Samsung unveils 32GB Flash-based 'HDD killer'

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Samsung has launched what it reckons its the world's first 32GB NAND Flash-based hard disk drive replacement unit. The company claimed the so-called "solid state disk" can access data three times faster than an HDD can and write files one-and-a-half times more quickly - though we don't know what HDD spec it was comparing its product to.

The SSD is a 2.5in form-factor product that operates at 5V and connects across a 66MHz Ultra DMA parallel ATA bus. Samsung said the unit consumes just five per cent of the energy it takes to run a hard drive.

Samsung launched the product in Taiwan, the better to attract the islands' numerous notebook manufacturers, who produce almost all of the world's mobile computers. Samsung is particularly keen to get its drive into laptops, which it believes will benefit most from the SSD's lower power consumption.

As the world's largest manufacturer of NAND Flash, Samsung wants to broaden the memory technology's appeal beyond MP3 players and memory cards. It has been working with Microsoft on the idea, and Windows Vista will support the use of NAND Flash caches to speed boot times. Intel recently unveiled 'Robson', an add-in card that uses a NAND Flash bank to cache operating system components to reduce start-up times and help cut battery consumption.

Samsung's SSD is seen more as an alternative to an HDD than something that operates alongside one, it seems. Samsung believes the SSD market will be worth $4.5bn by 2010, up from $540m this year. ®

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2006/03/21/samsung_unveils_ssd/

hopefully the beginning of the end of Hard disks in PCs!
 
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Solid state offers significant advantages not only in terms of speed, but also in terms of reliability (no moving parts) and environmental restrictions (again, due to no moving parts). Laptops can be made to withstand impact much better if there was a solid state disk inside, instead of a hard disk, for example.

I'd be interested in the reaction of all the key hard disk manufacturers (particularly those who have no other notable products, such as WD, Maxtor and Seagate).

Of course, HDDs will be here for a while (especially very high capacity drives, for the time being) but I can see the very high end, 15krpm SCSI market gradually being at risk from solid state.
 
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I would be very suprised if the major HDD manufacturers had not invested heavily in solid state memory.
In a few years this will be great though, high capacity, high speed, high reliabilty storage with low power consumption and zero noise and hopefully low cost too.

I can see PCs having no moving parts within 5 years as computing is moving towards efficiency and silence rather than sheer speed.
 
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I agree - even Intel seems to be moving towards lower wattage processors, so it might even be possible to cool lower end, next gen 65nm Dual Core processors passively. (Something of a departure from heavy duty air/water cooling malarkey)

Actually, graphics cards seem to be still hurtling towards Prescott-level heat dissipation so perhaps GPUs will be one of the last to become thermally sensible.
 
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Did anyone else notice it runs on a 66Mhz Parallel ATA bus, or was it just me :p?

What's the point of all the extra speed if it will only be limited by the pants PATA bus?

66Mhz - isn't that 66MB/s? So it will just perform as any normal HDU now, except seek time will be virtually non-existent.
 
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The only problem I can see with flash drives is that flash based technologies have a limited number of writes before they fail, which would present a problem which needs to be overcome before it can be used instead of a hard drive.
 
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i'd still buy a par o these and raid em. it list transfer speeds of 57mb rember unlike spinning hd's thats sustained and not burst or edge of the platter. raid0 could be fun. or how about 4 in a raid0. i would love to see the benches.

thinking about it since the the solid state memory operatees at the same speeds as the ram, couldnt the whole mb arcatecture be rewritten to skip ram all together. becase going through the ide or sata interface HAS to be bottlenecking the solid state hard drive.

OR we could just turn the ram into the main drive and have a 200gb bank. hmmmmmm....
 
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max power said:
i'd still buy a par o these and raid em. it list transfer speeds of 57mb rember unlike spinning hd's thats sustained and not burst or edge of the platter. raid0 could be fun. or how about 4 in a raid0. i would love to see the benches.
A decent 7200rpm drive will get 60MB/s average. You'd be very hard pushed to notice any difference in transfer speed. 4 in a RAID0 would be fruitless as they would be capped at 133Mb/s by the PATA bus.
 
