Samsung’s blistering fast 256GB SSD

Robert Hallock (Thrax)

November 20, 2008 11:09 AM ET in News, , , , ,

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.

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19 Comments:

  1. Tex
    20 Nov '08, 12:13 pm

    Wish they had mentioned the target price range

  2. edcentric
    20 Nov '08, 12:36 pm

    Watch, the randoms will suck and it will use twice as much power as a mechanical drive.

  3. Thrax
    20 Nov '08, 12:37 pm

    The former is unlikely and the latter is impossible.

  4. edcentric
    21 Nov '08, 8:28 am

    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.

  5. Thrax
    21 Nov '08, 8:34 am

    http://www.engadget.com/2008/07/15/t...more-efficien/

  6. bullzisnipr
    21 Nov '08, 10:48 pm

    Is power consumption really that big of a deal?

  7. Tim
    21 Nov '08, 11:54 pm

    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.

  8. jared
    22 Nov '08, 12:04 am

    It's a big deal when you are trying to squeeze every extra minute possible from your notebook on battery life

  9. Tex
    22 Nov '08, 5:10 pm

    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.

  10. RyderOCZ
    22 Nov '08, 7:08 pm
    Quoting 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.

    Tex, all these SSD's are 2.5" formfactor.. they go inside the laptop.

  11. Tex
    22 Nov '08, 10:22 pm

    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.

  12. Thrax
    22 Nov '08, 10:29 pm

    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.

  13. Tex
    23 Nov '08, 7:00 am

    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

  14. RyderOCZ
    23 Nov '08, 8:45 am

    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.

  15. bullzisnipr
    23 Nov '08, 6:23 pm

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

  16. mas0n
    23 Nov '08, 8:15 pm
    Quoting 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?

    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.

  17. bullzisnipr
    24 Nov '08, 6:24 pm
    Quoting mas0n

    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..

  18. RyderOCZ
    24 Nov '08, 6:48 pm

    Example of good Raid card coupled with 4 30GB SSD's in Raid 0. Raid card is an Adaptec 5405:


  19. bullzisnipr
    25 Nov '08, 1:14 am

    Wow, those are some extremely impressive speeds. Even coming from a single disc, I cant wait till I can afford one.

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