'm sorry, hard drives. It might be time to ditch you. You were cute when you were only 20MB. But Samsung's new SSD is 256GB, has no moving parts, makes no noise, and is fast enough to make schoolgirls giggle.
OK, I'm lying about the schoolgirls, but it is fast.
First, let's define terms. SSD means solid-state drive. An SSD emulates a hard drive; that's what it looks like to your PC, which means your computer goes about its business as though nothing has changed. An SSD uses solid state memory, which doesn't "forget" when the power goes off.
Because it's a solid state device, it uses less power and accrues virtually no wear and tear. And SSD has no physical parts that can fail.
Samsung says the SSD has a sequential read speed of 200 Mbps and sequential write speed of 160 Mbps. That's well over two times as fast as current hard drives, and probably a lot faster than whatever's in the machine you're reading this on.
Power consumption, more valuable than gold to small-factor hardware designers, is under a watt while the drive is operating.
This SSD will begin its life at 2.5 inches, the size of a laptop drive. And a 1.8-inch model is due late this year. This might not shrink the size of your next laptop, but it will make the battery last longer or tempt the manufacturer to keep the current battery life and just lighten the load. Neither is a bad result.
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May 27, 2008 1:23 PM
"No wear and tear" is very untrue. Indeed there is no moving platter or head. But what about the fact that solid state drives can only handle 10 or 20 thousand read/writes before failure of the memory cells? In devices like digital cameras, and perhaps even for servers to boot locally from (since most of their reads/writes once booted will be across some sort of network) these will work great. As a replacement for a Windows drive that gets read/written constantly over and over, they have a long way to go. Unless there is something new I don't know about.
May 27, 2008 9:37 PM
Quote: "No wear and tear" is very untrue.
Article Quote: accrues virtually no wear and tear
Quote: As a replacement for a Windows drive that gets read/written constantly over and over, they have a long way to go. Unless there is something new I don't know about.
Answer: Wear leveling algorithm.
With modern wear leveling algorithms it is very unlikely that during normal use any one group of cells will require 20K rewrites during the expected lifetime of the device. Reads do not count, only writes. And you better disable defragmenting, as this nearly useless on these devices. The only issue is their current cost.
The only possible exception might be using such a drive in a database server with a lot of users or high rate of data updates, but this does not constitute "normal use".
June 3, 2008 6:35 PM
Posted by: Zeevious
May 27, 2008 1:23 PM
"No wear and tear" is very untrue. Indeed there is no moving platter or head. But what about the fact that solid state drives can only handle 10 or 20 thousand read/writes before failure of the memory cells?
That is not true. Current SSDs have a life expectancy of 1,000,000 read/writes. Add to that lifetime a wear-leveling program and it does look better than the picture you are painting.
June 5, 2008 2:28 AM
Actually these Samsung SSD's have a life expectancy of 10K writes (MLC). The more expensive flash chips that support 1 million writes (SLC) are probably used in a later version of the disk.
However, this is usually not a problem in the "normal life expectancy" of the disk (which is the guarantee period of 1-3 years). For normal office, windows and gaming applications this probably isn't a problem. Unfortunately I'm more interested in server applications like databases and search engines that can benefit from the very low seek times. And for these types of applications with "swapfile-like behavior" this can prove to be a large problem.
September 4, 2008 4:52 AM
The HDD life expectancy based on component reliability is 50,000hrs.
The SSD life expectancy, based on component reliability is equal to its MTBF and is 300,000 to 2,000,000 hrs.
Maybe there is some confusion between current SSD's & Camera Flash chips?