Sandisk 32GB solid state drive

highlandsun · Post by **highlandsun** » Fri May 25, 2007 2:02 am

Still better than the $999 that dvnation.com is charging, although perhaps Newegg will eventually climb to near that level. I noticed that dvnation's webforum is gone, perhaps too many people were pestering them about their price being twice as high as Newegg's, or their false claim "you can only get the Samsung SSD's from us!"

Well, next month is Computex, and ADATA should be showing off more of their 128GB SATA SSDs. I still would prefer a PATA at this point, still not ready to retire my current laptop.

frostedflakes · Post by **frostedflakes** » Fri May 25, 2007 8:56 pm

Looks like eWiz has the Samsung 32GB in stock for a reasonable price, $480. Shipping to KS came out to $10 for me.

Link

Bicster · Post by **Bicster** » Sun May 27, 2007 10:11 am

Performance of the Samsung SSD is awesome. I am very happy with them. The 4GB model is giving me 54MB/s reads.

My only complaint is with the 44-pin adapter I am using (Startech) ... some IDE drivers complain that I don't have an 80-pin cable and limit me to 33 MHz transfers. The new Linux libata stack seems to always do this. The older piix drivers do it occasionally. Can someone recommend a better adapter?

Did anyone else notice that these things seem not to be covered by any warranty at all?

zerok66 · Post by **zerok66** » Mon Jun 04, 2007 8:53 am

Bicster wrote:Performance of the Samsung SSD is awesome. I am very happy with them. The 4GB model is giving me 54MB/s reads.

My only complaint is with the 44-pin adapter I am using (Startech) ... some IDE drivers complain that I don't have an 80-pin cable and limit me to 33 MHz transfers. The new Linux libata stack seems to always do this. The older piix drivers do it occasionally. Can someone recommend a better adapter?

Did anyone else notice that these things seem not to be covered by any warranty at all?

I found the Samsung 32GB in stock in the UK at www.microdirect.com for Â£260ish... I added it and removed it from my basket so many times, unsure as to if I should bite the bullet or not. I am so tempted. Its so new that it is only going to seriously drop in price, get quicker etc etc.

The real thing that put me off the Samsung was the IDE interface. I do have IDE and got the adapter, I just thought I would regret the purchase so am going to hold out a little longer till prices come down and I can get a 64GB on for around Â£200.

frostedflakes · Post by **frostedflakes** » Mon Jun 04, 2007 11:07 am

The Samsung has been tempting me as well, but I know I should hold off. Plus I don't have any free IDE ports, so an SATA drive would be preferred.

The Transcend 32GB 2.5" drive has showed up on Froogle for $400-450. Most of them are listed as out of stock, though, maybe they're waiting for initial stock to show up. Anyways, wonder what performance is like. I'd assume because of the price performance will be on par with the Super Talent drives, not Samsung and Sandisk.

frostedflakes · Post by **frostedflakes** » Fri Jun 15, 2007 1:54 pm

Looks like NewEgg has Samsung SSDs back in stock. 32GB is more expensive than at eWiz, but they have 16GB available which I couldn't find anywhere else. Price is about half of the 32GB as one would expect.

Just in case anybody is interested in purchasing.

yefi · Post by **yefi** » Sat Jun 16, 2007 8:16 pm

I was looking at buying one of those Samsungs until I noticed they were PATA only. It is absurd that you could produce such a new drive yet fit it with such an old interface. It's like seeing a jet engine on a German Fokker.

It won't throttle the drive's throughput at its STR to be sure, but it does hamper its potential a great deal.

ky · Post by ky » Sat Jun 16, 2007 11:53 pm

pipperoni wrote:
ronrem wrote:Remember WAY back...
I remember way back on the first Mac, the entire operating system, your programs (well, usually one per floppy) and saved files all had to fit on a 360k floppy. Of course I'm sure there are always older reminiscers then I...

Must be REALLY way back since you don't remember correctly... you mean 400KB floppy. 360KB is PC DOS.

vincentfox · Post by **vincentfox** » Sun Jun 17, 2007 11:00 pm

yefi wrote:I was looking at buying one of those Samsungs until I noticed they were PATA only. It is absurd that you could produce such a new drive yet fit it with such an old interface. It's like seeing a jet engine on a German Fokker.

It won't throttle the drive's throughput at its STR to be sure, but it does hamper its potential a great deal.

