Samsung has provided us with a new 32 GB Flash Solid State Hard Disk. How does performance compare to conventional hard drives and what are the implications for desktop and mobility users?

One item I noticed that was not discussed in the article is MTBF. Aren't flash chips limited to a finite number of writes? If so, wouldn't this equate to a low MTBF for the unit?

Jon

I never heard about that, I would think that flash could do as many number of reads or writes... what would limit them?

But then again, I should pay more attention in my solid-state classes...

Either way, I think a hybrid HDD is a good idea for now, but what I'm wondering is the maximum capacity of flash... can it reach above 1TB?? Can it surpass PMR?? Will it be cost-efficent?? Any thoughts?

For the time being the biggest hurdle I see is the cost-efficiency you mention. It is currently very inefficient meaning the cost per GB for solid state is way the heck above HDD cost per GB. That may eventually change if they can sell enough of it to bigger industry but will likely take years.

For now I think its safe to say if you want a good bit or storage or especially mass storage HDD is the only way to go. If you had the bucks and didn't need a lot of space I think an application in moblie PCs or laptops are the best place to start for these new "drives".

Yes... I too am wondering about the MTBF on one of these drives. In the past I have worn out both CF cards and USB flash drives by running OS's off them. From my experiences flash memory doesn't give you warning sings of failure as a machanical hard drive does... It just fails along with your data. It's just a matter how many r/w cycles can this drive take compared to its cheaper counterparts. My personal opinion of a device like this is that it would make a perfect OS drive in conjunction with "classic" hard drives for data storage. I've used over 50 Samsung desktop drives in years past and have only seen two fail -- one because I dropped it.

Paul AKA Sintekk

Yeah, this is a perfect item to sneak into the mobile market, and hybrid drives, and as costs go down, and capacities increase, it can seep slowly into the mainstream. I think if a 30 gig drive becomes affordable, I would get one for my OS and swap file like they mentioned in the article, and just leave everything else on the hard drives

Patrick,

Thank you for this very interesting article. Please tell Samsung to go home and come back with something more definite that is priced around $100 and is SATA. It's taken a long long time to move past PATA. We're trying hard to get rid of those behemoth PATA connectors that dominate mobos and block the air.

If this unknown priced NAND flash is mature enough, maybe it will be usefull for speeding up boot and application loads, reducing access time to the paging file and maybe even lower power draw. All of those attributes are commendable.

Orville

Hey, samsung will probably use SATA for products that are comparable to actual HDD drives

I am glad they are making these first attempts.

In a few years we will have SS Disks in our PC's that are connected SATA or sommething else

Have you seen the price of SSHDDs? 900 for 32 gigs would be pretty good. Check it out...

http://www.dvnation.com/nand-flash-ssd.html

I like the idea of the hybrid drives as well. I'd consider getting one if the price point was there. I guess we'll find out in 2007.

Hopefully in a 3 or 4 years, solid state drives be competatively priced. I'd pay 100 bucks for a 200 gig drive if it had those responce times.

Does anyone know if you flash drives have a finite number of times they can be written to? I didn't think they had a life span in those terms. Can anyone validate this?

Would anybody buy a 32 gig flash MP3 player?

I would say that we can probably only except hybrid HDD's, but the mobile market will move solely to flash... no more micro-hdd's, useless and cause enough headaches when they die.

Has anyone tried to boot Linux off one of these drives? I've tried to with 16Gb Super Talent Flash drives and wasn't able to though Windows installed and booted fine. The Linux install would freeze trying to partition the flash drive and we tried fc4, fc5, ubuntu, and debian. If any of you have been able to get Linux running off the Samsung 32 Gb Flash drive please let me know.

According to wikipedia:

"most commercially available flash products are guaranteed to withstand 1 million programming cycles"

Ofcourse, for powers users 32GB isn't much. But i really would like to use that sollid drive for my proffesional useage. Nomore being afraid for a HD crash and loose all my precious data.
Besides from that, imagine placing sollid drives for specific apliances, like routers, firewalls. Perfect.

It's a begin and you could add more pcb's on top of eachother (i guess).
I am for sure there is a market, only i you could go encrypt the data. They could let the drive boot first to it's own system and type your password to continue... My data will always be save.
I am for sure they have already something like this... I want that...!
Secured data protection. If they have not, my idea

1 million, thats not that many...

And "programming cycles" is very ambiguous. Still, if the I/O performance is worth the limited life, companies will buy it. Just back up the flash drive to disk/tape every so often and get some error control on the drives and you're good to go.

Drive die? swap it out and rebuild it from the backup.

I suspect they kept the IDE interface to keep it compatible with current server systems. The only place you really won't find those connectors is a) gaming systems (VERY recent ones) or b) SCSI systems. a is a small market. b is bigger, so you might see these for SCSI in the future as well.