Affordable 32GB SSD?

Silencing hard drives, optical drives and other storage devices

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perplex
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Affordable 32GB SSD?

Post by perplex » Tue Mar 21, 2006 4:48 am

http://www.tgdaily.com/2006/03/21/32gb_ssd_samsung/

Would any of you guys consider this IF it was priced between $750 and $1000? That seems reasonable for 32GB of SS to me.

qviri
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Post by qviri » Tue Mar 21, 2006 4:58 am

I don't know, on the desktop I can't help but think of an old 2.5" 40 GB drive entombed in anything.

If you're after performance in laptops... Uh, my laptop cost me $410 (Canadian), so I don't think I'm their target audience.

Trunks
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Re: Affordable 32GB SSD?

Post by Trunks » Tue Mar 21, 2006 5:59 am

perplex wrote:http://www.tgdaily.com/2006/03/21/32gb_ssd_samsung/

Would any of you guys consider this IF it was priced between $750 and $1000? That seems reasonable for 32GB of SS to me.
not for sound but for ruggedness. Assuming it was rugged.

Captain John
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Post by Captain John » Tue Mar 21, 2006 9:29 am

An 8gb CF card costs 323 at newegg, a 4gb 140, and CF-IDE adapters are $10.

at $1k it's a bit pricy (and _way_ out of my ballpark, to answer OP's question), but cheaper than existing CF + IDE RAID configurations.

But, does anyone really need more than 8gb (I'd assume 4gb RAID 0) and NAS?

-John

Schlotkins
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Post by Schlotkins » Tue Mar 21, 2006 9:58 am

I could be interested for my database files. Is the access time on flash as fast as it is for DDR?

Captain John
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Post by Captain John » Tue Mar 21, 2006 10:12 am

Access times in units of time (instead of cycles) is going to be much higher than DDR, but still much quicker than an HDD.

rpsgc
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Post by rpsgc » Tue Mar 21, 2006 12:03 pm

That's awesome, a 32GB 1.8" flash HDD. SSD to rule the world! Soon... soon...!

kamosoft
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Post by kamosoft » Tue Mar 21, 2006 1:13 pm

What about the ~ 10^6 writes limitation, did they fixed that?!

....
Well it seems not a big problem:

Longevity/Lifespan

Unlike DRAM, flash memory chips have a limited lifespan. Further, different flash chips have a different number of write cycles before errors start to occur. Flash chips with 300,000 write cycles are common, and currently the best flash chips are rated at 1,000,000 write cycles per block (with 8,000 blocks per chip). Now, just because a flash chip has a given write cycle rating, it doesn't mean that the chip will self-destruct as soon as that threshold is reached. It means that a flash chip with a 1 million Erase/Write endurance threshold limit will have only 0.02 percent of the sample population turn into a bad block when the write threshold is reached for that block. The better flash SSD manufacturers have two ways to increase the longevity of the drives: First, a "balancing" algorithm is used. This monitors how many times each disk block has been written. This will greatly extend the life of the drive. The better manufacturers have "wear-leveling" algorithms that balance the data intelligently, avoiding both exacerbating the wearing of the blocks and "thrashing" of the disk: When a given block has been written above a certain percentage threshold, the SSD will (in the background, avoiding performance decreases) swap the data in that block with the data in a block that has exhibited a "read-only-like" characteristic. Second, should bad blocks occur, they are mapped out as they would be on a rotating disk. With usage patterns of writing gigabytes per day, each flash-based SSD should last hundreds of years, depending on capacity. If it has a DRAM cache, it'll last even longer.

elec999
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Post by elec999 » Tue Mar 21, 2006 8:36 pm

I just hope that these will be better performance then the actual compact flash cards. Faster or even the same speed, as a Gigabyte iram or Western Digital Raptor. Then I would buy one.
Thanks

mb2
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Post by mb2 » Tue Mar 21, 2006 10:10 pm

if it was ~$100, i could see myself thinking about it. give it 3 years and it will be perhaps.. but by then i dont know if i'll be able to deal with 32GB as an OS/games/programs drive.. without any games, i'm sure i could thou..

i really don't see the market for these at the $750-1000 mark.. far too expensive for thin-and-light tablet PCs, the best application IMO.. and anyone with a power-laptop will want a 160GB+ hdd too..
if it does >100MB/s sustained transfer then it will be of interest to the performance PC enthusiast, which is one area it could sell in.. but still not much then i expect.
and the silent PC guy.. i think it needs to come down a bit to justify itself above 2.5" + enclosure.

so is this essentially a CF card.. or other form factor?

andywww
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Cost

Post by andywww » Tue Mar 21, 2006 10:27 pm

I definitely scanned the article and thought: "The only thing that matters in this article is price...which they left out."