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The performance so far doesn't look that sensational with a quoted read of 57Mbps and a write speed of 32 Mbps - a single raptor could easily better this.....
 
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smids said:
A decent 7200rpm drive will get 60MB/s average. You'd be very hard pushed to notice any difference in transfer speed. 4 in a RAID0 would be fruitless as they would be capped at 133Mb/s by the PATA bus.

whoa there go look at some hd reviews and benches. a lot of drive MAX at around 60mb but thats burst or max and NOT average. even the raptor 74 has a MAX of around 71mb and a min of 50mb ish. and again the max mb transfer speeds are at the edge of the platter the ALWAYS decreasc neat the center. solid state hd's do not have this problem so the spaeed is constant. here:

http://www.storagereview.com/articles/200601/WD1500ADFD_3.html
 
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max power said:
whoa there go look at some hd reviews and benches. a lot of drive MAX at around 60mb but thats burst or max and NOT average. even the raptor 74 has a MAX of around 71mb and a min of 50mb ish. and again the max mb transfer speeds are at the edge of the platter the ALWAYS decreasc neat the center. solid state hd's do not have this problem so the spaeed is constant. here:

http://www.storagereview.com/articles/200601/WD1500ADFD_3.html
Well, that's not what I've seen from HDTach. Most HDU's start about 80MB's on the outer edge down to about 40 at the centre. A raptor 75GB starts at about 90MB/s and the 150GB raptor about 95MB/s outer edge. I have owned all 3 versions of raptors and you are wrong. Yes, speed is constant (on a solid state) but you will not notice this unless you have a near full 7200rpm where it will be accessing data from the centre.

What did you prove from that link? The raptor 150 showing 88MB/s max and 60Mb/s minimum.
 
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Hmmm. I agree that it will be constant across the solid state device and I also think that they are the future and that the Samsung device is a good step forward, but this really isn't good enough yet for the mainstream or enthusiast market.
 
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ok then here look at it this way. for those of us that rember the first home use hard drives they were huge slow and had a compartively tiny amount of space, ok now look at this drive as the first (possibly) solid state drive for the home. the only place to go is up.

oh and that link i provided was just to show that hd's have a min transfer and a max transfer speed while solid states do not. and i honestely do think u would notice the differance.
 
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max power said:
ok then here look at it this way. for those of us that rember the first home use hard drives they were huge slow and had a compartively tiny amout=nt of space, ok now look at this drive as the first (possibly) solid state drive for the home. the only place to go is up.

oh and that link i provided was just to show that hd's have a min transfer and a max transfer speed while solid states do not. and i honestely do think u would notice the differance.
I knew HDU's degrade in transfer from outer edge to inner ;).

You wouldn't notice the difference though because the transfer rate would only come into play when transferring files - something which the raptor is actually faster than this drive - though only through the manufacturer's stupidity for using an aging bus and limiting to to the middle of that bus too!

I agree it is a step forward but that drive is no better, costs more and is too small considering the alternatives. When they come back with a better model, then I'll be excited.
 
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I don't think they expect people to be awfully excited about this particular model - rather, the general concept and showing that it can be done, seems to be the main point.

Also remember that solid state memory has an almost-zero "seek time" - this would be perfect for multi-user database applications where a lot of random seek takes place from all over the storage area.
 
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jhmaeng said:
I don't think they expect people to be awfully excited about this particular model - rather, the general concept and showing that it can be done, seems to be the main point.

Also remember that solid state memory has an almost-zero "seek time" - this would be perfect for multi-user database applications where a lot of random seek takes place from all over the storage area.
Yeah, I noted that in my first post - zero seek and the fact the drive will run silent is good, but I can't get my round around the limitation they put on it? :confused: It can read 3x faster and write 1.5x but it won't as they capped the bus.
 
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As I said, it's probably a limitation that will be very swiftly overcome as they develop a proper, public release model. I think this current version is a beta, demonstrating the possibilities. By the time they release a product with a reasonable price and performance, I would expect to see S-ATA interface and much better throughput (since solid state is supposed to be capable of much faster)

In the case of the database server model, a very fast maximum sustained transfer rate won't be so important anyway because so much time is already saved by the lack of moving actuators (and each "service" of data is unlikely to consist of large files in any case)
 
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