RSSSamsung to sample 256 GB solid state drive in late Q3
By Ed Oswald | Published May 27, 2008, 6:59 PM
The Korean electronics maker showed off its biggest and fastest SSD in the 2.5" category, bringing its solid state hard drives ever closer to its HDDs in capacity.
Samples of the drive will go out to Samsung's clients in September, with release targeted for the end of the year. Also in development is a 1.8-inch version of the same drive, which is slated for fourth quarter 2008 availability.
Drive manufacturers have spent a lot of time recently on SSD. SanDisk was one of the first to come out with drives commercially in 32 and 64 GB capacities, but the small size and high price have limited adoption.
The technology is alluring, as it promises many advantages: First, power consumption is much lower, allowing for increased battery life in laptop deployments. Second, the lack of moving parts means a decreased risk of mechanical failure and an improved resistance to shock.
Possibly most attractive about SSDs is the allure of memory being technically faster than spinning platters -- a bone of contention for Samsung's and Toshiba's competition in the conventional HDD space, including Seagate. Samsung and several other companies this year have already introduced half-terabyte 2.5" HDDs, but solid state drives are gaining momentum.
Apple's MacBook Air uses a solid-state drive from Samsung, but it only is 64 GB in capacity and comes with a price tag ($3,098 USD) nearly twice of its HDD-based twin. Other laptops have come out with SSDs, but are similarly high priced.
Samsung's 256 GB drive measures in at 2.5 inches, and according to the company, will have a read speed of 200 MB/s, and writes at 160 MB/s. The question of whether that refers to sustained transfer rate is up in the air; conventional HDD manufacturers have been known to tout their interface transfer speeds (such as SATA II's 3 GB/s) as transfer rates, when expert builders know better. Power consumption comes in at just under a watt when in use.
With measurements of 9.5mm (.37 inch) in thickness, Samsung's drive could conceivably fit inside the MacBook Air, although the company has not specifically mentioned any applications for the drive yet.
Samsung's projected ramp up comes at a good time for the SSD industry in general: From now until 2012, the market is expected to see as much as 124% annual growth.
I know our company uses EMC Symmetrix and they have some solid state drives in it and WOW ITS FAST. Its great when it comes to a lot of reads and writes for our critical transation applications. This would be great if we can get 256GB ones.
http://www.infoworld.com...lid-state-drives_1.html
or
http://www.emc.com/produ...are/symmetrix-dmx-4.htm
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|You're putting critical transaction applications (which I'm assuming has many reads/writes) on flash based drives...how long before those suckers die on you? I won't want to be the one responsible for those databases. :)
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|That makes no sense Niro. Your comparing a Hard Drive with moving parts verse a Hard Drive with no moving parts. Don't make comments unless you know what your talking about, you cant compare SD Cards with Solid State Hard Drives.
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|He's referring to the erase cycles that plague flash memory. Writing places stress on the cell due to the nature of static memory. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_memory scroll down a bit and read the "Memory wear" section.
Flash memory is good for read only applications though, like games (eg loading levels).
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|The wear is less of an issue nowadays with virtually all high-end flash drives implement wear-leveling. It would have been an issue if you were to rewrite the 250Gb thousands times a day but that's not the case. Also since there is no head movements, storage fragmentation is also a minor issue (hence no need for defragmentation work on the storage)
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|Current flash drives can do about 100,000 cycles...how long before a heavily used sql or exchange database destroys those drives?
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|"Don't make comments unless you know what your talking about"
I would make the same suggestion to you...
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|Actually -current- drives are more like 1 million or close to, if they're using NAND or techniques adopted from NAND. Still, 100k writes a day is reasonable for a server environment. Even if it's evenly distributing the load across the blocks, I'm not sure I would recommend it for a server role for a long-term solution.
For a personal or small business role it'd probably be good though.
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|I think your statement is a bit misleading... head movement doesn't cause fragmentation, it's just the reason fragmentation slows down HDDs. Solid state drives will still be fragmented, but it won't cause a performance hit... or at least not a noticeable one; a fragmented file still has more data that needs to be read from the file table than an unfragmented one, but a few more bytes won't really matter.
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|so the true question is how is the lifespan of such SSD drives compared to the current HDD drives. Also we could put into the variables how long a typical user actually has a drive before it is replaced with something larger or the laptop itself dies? And if you're looking at battery life how much longer will a typical laptop battery last in real-world scenarios with these drives installed instead of an HDD.
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|If they have the money they would be replacing it before they die so where is the problem if they get better speed?
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|We're not talking about typical users here...we were talking about an transaction heavy sql or exchange database running on these things in an enterprise class SAN...unless the "typical" user where you're from has a symmetrix SAN loaded with SSD's and plugs their laptop into it at home?
As far as which drive will last longer...the current HDD's will outlast a heavily used SDD drives by many, many years.
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|If I had a way of telling when a hard drive is about to die before it happens...I would be a very rich man. Unfortunately, with no magic 8 ball to look into the future, how do you go about preemptively replacing expensive, mission critical drives? Once a month? Once every 6 months?
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|Don't expensive, mission critical drives have SMART capabilities like home drives do? Plus, I'm assuming that those drives are set up with some kind of redundancy (RAID 5 or something like that). With SMART + RAID, do you *really* need to go about preemptively replacing drives?
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