Samsung’s blistering fast 256GB SSD

Robert Hallock 20 Nov, 2008 at 11:09am ET Article published in Tech

On Wednesday night, Samsung announced that it has begun production on a 256GB SSD that qualifies amongst the world’s fastest drives.

The as yet-unpriced drive hammers benchmarks like the fist of an angry god by boasting 220MiBs/200MiBs sustained read/writes. Meanwhile, early marketing details have not revealed the speeds of random read/writes which are a bigger indicator of an SSD’s ability to compete with a traditional drive.

The drive is also expected to be scaled down into 128GB and 64GB capacities with optional disk encryption.

Comments

20 Nov 2008 ~ 12:13pm Tex Wish they had mentioned the target price range
20 Nov 2008 ~ 12:36pm edcentric Watch, the randoms will suck and it will use twice as much power as a mechanical drive.
20 Nov 2008 ~ 12:37pm Thrax The former is unlikely and the latter is impossible.
21 Nov 2008 ~ 8:28am edcentric How so Thrax, many of the current SSDs, either the high speed or the dogs, draw just as much power as 4,500rpm notebook drives. Some of the reviews have reported total power consumption (Whr) for the entire test series to show this.
21 Nov 2008 ~ 8:34am Thrax http://www.engadget.com/2008/07/15/toms-hardware-rescinds-ssd-power-test-finds-them-more-efficien/
21 Nov 2008 ~ 10:48pm bullzisnipr Is power consumption really that big of a deal?
21 Nov 2008 ~ 11:54pm Tim Yeah, power consumption is not a big deal. And if a few extra watts IS a problem, then the people worrying about it won't be spending extra money on SSd's in the first place.
22 Nov 2008 ~ 12:04am jared It's a big deal when you are trying to squeeze every extra minute possible from your notebook on battery life
22 Nov 2008 ~ 5:10pm Tex Sorry guys.. random access wont be that bad... Price I'm afraid is.. who cares about power consumption really for a SSD drive? To be on a laptop they would be external with their own powersupply anyway.
22 Nov 2008 ~ 7:08pm Ryder

Tex wrote:

Sorry guys.. random access wont be that bad... Price I'm afraid is.. who cares about power consumption really for a SSD drive? To be on a laptop they would be external with their own powersupply anyway.

Tex, all these SSD's are 2.5" formfactor.. they go inside the laptop.
22 Nov 2008 ~ 10:22pm Tex Sorry I had never seen a 2.5 SSD. I had messed with quite a few before but all were 5.25 scsi interface. I had seen some before that 5.25 IDE but I had never see any 2.5 SSD's. Most I had seen used regular production ram to populate the drive. Most uses of SSD drives are not intended for laptops at all. The price alone bumps it from most laptop applications.
22 Nov 2008 ~ 10:29pm Thrax I'm sorry, that's incorrect. The majority of SSDs produced are now in the laptop form-factor, use NAND flash, and use the SATA or SAS interface.
23 Nov 2008 ~ 7:00am Tex BEFORE... meant a few years ago. That was not incorrect. It was said in the past tense. Thats what BEFORE means. (long sigh...)

I am thrilled about the new form factor! Still curious what a 256 gb SSD would cost that would put it into a LAPTOP market and not a server market where most SSD's reside.

I have actually used and tested a number of SSD drives. How many have you used in real life?

Cheers

Cowboy
23 Nov 2008 ~ 8:45am Ryder Are you thinking of an SSD with NAND Flash as the storage media or the older technology that actually stored it on Ram? As of right now, server grades SSD's are just making an appearance.

I have used several to date now, but of course that is part of my job.
23 Nov 2008 ~ 6:23pm bullzisnipr So say that you have a couple SSD's in a RAID 0 Stripe, what in the system then becomes the bottleneck, the interface?
23 Nov 2008 ~ 8:15pm mas0n

bullzisnipr wrote:

So say that you have a couple SSD's in a RAID 0 Stripe, what in the system then becomes the bottleneck, the interface?

The controller interface, yes. Anything more than a single SSD on an on-board controller would be a waste. You would definitely want a quality hardware RAID controller with 4 if not 8 PCI-E lanes and plenty of RAM for write caching if you wanted to do a serious array of SSD.
24 Nov 2008 ~ 6:24pm bullzisnipr

mas0n wrote:

The controller interface, yes. Anything more than a single SSD on an on-board controller would be a waste. You would definitely want a quality hardware RAID controller with 4 if not 8 PCI-E lanes and plenty of RAM for write caching if you wanted to do a serious array of SSD.

Wish I could say I needed that, I can't imagine speeds like that..
24 Nov 2008 ~ 6:48pm Ryder Example of good Raid card coupled with 4 30GB SSD's in Raid 0. Raid card is an Adaptec 5405:
25 Nov 2008 ~ 1:14am bullzisnipr Wow, those are some extremely impressive speeds. Even coming from a single disc, I cant wait till I can afford one.