Samsung's 64GB SSD: better, faster, stronger

We've been fooling around with Samsung's 64GB SSD for the past couple of days and guess what, it turns out the thing is both completely silent and really fast. Who knew? Without getting all chartngraph up in this piece, we pitted it against a couple of stock Seagate Momentus 5400RPM SATA 2.5-inch laptop drives and see what happened. Here's the high-level overview:

• Results with h2benchw were a bit inconclusive in read/write tests: sequential reads and writes were mostly neck and neck between flash and spindle, but it's important to remember that h2benchw isn't as "real world" since it does all its testing across completely blank, unpartitioned disks.
  
• Seek times were definitely spot where the flash drive pulled way ahead; average random access read was 20-33x faster at 0.9ms; large random writes, however, were about 4x slower. (This is no surprise, as Samsung does expect SSD drives to perform slower than platter disks in random write scenarios.)
• Once we switched over from cleanroom drive tests to formatted drives running operating systems, though, the FlashSSD started to mop the floor with its platter-based counterpart. In Xbench it doubled sequential and random uncached read and write speeds over the platter drive in most cases, topping out at about 52MBps read / 32MBps write.
• Boot speeds saw plenty of gain: even with a few startup apps and extra services installed we saw cold boot times drop from about 1:45 to under 30 seconds. In fact, we had to redo the first test because we looked away for a moment and it had already finished booting. That's a good thing.
  
• Real world read/write showed the flash drive almost on par, but usually a bit slower; testing with a 2.75GB file it took slightly longer to copy to the flash drive than the platter (3:07 to 3:00), and a fair bit longer when copying that same file from each drive to itself (3:20 to 3:46).
• We don't have a good baseline to run power tests and don't want to put out any misleading figures, but Samsung claims you'll eke out 10-15% more system time on battery. That actually sounds a little low to us since platter drives suck a lot of juice, but your mileage may vary.
• It's obviously completely quiet. In fact, it actually kind of freaked us out that we could no longer tell the drive was grinding away during heavy read/write sessions. This is something that will take some getting used to.

So is paying about a grand worth it to you for a drive that effectively cuts your laptop's storage in half, but also boosts read, seek, and boot speeds, saves power on the go, and is completely silent? We have a feeling that until it's 128GB, costs just a couple hundred dollars, and is available for purchase to end users as a part (instead of an upgrade in a new machine) most people won't jump. But look at us -- it's doubtful we could be much more stoked to ditch our primitive spinning-platter drive for a svelte all-flash lappie.

[eskwyre @ Nov 10th 2007 4:31PM]

"Thats how long I've been on ya!"

[ChrisG @ Nov 11th 2007 2:16AM]

nice. but I think Ryan titled it after the original song from Daft Punk, that Kanye West happened to sample. lmao 1up for me!

[Taylor @ Nov 11th 2007 5:27AM]

It's a Daft Punk sample.


Daft Punk's Harder Better Faster Stronger
sampled to
Kanye West's Stronger.

And Daft Punk sampled someone else in the original song too.

Which leads us to the question... is it harder, too?

[kyle @ Nov 11th 2007 7:03PM]

Yes it is stronger they can be dropped from higher and not break. So yes it is harder.

[Luke @ Nov 10th 2007 4:33PM]

I don't know why I think flash memory is so sexy. I'm starting to worry about myself. :)

This stuff rocks.

[Scott Neary @ Nov 11th 2007 10:30AM]

Definitely sexy, but I'd still like to know if 2 SSDs in RAID 0 would make any difference...and again, why are these things called disks?

[pundit @ Feb 5th 2008 9:44AM]

'Cause they're called "Drives" not "Disks". That's why.

[Z @ Nov 10th 2007 4:34PM]

I'm eager to have this technology in my laptop - so many advantages - but until the read/write speeds are faster, it's a no go for me. (And what's taking so long for insta-boot machines to get here?)

Of course, as you say, Engadget, the prices need to drop and the capacities need to double (at least).

