Super Talent SSD: 16GB of Solid State Goodness
by Gary Key on May 7, 2007 4:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
First Thoughts
We think Solid State Drives have an excellent future ahead of them. We are in the early stages of testing drives designed for the more performance oriented consumer market under an operating system (Vista) designed for them. However, we are still impressed with the overall performance of the Super Talent SSD16GB25/25M Flash Drive considering its design limitations for the target commercial and industrial markets.
Our limited testing shows both the strengths and weaknesses of this particular drive. Considering the read and write speeds are limited to around 25 MB/sec, the drive was forced to rely upon its superior access and random read rates to generate very competitive scores in our gaming and Windows XP operating system tests. However, we do see one of the major weaknesses of this drive being tested in a consumer centric test such as encoding where the write performance was up to four times slower than the hard disk. We expect these results to improve greatly with the consumer based drives, especially under Vista. In the meantime, the Super Talent SSD16GB25/25M is perfectly suited for its commercial or industrial target markets.
For now, the strengths of the technology behind Solid State Drives are significant for the portable market and eventually could be for the desktop market in specialized uses such as general office machines or portable workstations. The failure rates of the drive should be significantly lower since the drive has no moving parts; it can withstand extreme vibration and shock rates, and is designed for a wide variety of environmental conditions. There are other advantages as well.
Unlike the typical hard drive which has read access times in the 11ms range, most SSD products have access times less than a 1ms with the newer consumer drives being around .12ms at this time. This extremely low latency can significantly improve system resume times and random file access speeds when compared to a hard drive. A hard drive requires a motor, bearings, and moving head components that result in additional heat, power usage, and noise when compared to a SSD. Since the SSD does not have any moving parts it generates less heat, uses up to 80% less power, and is totally silent. Other benefits include improved data integrity, especially during power failures, power surges, or physical shock to the drive. The performance of the drive is fixed and remains stable over a long period of time unlike a hard drive that is subject to file fragmentation and slower access rates over time as the drive is filled up.
Of course, with strengths come weaknesses. The major weakness at this time is the cost of SSD products. The average cost at this time is $17 per GB of storage compared to as little as $0.25 per GB for hard drives. Also, overall performance of the SSD is dependent upon the NAND memory utilized and more importantly, the flash controller design at this juncture. We are just now seeing flash controllers and supporting software designs that can offer similar performance to a typical 7200rpm hard drive in most applications. This is one area that we expect to see improve significantly and quickly over the next nine months based upon our discussions with the manufacturers.
These weaknesses will diminish over time, especially with NAND memory decreasing in price by 40% per year based on current averages. We doubt the SSD product will make significant headway into the desktop market over the next three years due to the continued explosion of storage space requirements for digital entertainment. However, we do see it becoming a relatively significant part of the portable market over the same time period along with exceptionally fast double digit growth into the commercial and industrial markets.
We want to thank Super Talent again for providing our first benchmark-stable SSD sample and we look forward to their entry into the consumer market later this year. Until then, if you are a road warrior who is constantly afraid of losing data and can live with limited capacities, you might want to take a look at the consumer SSD products. And for those who are bound to ask, we only had a single drive for testing so we were unable to perform any RAID tests at this time, not to mention that definitely isn't the target market of this particular SSD. We hope to take a look at RAID performance of the consumer SSDs in the future, though the cost of such a configuration is likely to be prohibitive to all but the most affluent of users.
We think Solid State Drives have an excellent future ahead of them. We are in the early stages of testing drives designed for the more performance oriented consumer market under an operating system (Vista) designed for them. However, we are still impressed with the overall performance of the Super Talent SSD16GB25/25M Flash Drive considering its design limitations for the target commercial and industrial markets.
Our limited testing shows both the strengths and weaknesses of this particular drive. Considering the read and write speeds are limited to around 25 MB/sec, the drive was forced to rely upon its superior access and random read rates to generate very competitive scores in our gaming and Windows XP operating system tests. However, we do see one of the major weaknesses of this drive being tested in a consumer centric test such as encoding where the write performance was up to four times slower than the hard disk. We expect these results to improve greatly with the consumer based drives, especially under Vista. In the meantime, the Super Talent SSD16GB25/25M is perfectly suited for its commercial or industrial target markets.
For now, the strengths of the technology behind Solid State Drives are significant for the portable market and eventually could be for the desktop market in specialized uses such as general office machines or portable workstations. The failure rates of the drive should be significantly lower since the drive has no moving parts; it can withstand extreme vibration and shock rates, and is designed for a wide variety of environmental conditions. There are other advantages as well.
Unlike the typical hard drive which has read access times in the 11ms range, most SSD products have access times less than a 1ms with the newer consumer drives being around .12ms at this time. This extremely low latency can significantly improve system resume times and random file access speeds when compared to a hard drive. A hard drive requires a motor, bearings, and moving head components that result in additional heat, power usage, and noise when compared to a SSD. Since the SSD does not have any moving parts it generates less heat, uses up to 80% less power, and is totally silent. Other benefits include improved data integrity, especially during power failures, power surges, or physical shock to the drive. The performance of the drive is fixed and remains stable over a long period of time unlike a hard drive that is subject to file fragmentation and slower access rates over time as the drive is filled up.
Of course, with strengths come weaknesses. The major weakness at this time is the cost of SSD products. The average cost at this time is $17 per GB of storage compared to as little as $0.25 per GB for hard drives. Also, overall performance of the SSD is dependent upon the NAND memory utilized and more importantly, the flash controller design at this juncture. We are just now seeing flash controllers and supporting software designs that can offer similar performance to a typical 7200rpm hard drive in most applications. This is one area that we expect to see improve significantly and quickly over the next nine months based upon our discussions with the manufacturers.
