a significant amount of the SSD and kill the drive performance.

      And worse, some modern filesystems use "copy-on-write", so no data is ever overwritten (from the SSD point of view) the SSD performance will drop even more quickly.

  3. Price??? by Rick+Richardson · · Score: 3, Informative

    "It's really hard to rate a solid-state drive (SSD) without knowing its exact pricing, and that's just what we had to do with the Samsung 830 series. Samsung has been very tight-lipped about how much the 830 costs and will not reveal that until the drive is available for purchase in October." - CNET

    1. Re:Price??? by timeOday · · Score: 3, Insightful

      New high-end products reduce prices by devaluing older products, not by being cheap in themselves.

  4. Dell OEM Samsung drives are bad by DigiShaman · · Score: 4, Informative

    If you're purchasing a Dell, stay away from the Samsung SSD option as they're OEM. The drives are absolute shit. Most likely a firmware issue, often Windows will just freeze because writes cannot be further committed. I've been through two different Dell laptops models and they experienced the same issue using this same drive. Only when we swapped drives did the issue go away. And that was after Dell decided to swap the motherboard, ram, CPU, and video card. Nice.

    --
    Life is not for the lazy.
    1. Re:Dell OEM Samsung drives are bad by DigiShaman · · Score: 2

      http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/disk-drives/f/3534/t/19310219.aspx Good luck!

      --
      Life is not for the lazy.
  5. Re:why haven't they "been a big hit with enthusias by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 5, Informative

    Historically, Samsung's offerings have been relatively solid; but quite unexciting in performance terms, and pretty tepid in performance/dollar.

    OEMs love 'em because, while mediocre, they have been comparatively reliable(no equivalents of the Jmicron controller debacle, firmware that makes them show up as only 8MB in size, assorted bleeding-edge weirdness and general "No, we really do have to offer these things under a 3-year warranty to get business customers"-stopping issues.)

    The enthusiast-darling crown has changed hands a number of times. Intel was the one to have a little while ago, I think that they've been eclipsed by some of the newer Sandforce gear of late. There are rather more brands than there are chipsets, so brand enthusiasm tends to swing wildly based on cost and who is releasing the new hotness chipset this month.

  6. Re:why haven't they "been a big hit with enthusias by JonySuede · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Avoid SuperTalent like the plague they are.
    Avoid anything used or refurbished.
    Avoid any hybrid solution as they drain more battery.
    If you don't need a lot space and need extreme reliability look at intel 311 series (those drives kick ass) or any SLC based SSD for that matter.
    If you don't need extreme reliability, but don't want to play a game of Russian roulette with 3 bullets instead of one (like in the case of a SuperTalent drive), look and anything sand-force based.

    Since you have an aging laptop, you do not need something that can saturate sata 6Gb/s so try to find something like an OCZ Vertex 2 1 drive or a Corsair Force 1 as in real life they are quite similar (you do not need the third edition (both drives have a V3) in an aging laptop).

    Also bench the writing speed only one or two time as the more you bench the slower your drive get, you can usually bring some of it back by emptying the drive by formating it to ntfs in windows 7 and the use a force trim utility, wait about 15 minutes. After that you can reformat your drive to your file system of choice and the performance should be OK

    1- In synthetic benchmark they differs a little bit but it is imperceptible in real life, unless your main workload is approximated correctly by the synthetic benchmark you were looking at.

    --
    Jehovah be praised, Oracle was not selected
  7. Re:why haven't they "been a big hit with enthusias by ArsenneLupin · · Score: 4, Funny

    yay, the sup html tag is to hot for Slashdot a site for supposed nerd.....

    And apparently, you are too sexy for preview...

  8. Predictable? by TheLink · · Score: 2

    SSD failure is predictable.

    That's bullshit. You call the following predictable?
    http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r25491097-Dell-Laptop-and-SSD-Time-warp-issue
    http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?83778-Time-warp-drive-vanishing-after-3-days-data-gone-on-reboot...I-need-3-to-5-users-with-this-issue-to-help

    http://www.techspot.com/news/44694-intel-confirms-8mb-bug-in-320-series-ssds-fix-available.html
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X25-M#Past_bugs

    I might buy a Samsung SSD. The rest (except for Intel) don't have such a great track record even when compared to hard drive failure rates (and Intel's failures haven't been very confidence inspiring).

    http://www.behardware.com/articles/831-7/components-returns-rates.html
    http://www.behardware.com/articles/810-6/components-returns-rates.html

    For some people the failure is predictable in that they can almost bet the drives will fail within a year! http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/05/the-hot-crazy-solid-state-drive-scale.html

    But I don't regard that sort of predictability of failure as acceptable, unless the manufacturer is paying me to use their products and gives me plenty of spares.

    --
    1. Re:Predictable? by vadim_t · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Different kind of failure. You're linking to firmware bugs. HDDs have those as well

      In this thread we're discussing wear induced failure.

  9. Re:Usually? by TheLink · · Score: 2

    I have never had a hard drive fail in this way. I have never seen a SMART status go bad before I had a very sudden loss.

    What do you use to monitor SMART on your drives?

    --