Samsung's Solid State Disk Drive Unveiled

[iddo]

Hello all,
After our successful previous article on Samsung Hybrid hard drive we have just published a follow up covering the upcoming solid state hard drive.

Unlike the HHD the upcoming SSD will work with XP as well as Vista (although it will fair better under the new OS). The main problem will be price - around 700-1000 for a 2.5' 32GB drive on early 2007. It will start with portables but will move to desktop later on.

We are actually going to take a look at SSD performance in the near future something which many people will surly appreciate around here.

Enjoy,
Iddo

 

[Seekermeister]

At those kind of prices, I hope that these HDs are not life limited like their USB cousins.

 

[iddo]

They are not cheap and will not get very cheap for a while - this is their major problem.

Everybody is mentioning reliability - from all the people in the industry I was talking to this is no longer an issue (and I am talking of people who are using this technology for years. Remember that military / aerospace have been using this technology for years - it is just getting into the commercial market now.

P.S. we just got some new better pictures of the drive from Samsung - so enjoy.

 

[fuzzybabybunny]

I absolutely cannot wait for SSDs to become mainstream. Hard drives are SOOOOOO slow

I'm always sitting at my computer, waiting. My dual core 4GHz CPU is waiting for data to process, my RAM is just chilling, but my HDD is going nuts trying to keep up.

 

[iddo]

m... if you can afford a 4GHz CPU (probably OC) and Rabel XT you might be able to afford the new SSD (at least 3 different manufacturers are going to enter the market very soon now).

 

[Bateluer]

32GB good would be great for my OS, and my possibly my apps drive. But thats woefully tiny for my games and storage drives.

Needs to be over 160GB, preferably over 300GB.

 

[0roo0roo]

Originally posted by: iddo
They are not cheap and will not get very cheap for a while - this is their major problem.

Everybody is mentioning reliability - from all the people in the industry I was talking to this is no longer an issue (and I am talking of people who are using this technology for years. Remember that military / aerospace have been using this technology for years - it is just getting into the commercial market now.

P.S. we just got some new better pictures of the drive from Samsung - so enjoy.

well military and aerospace also have budgets and mindset of doing lots of upkeep on their stuff. preemptive replacing bits of flash mem probably isn't a big deal for them so i'm not sure it means its really reliable. planes last as long as they do because they are practically torn down and have bits replaced constantly

 

[Ilikepiedoyou]

Originally posted by: Seekermeister
At those kind of prices, I hope that these HDs are not life limited like their USB cousins.

what does this mean?

 

[oynaz]

USB thumbdrives can only be written to a limited number of times. About 10000 IIRC

 

[iddo]

I will quate from my own article:
Q: Is there currently some sort of technical limitation on the creation of SSDs other than cost, and what about the reliability of flash media?

A: Historically SSDs were limited in the number of R/W cycles. However, with modern flash technology and error correction, the reliability of the flash in a PC exceeds 10 years...



You can choose not to belive Samsung or m-systems which gave us the same answer but this is basically the answer you will get anywhere I belive...

 

[fuzzybabybunny]

Originally posted by: iddo
m... if you can afford a 4GHz CPU (probably OC) and Rabel XT you might be able to afford the new SSD (at least 3 different manufacturers are going to enter the market very soon now).

My dual 4GHz is an overclocked el-cheapo Pentium D 805. The Rebel XT is also the cheapest DSLR that Canon offers (barring the 300D). I definitely won't be able to afford these drives when they come out

 

[Seekermeister]

At those prices, they should offer a lifetime parts and labor warranty.

EDIT: Lifetime of the owner...not the component.

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: oynaz
USB thumbdrives can only be written to a limited number of times. About 10000 IIRC

The number of writes varies with the exact type of flash memory used... and I think even the 'cheap' stuff is more like 100K writes now.

This is probably a big part of why you can get a ~4GB jump drive for well under $100, but a 32GB SSD costs $2000-3000+.

SSDs are great... but they still cost too much to be mainstream. Although for a laptop or something where you don't need that much storage, or as a boot drive, maybe smaller ones (8-16GB) could be feasible in some consumer systems in a few years.

 

[zephyrprime]

Originally posted by: oynaz
USB thumbdrives can only be written to a limited number of times. About 10000 IIRC

It's 10000 per block and each block is only a few K big. Even cheap usb drives have wear leveling built in to shuffle blocks around to attain even wear.

 

[Seekermeister]

Those write numbers sound sufficient for thumb drives, considering their prices, but a harddrive is going to go through those number of cycles very quickly.

 

[iddo]

The cost for 32GB will be around 1000$ not 2000-3000$ - still expensive but it will come down - I would say that by the end of 2007 we might see sub 500$ 32GB SSDs.

 

[blackrod]

blackrod is excited for this new technology.

 

[So]

BS. the article quotes "ten years" and completely washes over just HOW MANY R/W cycles the drive can handle.