These weaknesses will diminish over time, especially with NAND memory decreasing in price by 40% per year based on current averages. We doubt the SSD product will make significant headway into the desktop market over the next three years due to the continued explosion of storage space requirements for digital entertainment. However, we do see it becoming a relatively significant part of the portable market over the same time period along with exceptionally fast double digit growth into the commercial and industrial markets.
We want to thank Super Talent again for providing our first benchmark-stable SSD sample and we look forward to their entry into the consumer market later this year. Until then, if you are a road warrior who is constantly afraid of losing data and can live with limited capacities, you might want to take a look at the consumer SSD products. And for those who are bound to ask, we only had a single drive for testing so we were unable to perform any RAID tests at this time, not to mention that definitely isn't the target market of this particular SSD. We hope to take a look at RAID performance of the consumer SSDs in the future, though the cost of such a configuration is likely to be prohibitive to all but the most affluent of users.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
44 Comments
View All Comments
Samus - Monday, May 7, 2007 - link
Simply awesome, thanks for the review Gary. This is exciting technology for sure. Only took them 20 years to make it cost effective and reasonably good storage.redbone75 - Monday, May 7, 2007 - link
I would say SSD's have a few more years to go before they become cost effective, in the home consumer market, anyway. That market will be very small until the price/GB becomes more reasonable.Lonyo - Monday, May 7, 2007 - link
Is there any chance for comparison of some 1.8" drives in the future?Since 1.8" mechanical drives are somewhat slower than 2.5 or 3.5" mechanical drives, and 1.8" laptops are looking at things like low power consumption, it would be nice to see, assuming you can get hold of some 1.8" drives of both types.
Reflex - Monday, May 7, 2007 - link
These drives are great in an embedded or manufacturing environment. Typically they are not written to frequently so you will never hit the write limitations. As a desktop PC drive however that write limitation could be hit very quickly, within a year even. Furthermore, having worked with these drives extensively in embedded environments, I will point out that when the write limitation is hit, you can no longer read the device either. Since there is no real warning, you simply suddenly lose access to all data on that drive.Solid state storage is the future, but not in the form of today's flash. The write limitation is severe, and very problematic. There are competing technologies that hopefully will show up sooner rather than later.
falc0ne - Monday, May 7, 2007 - link
"The SSD16GB25/25M features a read seek time of less than 1ms, a maximum read/write speed of up to 28 MB/sec, a sustained transfer rate of 25 MB/sec, and an estimated write/erase cycle of approximately 100,000 cycles. This equates into a 1,000,000 hour MTBF rating and indicates a 10 year life expectancy based upon normal usage patterns. Super Talent has developed a set of proprietary wear leveling algorithms along with built in EDD/EDC functions to ensure excellent data integrity over the course of the drive's lifespan."This passage tells a completely different story..
mongo lloyd - Monday, May 7, 2007 - link
Dan at Dansdata.com has said the exact same things as Reflex here for quite a while, and I tend to believe him more than SuperTalent's PR department.Also, as Reflex points out, NAND flash has usually way more than 100,000 write/erase cycles. 1 million cycle is not too uncommon.
Regular CompactFlash memory (previously NOR flash, nowadays NAND flash) can take up to the same order of magnitude of write/erase cycles, and we all know memory cards for digital cameras have quite a finite life. And that's without putting a paging file on them.
PandaBear - Thursday, May 10, 2007 - link
It depends on what kind of Nand. MLC usually can barely hit 100k for good ones (i.e. Toshiba and SanDisk) while 5k for bad ones (i.e. some batch of Samsung that got rejected and they have to dump in the spot market).For a camera, you will have to wear out your camera's shutter before you can wear out the card, but for HD, you better have very good wear leveling and good nand before even attempting).
Gary Key - Monday, May 7, 2007 - link
The manufacturer's are taking a conservative path with the write/erase cycles per sector and it has been difficult to nail them down on it. The latest information I have from SanDisk as an example is that the non-recoverable error rate is 1 error per 10 to the 20th bits read on their current drives but they have not committed to active duty cycles or power-on hours in arriving at that calculation. The majority of the SSD suppliers are focused on MTBF ratings at this time. We will have further details in our consumer article as I expect Samsung to open up on the subject.PandaBear - Thursday, May 10, 2007 - link
Nand don't wear out by sitting around, they wear out by erase/program permanently or read disturb (recoverable just by a rewrite). So MTBF is meaningless. You have to do a lot of reading continuously in order to wear out by read. Actually there are algorithms that protect such cases already by refreshing it, so no harm is done.It is the write that really kills the sector, and Samsung did not mention its erase/program for a reason: they failed their own spec that many reputable clients rejected their order (i.e Sandisk rejected their order from Samsung MLC, and Apple uses excessive recovery algorithm to tolerate them on the audio playback, those Taiwanese cheap flash that you get for free with super slow performance or die after 2 weeks, well, you know what you will get when you open up the case).
For their SSD, they may use SLC instead for the performance and reliability reason. It costs 20% more in spot market, but manufacturing cost is much higher (almost 2x when you think about it), so it will cost more.
Reflex - Monday, May 7, 2007 - link
First off, 100,000 is a VERY VERY low write rating for flash, typical drives nowadays have 250k+ write cycles.Secondly, as pointed out by the article, the intended market is industrial and embedded, which as I stated originally, is an environment where the drives are rarely written to. Typically you have a bootable image in those environments, and it is write protected in some fashion, or requires a very small number of writes.
And finally, if you think 100k write cycles is a lot, watch the drive light on the front of your PC someday. Every flash is a minimum of one write or read operation. Calculate how many times that flashes in ten minutes of 'typical' use. Then extrapolate. You'll understand what I mean.