[Suzanne @ Nov 10th 2007 10:29PM]

No kidding. I've been waiting for the Toshiba R500 w/SSD to come out forever. Their web site still says "The Portégé® R500 with the solid state drive will not be available until the end of July 2007".

[Jambon @ Nov 11th 2007 6:13PM]

I'm with you on the insta-boot machines. Can someone tell me what would be wrong with putting 2 gigs of flash or so on the motherboard right next to the cpu? Let it store the OS and maybe a few extra programs. That way you can get the storage of platters with the boot-up times of flash, and maybe save a bunch of battery life if you stick to the programs on flash.

[Ethan @ Nov 10th 2007 4:35PM]

Harder?

Seriously though, this isn't far off the 80GB drive that I have tons of space on, so the only barrier left is price. The fact that it's 2.5" confuses me though -though there's obvious compatibility reasons, I thought a big reason for this was also to make it smaller.

[Ryan Block @ Nov 10th 2007 5:02PM]

Yes, but until we have a new standardized drive size for SSDs it has to come in the physical form factor standardized for 2.5-inch platter drives. This drive could easily be made far smaller, but it wouldn't fit in anyone's machine. Samsung is also making a 64GB 1.8-inch drive (same size as what your portable media player uses).

[mike @ Nov 10th 2007 9:03PM]

16Gb is too damn small for an iPod Touch! Go sammy go...

[ammi @ Nov 10th 2007 4:45PM]

Now all we need is for GBage like this to come knocking at apple's door. iPhone with a 60GB storage capacity anyone?

Hell, if I had the cash and a drive that would fit, I'd mod one to that size myself...

[Grant @ Nov 10th 2007 5:13PM]

slow down killer, we need to manage to do a 16GB iphone first, even though i'm sure the only reason it hasn't been released is because of the uproar that the first price-cut caused.

See, all the stupid consumers who pissed and moaned about a price cut, now you could have a 16GB iphone, but apple wouldn't dare want to move at the speed of technology and piss off it's early adopters again.

as for a 32GB ipod touch/iphone, thats gonna be a whiles off too, because those things are nearly $400 alone, even with a bulk discount i'm sure apple would be paying $300-350 a piece.

In reality, a 64GB touch/iphone is nothing more than a pipe dream until those drive drop to the $200 price range.

[Ireland @ Nov 10th 2007 5:38PM]

I hope we see a 32GB iPhone before 2008 is over (yes I'm aware it's 2007 now) because I'm holding out for that. Storage is a much bigger concern than hacking to me, as I want to carry all my iTunes with me, and have room for some (yes official) 3rd party apps. The iPhone is "crying" out for more storage, and yes, 3G will be here by then too, woot!

[ammi @ Nov 10th 2007 6:01PM]

@Grant:
All good points. So much for an iPhone (or iTouch) that can hold my music collection.

=/ Hmm... I'm still wondering on that do-it-myself replacement thing though. It seems like it /should/ be possible to just buy a larger drive and swap it myself.

[Constable Odo @ Nov 19th 2007 1:00AM]

Samsung is definitely cranking out 32GB flash memory in volume as we speak. Apple will be waiting to gobble it up. Definitely a 32GB iPod Touch before Christmas at the current price of the 16 GB model. The 16GB memory will be going into the slightly upgraded iPhone. Sweet.

[Nubaeus @ Nov 10th 2007 5:12PM]

How does this fair against raid0?

[Grant @ Nov 10th 2007 5:17PM]

SSD drives will really make overall performance better, because defraging a disk should really be super fast now. Too bad windows won't fully utitlize these drives from sometime now and make defragging a chore of the past.

[insertAlias @ Nov 10th 2007 6:14PM]

I'm no expert, but I'm not sure that this would defrag any faster. Their tests showed that it took longer to transfer files from the drive to itself. Isn't that all defraging does?

[voidref @ Nov 10th 2007 8:11PM]

Defragmenting an SSD device is not necessary as seek times are negligible. The reason to de-frag disks is so that you don't take the seek hit multiple times when loading fragmented files.

