Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Samsung Announces Fast 256GB Solid State Drive (SSD)
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Well, it's a good question, and to a large extent I suppose it depends on what you're doing with it and how full the drive is. Bear in mind hard drives will slow down as they fill up while an SSD drive speed basically remains constant. I have seen a test where the current 64 GB SSD drive smoked a Hitachi 7K in small random read tests (by about 2X), and this new drive appears to be even faster overall.
I still don't think a 2.5" hard disc drive is going to keep up. At best it's going to maybe pull even in certain tests and get destroyed in others. Add in the durability, noise, and battery life advantages of SSD and it's no contest. The only thing keeping SSD back now is price and capacity and those are going to rapidly disappear.
True but I can't see HDD being dumped. It's more probable there will always be a caste system of Fast SSD at the top with less capacity but more performance and HDD below that with more capacity but less performance.
May not be within 5 years, but I do agree with you in concept.
The iPhone and iPod Touch use Flash memory. The iPhone has one slot and the iPod Touch has two slots. So if the maximum Flash memory chip is 16GB, the iPhone would max out at 16GB and the iPod Touch at 32GB, as they currently do.
The Classic iPods have 1.8 inch hard drives. So this technology could find it's way in there for sure.
The iPod Nano (all versions) uses the same type of Flash memory as the iPhone and iPod Touch.
The 1 inch drive storage form factor is used in Compact Flash memory cards, and thus used in high end digital cameras.
Yep, memory prices definitely decrease over time. Around 1993, a 32MB (that's Megabyte) SIMM cost around $3,200. Today, that same memory goes for $5 if you can find it, or need it.
Density is only one measurement. You still have to take into account rotation and head positioning, plus latency. There is also the data transfer limitation from the disk to the head and through the HD circuity.
The 64 dollar question will be if we see a new HD design as flash memory becomes cheaper. The current design requires that we still have some sort of interface such as S-ATA and IDE (P-ATA).
Who knows, we may see something more attune to the implementation we see in the iPods and iPhone. The problem with this approach is space.
My guess, in the future, we will probably see a new interface that is oriented towards flash memory instead of the current hard drive implementation. However, it will not be surface or socket mount. Instead it will still have a HD connector of some sort like today.
Where space/weight/power consumption is not a concern (i.e. desktop pc's), I can't see the market moving to SSD's for a while (unless they are a lot faster, in which cases they will be boot drives/scratch drives/swap file drives.)
Its gonna take a lot to wean people off the $110 750gb 3.5" drives. While SSD's are progressing fast (256gb for what, $5k?), they've obviously still got a long way to go.
Having said that, I'd say next year we will start seeing SSD's more than infrequently in laptops. Different concerns, different requirements.
What about as a Photoshop scratch disk? We currently have dual 10K Raptors in a RAID 0 stripe connected via eSATA. Could the current SSDs compete with that?
Part of what Samsung are saying here here by using a custom drive controller chip which lets them build a drive using cheap Mutli-level chips (same as used in iPhone) and get the same or better performance as expensive single-level chips (like used in Airs SSD).
So price for 64gb should drop by half
Apple might just "ask" to get one with PATA, just like they asked Intel to shrink that processor. Or, update the Macbook Air Logic board to one with a SATA Interface.
me too!! i dont remember what its called, but it has much better densities and all that (puts the data on the walls aswell as the holes). sounds like an awsome product for the same price (basically)
If you have an insane amount of money to spent give it a try and don't forget to report back
I am not sure what the typical access patterns look like for PS scratch disks. And another unknown is how well RAID controller can handle SSDs. RAID adapters assume that a seek operation takes time and are thus optimized to reduce this time. Often by caching data. So you might lose performance there.
But this leads to a very critical point. Current operation systems and their file systems are not optimized for SSDs yet. In the long run SSDs will blow away and ultimately replace HDDs.
The biggest current issue nevertheless is the real world availability of those SSDs..
I think that's something different, though I never heard of that. IBM calles its own "Racetrack memory" http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article3728060.ece
I just found the link above, and I remember that I've read about that some time ago in the newspaper. The funny thing about that article is..who really needs to store 500,000 songs on the go? Already 40'000 is way enough I think.
In the Wikipedia article for Holographic Memory there isn't even one word about IBM. So maybe something similar, but from other companies.
Anyway, the future will bring nice technology!
no lol..