WTF? In what way does using PATA versus SATA hamper it's potential? You know how many PATA devices are out there already, and are still being produced? I know people think Tutti-Frutti is the flavor of the week and anyone who doesn't have it, is a Luser, but really!

Steve_Y · Post by **Steve_Y** » Mon Jun 18, 2007 3:32 am

vincentfox wrote:
WTF? In what way does using PATA versus SATA hamper it's potential? You know how many PATA devices are out there already, and are still being produced? I know people think Tutti-Frutti is the flavor of the week and anyone who doesn't have it, is a Luser, but really!

The problem is that a lot of new hardware is reducing support for PATA. For example, my motherboard has four SATA ports, but only the one PATA, which is being used for optical drives. It wouldn't surprise me to see PATA dropped completely on some motherboards before too long. Especially motherboards for SFF systems where space is limited.

From what I've heard a lot of newer laptops are (or will be) SATA only. Surely the main market for solid state storage is portable computing?

It seems very strange for them to still use PATA when it's a dying technology even in mainstream PCs. It would put me off buying one and I'm sure that's true for a lot of other people.

flokel · Post by **flokel** » Mon Jun 18, 2007 3:39 am

as all newer mainboards do only have one(!) connector for pata devices (which is probably used for optical drives),
pata for harddisks is really outdated

â‚¬: steve was faster

Capsaicin · Post by **Capsaicin** » Mon Jun 18, 2007 8:32 am

Supposedly, most SATA SSDs are using PATA to SATA bridges internally anyway (article: http://www.digitimes.com/bits_chips/a20070607VL201.html). So, for the most part, it's just an issue of what connections you have available.

trxman · Post by **trxman** » Mon Jun 18, 2007 12:10 pm

I don't have any experiance with SSDs, so I need simple advice:

Is there some kind of best buy SSD drive with capacity of 4 - 8GB?

I'm looking forward putting my OS on SSD and using 1gbps network mounted drive for everything else. In that way, I could make silent box in my room and quite good OS performance.

Any suggestions?

frostedflakes · Post by **frostedflakes** » Mon Jun 18, 2007 7:48 pm

Samsung 4GB and 8GB SSDs are available on NewEgg.

Looks like PNY is coming out with their SSD line soon. 2.5" SATA and available in both MLC and SLC, so you can choose between higher performance and higher price or go with the MLC and save some cash.

http://www2.pny.com/MarketingPromotions ... _SATA.aspx

Can't wait to see what availability and pricing is like.

Spare Tire · Post by **Spare Tire** » Mon Jun 18, 2007 8:20 pm

Got a question. If i partition an SSD, does the wear-levelling work at an even lower level so that it will spread the wear accross the whole disk instead of just that partition?

trxman · Post by **trxman** » Tue Jun 19, 2007 4:16 am

frostedflakes wrote:Samsung 4GB and 8GB SSDs are available on NewEgg.

Looks like PNY is coming out with their SSD line soon. 2.5" SATA and available in both MLC and SLC, so you can choose between higher performance and higher price or go with the MLC and save some cash.

http://www2.pny.com/MarketingPromotions ... _SATA.aspx

Can't wait to see what availability and pricing is like.

great! thank you!

I saw on the NewEgg that 1.8" models with the same capacity are cheaper. are they slower or what?

frostedflakes · Post by **frostedflakes** » Tue Jun 19, 2007 5:10 am

I believe they have the same performance as 2.5" drives. Maybe just lower demand, therefore NewEgg has priced them a little lower than the 2.5" drives.

IsaacKuo · Post by **IsaacKuo** » Tue Jun 19, 2007 6:53 am

Do 2.5" PATA connectors fit on those 1.8" drives?

Bicster · Post by **Bicster** » Tue Jun 19, 2007 9:03 am

Spare Tire wrote:Got a question. If i partition an SSD, does the wear-levelling work at an even lower level so that it will spread the wear accross the whole disk instead of just that partition?

The SSD is of course unaware of partitions ... but you hit the $64 question. Sandisk CF cards do wear leveling using pools of erase blocks. That's fine for digital cameras and MP3 players but inadequate for normal PC usage. One would hope that the wear leveling is spread out across the entire disk with these HDD-replacement SSD's, but to my knowledge this information has never been shared with the public. If anyone has any sources, please cite them.

