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.
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JarredWalton - Monday, May 7, 2007 - link
The 100,000 writes is per sector (or whatever the flash block sizes are) of the drive, so even if you're generating thousands of writes per day if the writes are all going to different blocks it becomes much less of an issue. That's what the "proprietary wear leveling algorithms along with built in EDD/EDC functions to ensure excellent data integrity over the course of the drive's lifespan" are supposed to address.Unless you are intentionally rewriting a single location repeatedly, I don't doubt that the drives can last 10 years. Considering I have a lot of normal hard drives fail within five years, that's not too bad. Besides, with the rate of progress it's likely that in the future SSDs will get replaced every couple of years just like today's HDDs.
PandaBear - Thursday, May 10, 2007 - link
With wear leveling, it doesn't matter where you write, it is internally mapped to different physical location each time, so it is 100k write per sector x # of sectors = total # of write you can get out of the entire drive.In this case, a bigger drive buy you more than just space, it buys you extra blocks/sectors that it can cycle through and reduce the wear on every single drives.
Reflex - Monday, May 7, 2007 - link
[quote]That's what the "proprietary wear leveling algorithms along with built in EDD/EDC functions to ensure excellent data integrity over the course of the drive's lifespan" are supposed to address.[/quote]Just to address this specifically, there is no such thing as a 'standard wear leveling algorithm', every flash producer has thier own method of wear leveling, so by default they are all proprietary. I am relatively certain that this company has not come up with something so revolutionary that it would essentially change the entire market as you seem to be implying, if they have I am pretty certain these flash chips would be the industry standard by now. Furthermore, were it any more advanced than the competition, it would not be advertised with a 100k write limitation when the industry standard is 250k writes.
Reflex - Monday, May 7, 2007 - link
I am very aware of how it works. However write operations can happen across several sectors. Once again, consider the market these are intended for. You will NOT get ten years out of one on a typical workstation, it simply will not happen. You will get at least a decade out of one as part of a cash register, assembly line robot, or other industrial/embedded purpose, which is what their statement is all about.You are likely to get one to two years out of one of these, tops. Furthermore, when it fails it will be sudden, and you will not be able to recover your data through conventional means.
I highly suggest you test this before you reccomend your readers to use these things as a main drive. I have tested it extensively myself as part of my job. My email is in my profile if you feel the urge to contact me about this.