Samsung's 16GB solid state laptop drive
By Peter Rojas 
posted May 23rd 2005 4:17AM
posted May 23rd 2005 4:17AM
Samsung is showing off a new 16GB solid state drive for laptops and Tablet PCs that's based on based on NAND Flash memory. The 2.5-inch drives will almost certainly be crazy expensive when they come out in August, and 16GB isn't much compared with the 100GB drives that are showing up in laptops these days, but Samsung says their solid state drive will use 95% less power than regular laptop drives, not to mention that they'll also be quieter, weigh half as much, and emit considerably less heat.
" but Samsung says their solid state drive will be use 95% less power than regular laptop drives, not to mention they’ll be quieter, weigh half as much, and emit considerably less heat."
You seem to have missed out the whole 'moving parts' thing, making them highly resistant to G-forces (finally, a high capacity DAP that won't be prone to vibration in my car).
Oh, they won't just be quieter, they should be silent.
Does anyone know how much of a speed increase a solid state drive would have over a conventional 7,200 rpm or 10,000 rpm drive?
I'm not sure, but if my solid state memory is anything to go by: increase is an optimistic guess...
Interested to see the pricing of this. If/when pricing becomes affordable enough, could we potentially see dual-drive solutions? I'm not sure if two 2.5" drives have been paired before, but perhaps a solid-state primary and standard secondary that's only accessed when needed is in the works? All the benefits of solid-state with the additional capacity. (Not sure if this is possible.)
Exactly how much battery life is saved when they say "95% less," anyway?
jv - That is actually being planned, I believe Longhorn will support it. It will be a single drive with both solid state and hard disk technologies in it.
This is something that I have been looking for, for quite a while now. If they could, someday, get speeds that are almost as fast as RAM; Slow data access would be a thing of the past.
Here's to hoping they can continue innovating on this type of technology!
Oh, and if you follow the link, they say:
"The SSD's performance rate exceeds that of a comparably sized HDD by more than 150 percent. The storage disk reads data at 57 MegaBytes per second (MBps) and writes it at 32MBps."
solid state memory is 80million times faster than rotating media. so thats like 400 quadrillian times the speed. or some crap like that :)
So yeah its pretty fast.
THIS is what palm's lifedrive should have been.
Don't they have a fairly low maximum writes? I always thought that was what was holding them back from being system drives.
From the article at http://www.tmcnet.com/usubmit/2005/May/1146781.htm :
"The SSD's performance rate exceeds that of a comparably sized HDD by more than 150 percent. The storage disk reads data at 57 MegaBytes per second (MBps) and writes it at 32MBps."
Apart from the cost, my concern would be how many re-writes this type of flash media can withstand? As far as I know, most flash memories have limited lifetime of fewer than 1,000,000 re-writes.
I remember reading a year ago someone attempting to make a mini system using a compact flash memory card (I think it was 512MB) to boot into Windows 95. They found after a week of use the card was slowly becoming unusable and became corrupted due to re-write "wear". :)
If it helps to reduce this stone age times to boot a laptop I would love to get it.
"As far as I know, most flash memories have limited lifetime of fewer than 1,000,000 re-writes..."
Yes, a number of studies on flash based memory, including numerous tests conducted by NASA have all addressed this very same issue of flash's short term reliability. I tried to point this factor out a couple months ago to those who are preparing to use Panasonic's DVCPROHD P2 solid state camera, the HVX200. Of course, they didn't really want to hear any of it. "If we're paying that much, there's no way we'd get screwed...right...right...???" hmmmmmm...
#9: You're right, Palm should have used their time travel device to get this into its product.
16Gb of solid-state memory yields a new direction for media players, sure, but the MTBF appears considerably less than a hard drive, so you couldn't use it for a runtime buffer or a daily-use player with lots of sync'ing.
You *could*, however, use it as a boot partition that hardly ever changes, so boot times drop considerably. Also, if you used it as a WriteSeldom, ReadLots kind of player, you could see some advatanges there. How you could impose that sort of discipline seems more of a technological hurdle than a psychological one.
-C
Oh my gosh, so you mean I'll only be able to write to my iPod shuffle like, 1 million times? What a rip off!
All sarcasm aside, if you over-wrote flash drive 100 times a day, you could use the computer for what, 10,000 days?
Um, do you need your drive to work longer than 27 years?
Here's a stupid question:
Are hard drive failures caused BY the hard drive itself, and would that be solved with a flash drive, or does that have nothing to do with it?
Re: Palm
When palm1 tested lifedrive (did they? how much?) and discovered the problems switching between applications you'd think they would have gone looking for a different device. One of palms greatest selling points for its OS over windows devices was its responsiveness. Lifedrive is a step back from that.
Obviously, palm1 wouldn't need a 16GB drive - something smaller would still suffice. Being smart about what goes on the drive and have other ram in the unit would have been necessary.
I write this because I'm a fan of the palm os (from palm pilot pro, various add-ons, handsprings, soon a treo) and think that palm1 has shot itself in the foot at a time when the pda market could be shrinking.
15. I think you miss the point. I think 1,000,000 is the best case; some flash memories fail after 100,000 writes which is OK for pictures, music and so on, but not good for an operating system that will rewrite the page-file many thousands or tens of thousands of times per session. It won't take 27 years for a particularly byte to fail, more like under a month.