YES!! thats it!!! it sounds pretty good, and they say it will stay around the same price. im extremely intrigued
Sorry, but this simple linear multiplication (64GB $1000 x 4 = 256GB $4000) is rubbish, not to mention using Apple's normally bloated BTO price. SSD prices, along with every other product in the world, are much more complex than that. The cost of large capacity SSDs is much higher than if it were directly proportional to the costs of lower-capacity models. Also, not every SSD is made the same, and the fastest SSDs from well-known brands have historically been much more expensive than a similar capacity, slower SSD from a smaller, more generic brand. There are also all kinds of flash types, architectures, controller technology, that have varying materials and R&D costs. Not only that, but market demand and intended clientèle play a large part in the current SSD market. Most customers for SSDs are large enterprises, defense contractors, aerospace companies, military, which will pay a large premium for these devices. They are basically charging what these types of organizations will bear at this point. They are going to have to restructure the ridiculous prices for consumer SSD products..
Another thing to consider is that SSD prices are hard to track down. Most manufacturers do not list prices on their websites, and many of their distributors are set-up to only offer these things OEM. The ones that are easiest to find retail prices for are the smaller, cheaper consumer-focused models. However, here is a small sampling of prices I was able to find on the internet. These prices come from Google Product/Yahoo search, Newegg, CDW, and a bunch of small distributor websites found on SSD manufacturer's websites. There are many other companies selling large 128GB+ SSDs such as Mtron, BitMicro, A-Data, Adtron, etc but prices could not be located.
256GB SSDs
Super Talent 3.5 inch 256GB SATA = $5,910.00
Super Talent 2.5" 256GB = $5,950
Axiom 2.5" SATA 256GB = $6,849.99
128GB SSDs
SUPER TALENT FSD28GC25M 2.5" 128GB SATA = $3,049
MTRON PRO 7500 3.5" 128GB SSD = $3,495
MemoRight GT 2.5" 128GB SATA SSD = $3,539
Super Talent 2.5" 128GB DuraDrive = $2,990
Super Talent 2.5" 128GB = $3,260.00
Super Talent 3.5" 128GB = $3,899.00
Anyways, the good thing about this specific Samsung announcement is that even though these new SSDs are going to be ultra-fast (and therefore expensive), they were still able to construct them using MLC flash, which has historically been much cheaper than SLC flash, but also significantly slower. So hopefully this line of devices will bring fast SSD pricing out of the stratosphere.
Highly likely. Although the 3.5" form factor won't go down without a fight, as HDDs have a huge advantage there.
This is good news, though a 128GB version on the MBA will be released before the 256GB obviously, and how much extra would the price be between the 64GB version and 128GB Version? (about $900-1100) im guessing
Apple Insider said:
This is the most important part of this announcement, forget about the capacity and speed.
This technology could reduce the price of SSDs, and that's their main problem.
Cost is a bigger factor then capacity.
Pundits have been saying for decades that "silicon is cheaper then iron", and yet we still use the latter to build are mass storage devices because while that adage is true for raw material costs, it has so far been the extreme and exact opposite in terms of the finished product.
1TB SSDs for $250 are likely far more then five years away, IMO.
Wirelessly posted (iPhone: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/4A102 Safari/419.3)
Things are definitely improving with SSDs but it is going to take some time before the price makes them practical enough to be a standard.
Things are definitely improving with SSDs but it is going to take some time before the price makes them practical enough to be a standard.
I doubt that SSD drives will overtake hard drives any time soon. Not enough capacity and still too expensive. I wonder if/when we'll see holographic storage & memristors in the consumer market.
Something I'd really like to see is a SSD RAID. Just curious how performance would compare, especially against 15,000 RPM SAS drives. I know SSD would not have any where near the storage, but speed would be the interesting part. I also checked, and Secure Digital cards would fit into a 1U enclosure.
Something I'd really like to see is a SSD RAID. Just curious how performance would compare, especially against 15,000 RPM SAS drives. I know SSD would not have any where near the storage, but speed would be the interesting part. I also checked, and Secure Digital cards would fit into a 1U enclosure.
Prices should fall rather quickly. Plus I would imagine there being a variety of drive sizes:
32, 64, 128, 256 Gig....
Would be cool to replace my old 20 Gig drive in my Thinkpad X31 with an SSD!
One problem....
The mac book air runs on PATA not SATA II they would have to reconfigure the logic board to support this drive...
look:
http://www.apple.com/macbookair/specs.html
The mac book air runs on PATA not SATA II they would have to reconfigure the logic board to support this drive...
look:
http://www.apple.com/macbookair/specs.html
Simpletech announced a 512GB SSD, but is 3.5 inch.
http://www.engadget.com/2007/04/18/simpletech-announces-512gb-and-256gb-3-5-inch-ssd-drives/
http://www.engadget.com/2007/04/18/simpletech-announces-512gb-and-256gb-3-5-inch-ssd-drives/