Samsung's 64GB SSD: better, faster, stronger
By Ryan Block 
posted November 10th 2007 4:17PM
posted November 10th 2007 4:17PM
- 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.
DO AL OF U GUYS OUT THERE ACTUALLY THINK THAT YHE IPHONE WILL LAST AS THE STANDARD FOR A 64GB MODEL TO ACTUALLY BE COOL ANYMORE? FUCK NO. DIGITAL VOLATILE, CONDUCIVE PAPER IS GONA REPLACE PORTABLE MEDIA AS WE KNOW IT, IN LESS THAT 2 YEARS AND THAT BULKY SHIT WILL BE OUT THE WINDOW. HARD DRIVES WILL BE CYLINDRICAL LIKE FILM CASES THEY'LL FIT INTO URE NO. 2 PENCIL'S ERASER, HOOKED UP TO A NETWORK THAT RECORDS URE KEYSTROKES.
I would love to see four of those in RAID-0!
As Ryan said in the article, i'm waiting for the 128gb version that is priced closer to a physical hard drive before I'll get more excited about doing an upgrade. It's not that I don't think this is cool... it's way cool. But space wise, 80gb is just not enough anymore. Need more breathing room.
So i guess that if you have an led-backlit screen and an ssd, you'll have a near invincible laptop.
I don't see the end of hard drives for a long time. Flash will work well and likely be the storage of choice for portables, but HDDs are increasing in capacity too, and faster. Also, as technology progresses, we'll need more and more storage. But I wouldn't mind being proven wrong...
Just to avoid confusion, I meant capacity was increasing faster. Although HDDs do copy faster for now. I wish i could edit my comment.
What I would certainly love is a relatively small, affordable SSD for my desktop - I'd just install the XP + page file. I guess Ubuntu's fast enough, but Windoze could use an extra kick.
If you read what people have been saying, you really do not want to install your page file on here.
With it taking longer to write to then you are better off using a normal platter for paging file or increasing ram so you dont need it.
So... what's the advantage of this SSD over a Hybrid-HDD? Too bad this wasn't tested against the Seagate Momentus 5400 PSD (hybrid laptop drive).
but whats the failure rate?
I don't know much about how the internals of a computer are constructed or work outside of what I can see for myself with the cover off and the few bits I've learned/read about. Regardless of my limited engineering knowlegde I wonder why computers (esp. laptops) still come with disk drives? Wouldn't computers on a whole run faster and suffer less heat failure if the 500GB HDD was replaced with 5 100GB SSD's? Please advise.
One simple reason: cost. Hard Disks will be obsolete one day, but not until the $/GB of NAND is more comparable.
at $1000, that's over $15/GB
you can get a $33 4GB usb flash drive straight from china - about $8.50/GB shipped.
I wish someone over there would preempt SanDisk's Vaulter Disk and make a Mini Pci SSD for me to boot from... at 4GB for under $50. I never use mini pci anyway.
In my benchmarks this disk is at least 3 times SLOWER than the regular hard disk when writing small files to the disk, which is the case if you compile programs - it slows the compiler speed at least 2-3 times compared to the regular disk. I guess Samsung got greedy and did not install any cache memory into the $1000 drive! The flash itself is known to be very bad with writing a lot of small files to the disk.
hmm any one thinking about grabbing one of the 1.8's and throwing it in their mp3 player(not ipods cuz they are garbage unless you throw linux on them)
I get that SSDs save a lot of energy since they don't have moving parts, but does anyone know where I can find numbers on energy savings for similar size drive + similar data transfer + similar data transfer rate? Looking for a good side-by-side comparison with as few variables as possible impacting the energy consumption. Thanks.
what would the test results be like if you were to run these in a RAID config like the Sony laptop? I know it would be rather pricy, but i think you might see a serious gain there. I use my 32 ssd to boot vista and then i store everything to an external hdd. I don't think i will buy anymore hdd's i am going to wait till ssd's become more widely availible.
wondering about the SSD specs of the new macbook air. interesting to hear that it's not all positive with SSDs, which at a $1,000 more in the case of the Air I would expect. i'm not super technical but am I correct to understand that saving or copying files using an SSD drive will be several times slower than with an HDD? the air's drive is 4200 rpm.