Eventually OSes will probably offer filesystems designed specifically *for* SSD's, both to help with wear leveling and to enhance performance. In the near term, logfs may be an option for Linux users. I know I'm keeping an eye on it!

Spare Tire · Post by **Spare Tire** » Tue Jun 19, 2007 12:59 pm

Well, for one thing i know win XP Embedded has the option to make your system partition (or other partitions too i guess) read-only and with a write filter it will intercept all writes from user level applications and put them in ramdisk and then write only once when you shutdown, or i guess until the ramdisk is full.

Mr Evil · Post by **Mr Evil** » Tue Jun 19, 2007 1:33 pm

Bicster wrote:...Eventually OSes will probably offer filesystems designed specifically *for* SSD's, both to help with wear leveling and to enhance performance. In the near term, logfs may be an option for Linux users. I know I'm keeping an eye on it!

What about UDF? It's designed for things like CD-RW, which has similar requirements to flash.

Bicster · Post by **Bicster** » Tue Jun 19, 2007 4:26 pm

Mr Evil wrote:
Bicster wrote:...Eventually OSes will probably offer filesystems designed specifically *for* SSD's, both to help with wear leveling and to enhance performance. In the near term, logfs may be an option for Linux users. I know I'm keeping an eye on it!
What about UDF? It's designed for things like CD-RW, which has similar requirements to flash.

UDF doesn't do wear leveling, but it allows remapping of worn out sectors (at least if I understand it correctly.) I don't think it brings anything to the table here. It all depends on what the behavior of the SSD is when it runs out of eraseblocks. I presume either the entire disk, or large portions of it, become read-only at that point. UDF probably can't cope with that, even if the OS supports using it in sparing mode.

I also don't know how well UDF would work as the root filesystem for a Unix like OS. It wouldn't be suitable for booting Windows at all.

Maybe someone should buy an SSD and torture the hell out of it so we know what happens when it breaks

vincentfox · Post by **vincentfox** » Tue Jun 19, 2007 6:38 pm

What about ZFS? If JFFS for it's wear-leveling were crossed with ZFS with it's ability to recognize an error via checksums, that seems like the perfect flash filesystem.

|Romeo| · Post by **|Romeo|** » Wed Jun 20, 2007 10:00 am

IIRC UDF doesn't deal with sparing itself -that is performed by the drive (there was a discussion on the UDF refelector about using UDF on flash a while back). I think it does some clever things with the bitmap.

I wouldn't like to swear to any of the above, because a) it was a while ago
b) I wasn't vitally interested
c) I've never gone into UDF in enough detail to understand it properly

But there was a discussion about this on the UDF reflector, so if you're really interested you can look it up.

Spare Tire · Post by **Spare Tire** » Fri Jun 22, 2007 10:34 am

Best filesystem for SSD that windows can run on would be FAT right? NTFS keeps writing to the disc for unknown reason. I also hear FAT is faster, and it's fragmentation problem will be a non-issue for SSD. But FAT is less secure and also less safe.

Mr Evil · Post by **Mr Evil** » Fri Jun 22, 2007 11:01 am

Spare Tire wrote:...NTFS keeps writing to the disc for unknown reason...

I've formatted several USB flash drives with NTFS and haven't noticed any unexplained writing, but maybe that's because I have the "last accessed" timestamping turned off.

Pauli · Post by **Pauli** » Fri Jun 22, 2007 12:07 pm

Spare Tire wrote:Best filesystem for SSD that windows can run on would be FAT right? NTFS keeps writing to the disc for unknown reason. I also hear FAT is faster, and it's fragmentation problem will be a non-issue for SSD. But FAT is less secure and also less safe.

A file system doesn't "write to the disc" for any reason -- the operating systems does that. I think what you're trying to say is that NTFS has too much overhead associated with it and therefore requires additional activity by the OS to use and maintain it. FAT may be the fastest of PC operating systems, but it is of limited usefulness because of limitations with large hard drives among other things.

highlandsun · Post by **highlandsun** » Sat Jun 23, 2007 7:57 pm

Nah, aside from the lastAccess timestamp, Windows just writes continuously to its security logfiles. So you get that update traffic regardless of the type of filesystem you use. Stupid POS. As far as I know, there isn't any control to turn off that logging, nor is there any app for reading those logs. At least on Unix you can configure syslog.conf and turn that stuff off if you don't need it.