Samsung Unveils SSD Delivering Speeds of Over 2 GB/s

http://techgage.com/news/samsung-unveils-first-pcie-3-0-x4-based-m-2-ssd-delivering-speeds-of-over-2gbs/

by notsony • 12 years ago

272 112 12 years ago

techgage.com

ck2• 12 years ago

How long until they just use dimm slots?

jotux• 12 years ago

SATA DIMM slots are already available:

http://www.vikingtechnology.com/satadimm-ssd

zxexz• 12 years ago

That only uses the DIMM slot for power - it still uses a SATA connection. This definitely has its uses, though.

wmf6• 12 years ago

Hopefully never. Flash's characteristics are so different from DRAM that flash DIMMs just confuse people.

But there is http://www.sandisk.com/enterprise/ulltradimm-ssd/

pslam• 12 years ago

You can use the DIMM slot for the DDR bus interface, but not used in the traditional way DRAM would be. The DDR interface is extremely fast, and can be purposed for uses other than the standard row/column/select/precharge etc commands.

You would likely need chipset support for it to be used in this fashion, though.

Someone12344• 12 years ago

Agreed.

It would be nice to see a set of slots for both RAM or an SSD. So your laptop may have four slots total, and you can mix and match RAM or drives as you see fit.

The technology to do this is already commercially available in servers. Just need it to come to laptops or PCs.

jader201• 12 years ago

At some point, I hope to see the lines between RAM and SSDs dissolve, such that the OS can just use a portion of the SSD for RAM.

jjoonathan• 12 years ago

Ugh. Well, I suppose it might be OK as long as it doesn't inherit anything about the DRAM hardware interface. Seriously, if you haven't seen how it works (test: are the timings tCAS, tRCD, tRP, tRAS familiar?) you are dramatically underestimating how ugly and restrictive the interface is. It's completely inappropriate for anything but DRAM and probably inappropriate for modern DRAM too. If not, it's probably because backwards compatibility with the interface has constricted DRAM design.

Speaking of which, I'd love to read a modern analysis of chip-to-chip serial vs parallel if anyone has one handy.

sliverstorm2• 12 years ago

It may happen, but not without potential pitfalls. For example, modern CPU's cannot actually address the full 64-bit address range of memory, and if your drive is a DIMM device it is necessarily memory-mapped. CPU's can address a few tens or hundreds of TB. While few computers have that much disk, we aren't far off.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64#Canonical_form_addresses

jschwartzi• 12 years ago

There's nothing in that article that says you can't write a driver which utilizes certain addresses as registers and other address ranges as visible sections of a mass storage device, for example. That's just one hack workaround I can think of that would allow you to put flash into a DIMM. You could combine that with DMA to read data out of your flash DIMM and into your RAM DIMM.

At that point, reading data would be a matter of setting up your paging registers and then queuing a DMA operation to copy data out of the exposed segment of your mass storage device and into RAM. Your flash DIMM would then be just another memory mapped hardware device.

goeric• 12 years ago

How does this compare to the PCI-e based SSD's in the Mac Pro?

wmf6• 12 years ago

It's a newer model. I suspect the difference is negligible in real-world usage.

Someone12344• 12 years ago

Twice the maximum speed is "negligible?" Hmm. Certainly at sequential tasks it should be marked, maybe not so much in random.

dzhiurgis3• 12 years ago

PCIe on Mac Pro has 4x link, although in AnandTech's benchmark they achieved ~1GB/s read speed on 512GB stick.

So I assume theoretically one would see speed increase.

dzhiurgis3• 12 years ago

offered in 128GB, 256GB, 512GB, and even 1TB capacities

Same as current Apple offering, although Retina MacBook Pro's only supports only 2x link.

I hope some larger capacities will become available in next year or two. Also I have noticed no difference in daily computer use when went from 500 MB/s SATA drive to 900 MB/s PCIe.

aduitsis• 12 years ago

Actually, it can go to 4x : http://blog.macsales.com/25878-owc-gets-1200mbs-from-ssd-in-...

They simply plugged in an SSD from a 2013 Mac Pro. Go figure.

notsony2• 12 years ago

But can they plug in the new Samsung SSD (when available) or any of the PCIe-SSDs currently available on Amazon?

