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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eguy - Monday, May 14, 2007 - link
These guys are knowledgable and sell the Super Talent and other SSDs. They are even working on a RAID0 SSD box! http://www.dvnation.com/nand-flash-ssd.html">http://www.dvnation.com/nand-flash-ssd.html .There are not many SSDs that can benefit from RAID0. The issue is that the CONTROLLERS used IN these disks max out in speed before the NAND chips will. That means that the Samsung NAND chips while capable of 60+MB/S are throttled by a controller than in some cases will only do 25MB/S. In a hard disk, the media transfer rate is lower than the controller's bandwith. The hard disk controller can do 150MB/S+. So in hard drive land a 50MB/S hard disk + another 50MB/S hard disk = about 100MB/S in RAID0. But I've seen a 25MB/S SSD + 25MB/S SSD =, you ready for this? 17MB/S. DV Nation is predicting they will have a RAID0 box out later this year that can outperform a single SSD. They couldn't get the ultra-fast IDE Samsungs to RAID up. I told them I wanted to do 2X SATA SSDs in RAID and they said their customers had not had success with that.
I'm thinking newer models might in the future.
Also don't get bent out of shape between SATA and IDE in SSDs. IDEs are just as fast, if not faster than SATA. Even in the world of hard drives, IDE vs SATA does not matter in speed. Drive makers CHOOSE to make their fastest consumer drives in SATA, but even a 10 year old IDE interface is capable of 166MB/S, right? My 10,000 RPM SATA RAPTOR can only to 75MB/S, so IDE would be just as fast for it.
Modern SSDs will outlast hard disks. Forget the write cycles. They are rated between 1,000,000 and 5,000,000 write cycles. The problem is, hard disks are not rated in write cycles. For an apples to apples comparison, you need to use MTBF (mean time between failures). SSDs are rated much MUCH higher in that regard. Look at documentation on Sandisk's site, Samsungs, all the big manufacturers and independent reviewers. I've seen math done that shows life of up to 144 years! (!??!!)
Bladen - Tuesday, May 8, 2007 - link
I think many of us would be interested in seeing exactly what RAID 0 can do for these things. It would be good to compare 2x RAID 0 of this drive vs 2x RAID 0 of the Sandisk and/or Samsung ones, and compare that to 2x RAID Raptors too.Just be particularly flattering to Sandisk or Samsung to get another drive of them if you can.
abakshi - Tuesday, May 8, 2007 - link
If I recall, the price point for the current (OEM) SanDisk 32GB SSD is $350 in volume. If those (which are shipping in laptops today) have much better performance than this, why would anyone use this in an industrial/medical/etc. application - pay $150 more for 1/2 the space and a slower drive? Am I missing something here?Also, any idea of when are the SanDisk/Samsung/etc. consumer SSD's coming out?
PandaBear - Thursday, May 10, 2007 - link
Yeah, longer life span if you do not read/write a lot. HD wear out regardless of use but flash usually doesn't. Also, industrial environment don't usually use a lot of storage but have a lot of packaging limitation (can't fit a large HD or don't have enough cooling) that rule out HD.Check out Hitachi's Endurastar HD, they are rated for industrial grade but are more expensive and smaller capactiy. Now that is a better comparison.
MrGarrison - Wednesday, May 9, 2007 - link
Samsung's SSDs are already out. Check Newegg. They are even available here in Sweden.I would buy two of their 16GB SSDs if only they had SATA interface. Oh well, guess I'll have to wait a couple of months more.
Calin - Tuesday, May 8, 2007 - link
Interesting review, but I have a small problem with it:Please, compare the cost per gigabyte of the 2.5" SSD drive with the cost per gigabyte of other 2.5" mechanical hard drives.
While totally correct, the cost of $0.4/GB of current 3.5", high-capacity hard drives is much lower than the cost for the 2.5" mechanical hard drives (somewhere around the $1/GB, or slightly higher for low capacity drives).
The 16GB 2.5" SSD don't fit in the place of a Raptor, and a Raptor won't fit in the place of a SSD 16GB drive.
Thanks
bob4432 - Monday, May 7, 2007 - link
are the power requirements for the seagate 7200.2 correct - .87W / 2.42W?MadBoris - Monday, May 7, 2007 - link
I'm just very disappointed with performance on these for consumer PC usage.I mean this is solid state memory.
Somebody is going to break this wide open with performance someday, because flash is just so damn slow it's painful to write this.
Making a RAMDRIVE today (using a portion of system RAM) on our PC's is thousands fold faster only lacking volatility for persistent data.
Just duct tape some RAM sticks together on a PCB, hook a duracell to it and we should be good. ;) Well, you get the idea...We need to leverage performance of RAM today.
Wake me up when this technology gets interesting.
Shadar - Monday, May 7, 2007 - link
The article seems to imply that transfer rates are the problem with performance. In this case a RAID of 2 or 4 of these in RAID-0 would drastically increase performance. 4 of these in a Raid 0 should crush a standard hard drive as the transfer rate would always be higher and it would have blazing access times.Though I must wonder why the CF cards are not raided as it is inside this drive. Why wouldn't the manufacturer be using 4 4GB cards in a raid array to boost the speeds themselves inside the box?
yyrkoon - Monday, May 7, 2007 - link
Yeah sure, lets take something with an already severely limited lifespan, and decrease the lifespan by abusing it with RAID . . . Lets not forget that 4 of these drives would set you back over $2000, and it makes even less sense to do so.
I have done intesive testing in this area of my own, and to tell you the truth, *you* do not need that type of performance. *you*, of course meaning, you, me, or the next guy. Besides all this, if you really want to waste you money in the name of peformance, why dont you get 4x or more servers, capable of supporting 32 GB of memory each, use iSCSI, export 31GB of ram from each server, and RAID across those. If you're worried about redundancy, toss in a couple of Raptors into the initiator, and run RAID 0+1, or RAID 10 for redundancy . . .