I mean, SSdrives are already available- just outside of reasonable price range. This announcement doesn't really give much of a hint as to what the price will be.

dorion
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Post by dorion » Fri Mar 24, 2006 4:53 pm

I'm really liking the looks of the future of Storage. We'll have super charged perpendicular hard drives, hybrid hard drives combining flash and regular techniques, full fkash hard drives, and if IRam and its siblings can take off then I;m happy. I like variety.

highlandsun
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Post by highlandsun » Thu Mar 30, 2006 1:27 pm

I guess that price range is reasonable. Given that 1GB CF cards are $45 it would cost you $1440 to get 32 CF cards for an array. $750 is probably in the ballpark.

Still, this is only a 1.8" drive. For a laptop I'd want a 2.5" drive, and that ought to be in the 64-128GB range to be usable.

I guess there's still a question of who the real market is for these things. I suppose if you were building a play-only media PC you could use an iRAM as a boot disk and get everything else over a network. I don't know who besides laptop/mobile users really need a SSD.

nutball
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Post by nutball » Thu Mar 30, 2006 11:17 pm

This has to be good news for flash-based storage.

jmke
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Post by jmke » Fri Mar 31, 2006 2:15 am

With only 4GB flashdisk as main disk you can build an extremely quiet HTPC and get the storage over the network from a file-server tucked away somewhere. That's how I have things set up at home:)

bbzidane
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Post by bbzidane » Fri Mar 31, 2006 7:02 pm

it appears that transcend just released a couple 1.8" and 2.5" flash hard drives. the size is limited to 2, 4, and 8 gb, but it would be adequate to place the os on it to allow faster boot up. http://www.transcendusa.com/products/Mo ... ?ModNo=100

any one have any experience with these flash drives?

the price that the 4gb 2.5" drive is going for (~368 USD), the 32gb drive doesnt look that expensive afterall

Copper
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Post by Copper » Sat Apr 01, 2006 12:39 pm

bbzidane wrote:it appears that transcend just released a couple 1.8" and 2.5" flash hard drives. the size is limited to 2, 4, and 8 gb, but it would be adequate to place the os on it to allow faster boot up. http://www.transcendusa.com/products/Mo ... ?ModNo=100

any one have any experience with these flash drives?

the price that the 4gb 2.5" drive is going for (~368 USD), the 32gb drive doesnt look that expensive afterall
Those things are junk when it comes to performance. Downloading and reviewing the data sheet reveals the drives use PIO4 mode, like a floppy drive, with a max 16MB/sec transfer rate. Lacking DMA mode, read and writes will be taxing on system resources just like using a floppy. High priced - little performance. Stick a Samsung MP0402H in a Smart Drive. It'll be larger, faster, less expensive, and just as silent.

The key to look for in these new Flash drives is Ultra DMA (Direct Memory Access) mode - just like your hard drive uses. UDMA 66, 100, 133, etc. Even better is SATA and SATA2.

highlandsun
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Post by highlandsun » Mon Apr 03, 2006 12:13 pm

That Transcend product is pathetic, considering you can buy a CF to IDE adapter for $20 and get a 4GB CF card for $100.

http://linitx.com/product_info.php?products_id=307
http://www.cfide.co.uk/compact_flash_ide_adapters.shtml
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductLi ... tegory=353

PIO, yeah, another strike. Geeze, even my old Atari had DMA for the floppy disk, PC standards are so pathetically lame.

highlandsun
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Post by highlandsun » Mon Apr 03, 2006 12:19 pm

Ah, this is what I was thinking of before, supports DMA...
http://www.acscontrol.com/Index_ACS.asp ... dapter.htm

Felger Carbon
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Post by Felger Carbon » Mon Apr 03, 2006 2:29 pm

highlandsun wrote:Ah, this is what I was thinking of before, supports DMA...
http://www.acscontrol.com/Index_ACS.asp ... dapter.htm
At what speed? No info on that vital subject.

I bought a Sybex CF-IDE adapter ($10 at Newegg) and a $25 512MB 140X flash card (24MB/s read, 16MB/s write) but it added about 80 seconds to the DOS boot time, and stuck at "0% confirmed" when I tried to run FDISK. So my first attempt at using a CF-IDE as the #2 disk for the swap file was unsuccessful.

I hope anybody who actually gets one of these things working under DMA posts here and lets us know about it. I'm very interested in this stuff, as witness my first (unsuccessful) $35 experiment!

highlandsun
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Post by highlandsun » Wed Apr 05, 2006 1:49 am

Speed just depends on the flash card and its internal controller chip. The adapter is nothing more than a pin map, connecting one connector to the other.
This Sandisk doc mentions 16MB/sec peak on the host interface.

http://www.sandisk.com/Assets/File/OEM/ ... hv11.0.pdf

This would be a poor choice for a swap drive, especially given the wear limits and the slow overall speed.

jackylman
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Post by jackylman » Wed Apr 05, 2006 9:53 am

Or you could buy a 40GB WD Scorpio (they have SATA versions now, so no adapter needed). You take a performance hit, but it's effectively silent if you put foam around it. Cheap too.

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