My understanding is that Apple (deliberately) changed the physical shape of the PCIe-SSD connector so you could not upgrade the SSD yourself.

dzhiurgis3• 12 years ago

Interesting. EveryMac reports only 2x.

I've seen that OWC article where they get up 1200 MB/s and though that might be still achieved by 2x link width.

mattkirman• 12 years ago

I have a 1TB SSD in my late 2013 15" MacBook Pro Retina and System Information is reporting that it has a 4x link. Even with the additional overhead of having FileVault enabled I still see read/write performance in the region of 1000-1100 MB/s.

MartynX• 12 years ago

The 1TB disk in those is PCI-E.

WestCoastJustin• 12 years ago

Has a Lenovo part # on it, so I suspect this is the PCIe SSD inside the new ThinkPad X1 released as CES 2015, and there was a nice discussion on HN about it yesterday [1]. In that article, the author mentioned that in the tests "read speeds reached 1350 MB/s", which is pretty freaking awesome for a laptop!

Update: Yeah, the SM951 (shown in this article) is in the X1 [2 - see specifications heading].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8847411

[2] http://www.thinkscopes.com/blog/2015/01/06/lenovo-thinkpad-x...

JoshTriplett5• 12 years ago

That's amazingly frustrating. I bought the second-generation X1 Carbon last year, on the theory that Lenovo had killed off mouse buttons permanently so there was no sense waiting for a new system that had them; now they release the third-generation X1 that not only has the mouse buttons back, but kills off the insane touch-strip in favor of real function keys again.

chao-• 12 years ago

I was waiting all of 2013 for that X1 refresh, and spent a whole day swearing at random inanimate objects after seeing what they actually built. Bought an ASUS Zenbook instead. I would LOVE to have somehow lasted this year without a new laptop and sprung for this fixed-up X1, had I known they would correct course. Alas I only buy new laptops every 4-ish years.

So Lenovo lost me as a customer for a 7-8 year span because of those asinine touchscreen keys. I loved Thinkpads as reliable Linux workhorses, but the phrase "Will change their usage per app!" might as well say "Will never work in Linux!".

walterbell8• 12 years ago

The trackpad/keyboard change made me so happy, because I can now buy a Lenovo laptop again. Now they need to bring back the Ultrabay (so we can have 2 spindles (1 swappable) + M2 SSD in a 14" laptop) and get rid of non-removable batteries.

The customer backlash must have had a substantial financial impact for Lenovo to reverse course. Other than Blackberry, has any technology vendor trumpeted their own course-reversal in launch marketing for a new product?

nullc• 12 years ago

Same boat. I finally bought one, after trying out someone elses and deciding that I could live with it.

Ugh. It's almost unusably bad. Fortunately I already don't use the mouse much, but it's gotten worse with more use not better. :(

mrmondo• 12 years ago

This brings them in-line with the 2013 retina MacBook Pro's PCIe SSD speeds though which I believe we're just below at around 1GB/s?

vegardx3• 12 years ago

You have no idea what kind of performance you'll get with an Apple SSD. My almost brand new Macbook Pro has the worst SSD I've ever used, we're talking sequential speeds comparable to a hard drive. But it still works, so they refuse to change it.

porsupah• 12 years ago

My late 2013 rMBP with the 1TB option sees sustained read and write speeds of around 900MB/s, indeed. Useful when dealing with uncompressed video.

harisamin• 12 years ago

would love to update my 128gb SSD on mid 2011 macbook air :(. Should’ve upgraded to 256 at least …damn you hindsight :)

wmf6• 12 years ago

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/SSD/OWC/Air-Retina/Apple-MacB...

bluedino• 12 years ago

You're better off just finding and OEM 256GB drive on eBay or something. You can use any 2010 or 2011 SSD in the 2011 Air, but the 2012, 2013/2014 Airs are not interchangeable.

facepalm• 12 years ago

I've upgraded my MB Air to a 1TB SSD from Transcend (JetDrive). I think it works with a mid 2011.

jfb• 12 years ago

That's great, but I'd settle for half the speed and twice the density.

vidarh2• 12 years ago

It usually works the other way with SSDs: The bigger the capacity, the faster. The reason is that to increase capacity they usually add additional flash chips in parallel, so apart from on the very low end it is not unusual to see peak performance double when capacity doubles except where you're limited by the maximum performance of the controller or interface.