[kL @ Nov 11th 2007 9:53AM]

There is absolutely no reason to defrag flash drive. Defragging is done in order to reduce seek time and Flash has zero seek time already.

Actually we need better flash-specific filesystems that wouldn't waste resources on optimizing for sequential access!

[John @ Nov 10th 2007 5:19PM]

I think in a laptop, there's also a huge advantage in flash over platter because you don't have to worry about bumps while you're drives are busily spinning away.

[srbradbury @ Nov 10th 2007 5:46PM]

"So is paying about a grand for a drive that effectively cuts your laptop's storage in half, but also boosts read, seek, and boot speeds, saves power on the go, and is completely silent?"

...Is it what?

Silly Billy

[Che @ Nov 10th 2007 5:48PM]

Why would you defrag an SSD? Isn't the point of defraging to avoid time for the read/write head to get to the right place on the disk (not an issue whith SSD)?

[Charles Han @ Nov 10th 2007 6:11PM]

The best thing about this drive is you never have to worry about ur drive eventually dying and without any moving parts less hassle to worry about. I'm pretty sure couple years from now the prices should be far more reasonable.

[Atanas Boev @ Nov 10th 2007 6:16PM]

Work It Harder Make It Better
Do It Faster, Makes Us stronger
More Than Ever Hour After
Our Work Is Never Over

... couldn't resist :)

[mark galvan @ Nov 10th 2007 9:26PM]

Gotta love Daft Punk.

[Jimbo @ Nov 10th 2007 6:23PM]

The 32 Gig Samsung 1.8" drives are to be had on Ebay for the $300-350 range; no reason to pay a grand.

[bryan @ Nov 10th 2007 8:01PM]

The reason it only saves 10-15% of system power compared to a platter disk is the fact that (by default in most retail laptops) the hard drive is off a lot of the time. Obviously this can be changed. There are also huge power differences between a 4200 or 5400 rpm laptop drive or the now-standard 7200 rpm desktop drive. Also, when using wireless technologies, the transmitter is probably taking much much more power than either a platter or an SSD, reducing the SSD's relative improvement on system battery time.

My guess is that they want to make realistic statements, lest they be deemed liars for saying: "This will save 80% power over your existing 64GB of storage" when they are comparing it to a RAID of two 32GB raptors each running at 10000 rpm (or even the 15000 rpm SCSI variants, 'cheetah', I think).

[Carl @ Nov 11th 2007 1:14AM]

Raptor is a Western Digital product, Cheetah is a Seagate product.

[jcj7161 @ Nov 10th 2007 8:52PM]

crikey--why do they compare it to 54k RPM HD instead of a 10K raptor? FUD

[Ryan Block @ Nov 10th 2007 9:06PM]

This is a laptop drive. It's intended for laptops. Are 10k Raptors intended for laptops? No, so it's hardly FUD, and more like apples to apples.

[Jim H @ Nov 10th 2007 10:23PM]

For me the faster boot up times, added reliability in terms of shock-proofing, lower power consumption and lower heat generation will make an investment in this drive now worthwhile for me. I've got one coming in a Dell M1330 soon.

I expect that, by the time I come to replace the M1330 in three or so years time that SSDs will be ubitquitous in laptops and the prices will have fallen considerably. SSD is the future and it's here now;). Oh, and I think you might get a better deal than $1000 from Dell if you play your cards right too. I know mine didn't cost that much;).

Incidentally, since when was copying a 2.7GB file a real-world test;)?

[mattspierce @ Nov 10th 2007 10:29PM]

This is a day long awaited. Also its a post that lets me change my engadget password.

[Josh A Cunningham @ Nov 10th 2007 10:56PM]

Sweet

[Chris A @ Nov 11th 2007 12:20AM]

So, how do I get one of these babies inside my eeePC? :) Why settle for a 4GB SSD when 64 s=is out there!