#15 Obviously doesn't know how computers work. Stuff is being written to your hard drive all the time.
More importantly can you get one to replace your old drive in the laptop you've got now, does it just totally mimic a normal rotating drive?
There are different type of files
- Operating system files
- Other program files
- Temporary files
- Media files: Images, mp3- and video files
- Your working files
Most of those files are not re-written even on weekly basis. Basically the only type that is re-written very often and could cause problems is Temp-files.
What if you had a virus could you purge all the files fast or just deleat windows and reinstall like an old hard drive
Regarding the flash memory "wear" problem in terms of limited write cycles, perhaps the operating system could be tweaked to write often-changed system files to volatile dynamic memory, and only dump that info to flash periodically and/or on closing. I don't know how much volatile memory that would involve, but perhaps 256MB would be sufficient in the case of Windows XP considering that the "footprint" of the entire OS is, I believe, in the neighborhood of one to two gigabytes. I've never looked into how or if Windows Embedded addresses this issue, but maybe this is an already-solved problem.
Alternately, perhaps a solid-state drive could pair non-volatile flash memory with built-in volatile memory to accomplish the same objective of only periodically writing the often-changed system files to flash, thus significantly reducing the "wear" problem. Such a device wouldn't seem to need any special cooperation from the operating system.
On the other hand, perhaps some programs freqently cache lots of data to the hard drive and such data might occupy considerably more space than that required by the operating system.
I hope that there's a solution that will work with current flash technology which could avoid those long, nasty start-up times, not to mention bring other advantages in terms of shock-resistance, speed, power-consuption, weight, heat, size and so on.
the flash is limited by the number of block erasures. it turns out that modern flash technologies use wear leveling such as trueffs (by m-systems i think). flash file systems like this gaurantee that the blocks wear equally across the entire disk. therefore, the mtbf can actually be slightly better than for standard magnetic media. i would think that samsung would be using this or a similar algorithm in thier product. also, there is the increased reliability when subject to the normal g forces related to laptop use.
SSD/Flash Disks come in several flavors.
Industrial/Military which are 3 million writes plus.
Standard 1 million writes plus.
The main problem with using any SSD (Solid State Disk) is pointed at the idiocy of writing all the time to the main drive's partition... most of these writes are mainly upkeeping writes.
I re-worked my systems (1 desktop, and 1 laptop) to write upkeeping to a TEMP drive... aka small hard drive partitions, and saving work to a different HD partition named WORK.
The OS is on the SSD drive's boot partition, and is only written to when new software relating to the OS is added or old software is deleted/replaced.
Applications are on the SSD drive's APPL partition, and all applications write to the TEMP or WORK HD partitions.
Been working FAST and beautifully.
As long as systems insists on constantly writing to the storage media in order to keep things current, then there isn't much choice but to make it this way.
HOWEVER, 64Gb (thats right, 64 gigs) 2.5 inch SSD IDE 44 pin drives are GREAT for MP3 players/jukeboxes. After replacing my MP3 player's HD for the third time (drops from 3 to 5 feet should NOT ALWAYS kill these drives, but they seem to always kill them!). So I have dug deep into my $ pocket for a 64Gb, and haven't regretted it at all... instead of playing times of 15 to 18 hours, I now get playing times of 35+ hours on one set of charged 2700mAh NiMh AA batteries... of course being a sensible person I refuse to have anything to do with players which incorporate built-in batteries :) I like being able to plop discharged batteries into the charger and fresh charged ones back into my player.
Now if I can only find my holy grail of portable music player... AM/FM-stereo/WeatherBand/TV-VHF receiver and MP3/MP3-Pro/WMA/FLAC player which has 4 compact flash slots and can use four 16Gb (due out any time now) and later higher capacity CF cards, with removable AA or AAA NiMh batteries... sigh
Anyways, you just have to do things sensibly, of course you need to stay away from Microjunk OS based equipment otherwise you are screwed.
I know that on some embedded systems, temp files are written to a RAM drive and there is no swap partition or swap file, and this greatly reduces 'wear and tear' on flash memory. OpenWRT employs these principles (from memory, pardon the pun). Embedded systems are one thing; a general purpose desktop OS is another altogether.
They released a 16 GIGABIT chip, not GIGABYTE. 16Gb != 16GB. Big difference.
Sean,
Two things:
1. This post was written prior to the release of Samsung's 16Gb modules.
2. If you'd actually read the article, you'd have seen that Samsung used 8Gb modules to create a 16GB flash-based laptop drive. We do make mistakes, but we didn't in this case.
Oops, my bad. I did read the article, but I'd come across a couple blogs throughout the day that misquoted the size of each module. So I saw your post, and went into rant mode without thinking much on it. Sorry bout that.
I was dum not to buy Sandisk's shares in 2000 !!!!!!!!
assuming these drives were put into a media device like an mp3 player, realistically you'll never write more that 1000 times to the player, would a chip like this be plauseable for an mp3 player.
But, just how deep did Paul (#25) have to dig into his pockets for that 64Gb SSD for his player????
What's the source?
As far as I've found, in the IDE format (or SATA) for under 2000 USD I can't find anything larger than, at best, 8Gb...that's a depressing prospect (that makes it look like a second mortgage would be needed to see Paul's project through).
in other words: what's your secret?
Thanks!
#30: There are other things in that post that make you look "dum" as well.