NoMoreNicksLeft3• 12 years ago

Speed's nice, but get the price-per-terabyte down, I beg you.

cpncrunch• 12 years ago

It has come down by about 50% in the last year.

NoMoreNicksLeft3• 12 years ago

http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-2-5-Inch-SATA-Internal-MZ-7TE1...

$422.

I've been looking at this same one for about a year. It's slightly lower than it was at first, I think it was $470 or so.

I need it to be about $100. I'll buy one per month at that price. But at $422 for a terabyte, it's not that useful to me.

rasz_pl3• 12 years ago

Speed's nice, price-per-terabyte is important, but do something about endurance and how it acts when it dies. I want my drive to tell me "x and Y is broken, only Z is available, read your data before I die" instead of simply VANISHING from my system on next power up like EVERY FRICKIN SSD does right now (even ones promising read only failure mode like Intel).

moe2• 12 years ago

Any electronics device can die at any moment without a chance to tell you anything.

That's why you have to make backups and run your disks in a RAID.

NoMoreNicksLeft3• 12 years ago

My operating system files churn as much as anyone, but I don't intend to use SSDs for files that will be written and rewritten.

I'll use it for the stuff that I want to write once and keep for 30 years.

I have terabytes of such, already.

drzaiusapelord• 12 years ago

What if we gave up on the idea of fixed disk storage and just filled our computers with enough fast RAM to use as a permanent RAMdisk that wrote to these super fast SSDs on occasion, effectively treating the SSD as a backup for the RAMdisk? With a proper battery backup implemented, I imagine it could work.

2 GBytes/sec is crazy fast. That's my entire steam library in 20 seconds. What percentage of those files change per day? 10% or so at most? So when I shut it off, its syncs up the diff in 2 seconds.

When storage gets this fast and RAM this cheap, why bother with fixed disks? Imagine the new Macbook Air with 8gb RAM installed and another 128gb as a RAM disk and a 128gb SSD to back up the RAMdisk.

frozenport• 12 years ago

> and just filled our computers with enough fast RAM to use as a permanent RAM disk

Current ram implementations use a lot more power compared to an SSD, and might not be suited for a laptop.

vessenes• 12 years ago

We have servers like this, and under a surprisingly large number of load scenarios you only get a little speedup. There are use cases where it's helpful, but there are lots of little things that slow down performance that aren't disk-bound, like single-threaded waits for a piece of networking code to timeout, or waits for code that's CPU bound, they all add up.

I used to dream of what you're talking about, but from my own experience in the last year, it just doesn't matter that much for the daily experience using a computer. 16GB of RAM is plenty right now, SSDs are very fast for many tasks, I'd look at upgrading your internet bandwidth after that if you want your computer to feel faster.

seunosewa• 12 years ago

How is this better than a MacBook Air with 128+8gb of ram and a 128gb super-fast SSD? Why buy a super-fast SSD and only use it for daily backups?

bobbles• 12 years ago

End-game should be that my PC just has 'storage' that ranges from RAM to cloud-based auto-backed up data.

The computer should automatically optimise this for commonly used or 'app' style data and keep the information in the level of storage that makes sense.

monochromatic• 12 years ago

Are there issues with booting from PCIe slots? I assume if there are, they'll get sorted out quickly as drives like this become more popular.

wtallis3• 12 years ago

Unless your system has very buggy firmware, any PCIe lane is as good as any other, even if it's behind a switch. The real difference here that limits compatibility is that the controller uses the NVMe host controller interface and command set, instead of the AHCI standard used by SATA controllers and previous PCIe-based SSDs. Software (firmware or OS) that doesn't have a NVMe driver won't even recognize this drive as being a storage device.

aruggirello• 12 years ago

This. Sata Express/M.2 looks promising; there are no mobo's with multiple M.2 ports so far though, so sorry, your 2 GB/s is still not enough for me - a raid0 mdadm device with 4+ very good Sata3 SSD can beat it.

OTOH if a mobo with 2 (or more) M.2 ports hits the market, things are probably going to change...

Samsung Unveils SSD Delivering Speeds of Over 2 GB/s

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