[Blackster @ Nov 11th 2007 4:32AM]

you won't. there's a slot for a card, but heck i've got no clue what kinda cards do fit in there ^^

[Sebastien B @ Nov 11th 2007 2:07AM]

I've been using a Sandisk 32 GB SSD on a Dell Latitude D630 running Vista for about 3 months now. This wasn't cheap, and even with an early adopter mindset, this is a big disappointment; it does indeed reads much faster (about 30 times), but writes at least 3 times slower than the same D630 running a SATA.

Quiet is great, more battery is fine, and I hardly ever reboot using Vista almost instant sleep feature, but installing software or writing large files is *painful*. Plan for a lot of memory: you do *not* want to see your system paging for virtual memory.

Now maybe Vista is to blame, but the whole system will hang now and then for 10 secs or more. Is it indexing something, writing whatever system logs on disk, who knows, but a a few other users have reported the same issue with this SSD on Dell forums. No driver update has been released either since the SSD option was out.

I for one will try to switch back to a SATA. This is not ready for prime time, even if Samsung claim better write speed on its 64 GB.

[tgm @ Nov 11th 2007 7:25AM]

Everyone, PLEASE READ this post AGAIN.
Sebastien B, thanks for being the voice of reality check here.

All of you going into convulsions over the "day I've been waiting for", please research, read and think again. I've been waiting on the SSD 64GB SATA drive to be released, so I can plunge and upgrade my expensive enthusiast desktop machine with the "dream drive". However, the performance is always measured against notebook drives, write times are painfull, and a pair of WD Raptors in RAID 0 kicks any SSD's booty.

More info
http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/08/13/flash_based_hard_drives_cometh/page12.html
http://techreport.com/articles.x/13163/15

[Jim H @ Nov 11th 2007 5:39PM]

I've read your articles and all it really proves is that SSD is currently a bad choice for servers. The advantages for ultraportable laptops are undeniable.

[Julian Bond @ Nov 11th 2007 3:38AM]

Will the price/performance curve for SSD ever cross that for hard drives? In the last 18 months hard drives have made some big jumps from 80->160->320 and 200/250Gb drives in the latest laptops are now common. SSD has also been making big jumps but it's much lower down the curve.

Where's my 1.8" form factor USB portable drive?

[Gav @ Nov 11th 2007 6:12AM]

I really can't wait for this to go mainstream, I might finally upgrade my Panasonic Toughbook if they get one of these inside :)

[DAZA @ Nov 11th 2007 6:15AM]

Good review, thanks.

[Dave Farquhar @ Nov 11th 2007 8:27AM]

Performance on SSDs will improve if/when manufacturers start putting cache on them, like they do HDDs. I'm guessing the reason they don't now is cost.

As far as life expectancy, thanks to wear leveling (which distributes out the writes so you no longer pound individual memory cells until they go bad), life expectancy on an SSD is measured in years even under a worst-case scenario of constant writing. I've seen estimates as low as 2 years with constant writes and as high as 15 years with ordinary use. I've seen conventional HDDs conk out after a year or two, so that sounds good to me.

Write performance is the main thing that keeps me from running out and getting one of these tomorrow. If they solved that by adding cache to them, I'd start putting them in my desktop PCs too, not just laptops.

[kL @ Nov 11th 2007 9:20AM]

> we could no longer tell the drive was grinding away during heavy read/write sessions. This is something that will take some getting used to.
It's like that on iMacs. Some R/W indicator in menubar (or taskbar tray) solves the freakish part and silent part becomes quite welcome.

[schmolch @ Nov 11th 2007 10:03AM]

Wait a second!!!

Samsung claims 120MB/s read and 100MB/s write speed.

And here you say "Real world read/write showed the flash drive almost on par, but usually a bit slower".
Slower than a 5400rpm drive with about 35MB/s ????

Isn't that a big scam then?


I´m the first one to jerk of to the access-times but if they are trying to fool us they can keep that shit for themselves.

[Scott Neary @ Nov 11th 2007 10:27AM]

Can SSDs be set up in RAID 0? And again, can someone tell me why these are called disks?

[omelfata @ Nov 11th 2007 1:05PM]

I would love to see four of those in RAID-0!