back to article Samsung’s SUPER-speedy SSD is a real power-sipper

Samsung’s latest small form factor PCIe flash drive shunts data at up to 2.15GB/sec, making it a right speedy little critter. It’s also much more power-efficient, using its “L1.2 low power standby mode (which allows all high-speed circuits to be turned off when a PC is on sleeping or in hibernation) as defined by PCI-SIG (the …

  1. Lionel Baden

    And again !!!

    Samsung are just showing off now !!!

    AND I LOVE IT (proud 850 evo owner now)

    Cant wait till these get built into the latest batch of phones !

    1. Steve Todd

      Re: And again !!!

      I hate to break this to you, but these will never go in phones. They're too big, too high power (they need > 4w at full chat) and use the wrong kind of interface (PCIe rather than ONFi for example). These parts are designed for laptops, and possibly at the outside desktops.

      1. Lionel Baden

        Re: And again !!!

        **sniff

        ok :(

        1. Charles 9

          Re: And again !!!

          It's not like Samsung isn't prepping something for phone applications. I believe that's where their 3D Flash efforts will end up. It may not be uber-fast, but it will be compact.

          1. Lionel Baden

            Re: And again !!!

            DRY MY TEARS, ITS TIME TO CHEER !!!!

  2. Alan Denman

    I don't get it.

    Surely standby an SSD is on or off.

    The data is not on or off lossy like with RAM

    1. 8Ace

      Re: I don't get it.

      Something has to be "on" waiting for the "wakeup" call

    2. Paul Shirley

      Re: I don't get it.

      A drive can go to standby when idle on a running PC. Not likely to happen if it's the OS drive. Won't power down until the PC powers down in standby standby.

    3. illiad

      Re: I don't get it.

      AFAIK it is the drive interface that is the prob... The OS regularly polls the drive, (of course) thinking it is still 'rotating' media to keep it ready...

      B U T the picture of this SSD above is not clear -- it does not look like a PCIE connector, and it looks a bit long to fit in a SATA slot (the number of contacts may be ok, if no 'hot swap' capability... )

      must be some 'simple' PCIE, but then a device driver would be needed to make it look like a drive... :(

      SATA is much simpler, just plug it in...

      read this to see why PCIE is not THAT better... Until the get a *another* new spec that will do it... {yawn}

      1. illiad

        Re: I don't get it. ( URL!!!! :O )

        read this to see why PCIE is not THAT better... Until the get a *another* new spec that will do it... {yawn}

        http://www.computerweekly.com/feature/PCIe-SSD-What-it-is-and-how-you-can-use-it

      2. Fuzz

        Re: I don't get it.

        This is an M.2 card and most likely NVMe so the article you posted isn't relevant

      3. Chris 2

        Re: I don't get it.

        It's an m.2 connector, most mid-range or above motherboards come with the ports now. They come in either PCIE or SATA formats, and the PCIE versions can be a _lot_ faster. There aren't many PCIE drives out yet though. This one looks pretty tasty, depending on price and if you can get them retail.

        EDIT: also, that article is from 2010, so yeah, a bit behind the times..

        1. petur
          Thumb Up

          Re: I don't get it.

          I switched to using M.2 for my OS drive, and I can testify that it is the fastest 'disk' interface I have used so far. Previously using an intel SSD on SATA2, so I was impressed to notice the difference.

          1. Gordon 10

            Re: I don't get it.

            I would expect to see it in the next MacBook refresh. Apple hoovered up much of the early M.2 supply - especially Sammy's.

            Might be a nice upgrade for my Mid 2013 model MBA.

            1. M. B.

              Re: I don't get it.

              I would like to see it with at least a 1080p screen and Broadwell U processors as well, probably the i5-5250U. That would make for a snappy lightweight with battery enough to last me a fully day of poking around in client data centers.

              1. M. B.

                Re: I don't get it.

                Wait, that might not be a part of the plan...

                http://9to5mac.com/2015/01/06/macbook-air-12-inch-redesign/

  3. frank ly

    Use of words

    "... energy efficiency, requiring only about 450MB/s per watt for sequential reading ....

    Shouldn't that be " ... achieving about 450MB/s per watt ..."

    1. Charles 9

      Re: Use of words

      No, they got it right. They're saying it would take the reading of a total of 450MB of sequential data for the device to consume 1W of power and 250MB for writing. Meaning it's probably able to selectively power storage chips up and down as needed. A random operation would require more chips to be online at a time, reducing the power efficiency somewhat, but perhaps you get the picture now.

      1. Gordon 10

        Re: Use of words

        are you sure about that? Even for sequential writes my understanding was the wear levelling and raid-like usage of the individual chips would require most/all of the chips powered up. Unless the power up/down time has much less latency than Im assuming it does.

      2. jzlondon

        Re: Use of words

        They didn't get it right.

        A Watt is 1 Joule per second. Your interpretation makes no account of read speed. You say that reading a total of 450mb would consume 1W. What if that read took 10s? Would it stil consume 1W over all those seconds?

        You can't actually consume 1W of power. What you can do is draw 1W of power for a certain amount of time.

  4. Phil Bennett

    Surely about the same power usage as the previous gen?

    From the article:

    "more than 50 per cent of improvement in performance per watt over that of the XP941 SSD"

    "50 per cent faster for sequential reading and writing. "

    Looking at both sentences, does that mean this drive uses about the same total power as the previous gen, albeit with higher performance?

    1. Charles 9

      Re: Surely about the same power usage as the previous gen?

      Based on the stats and the article, it's somewhere in between "more performance for the same power consumption" and "the same performance for less power consumption". It has somewhat better performance than before while also using less power than its predecessor.

  5. JustNiz

    >> The XP941 was rated at 73TB written (40GB/day) and had a 3-year warranty.

    So is the idea that SSD drives are now *designed* to only work for a few years? Seems to me that SSD is actually big step backwards if that's true. I've had the same mechanical hard drives in my PC for maybe 10 years now with no problems.

    1. LaeMing

      The lifespan is inherent in the way flash memory works. A combination of how often you re-write data blocks and how many spare blocks are set aside in the device to account for write-worn ones determines actual life.

      If you are determined, you can wear out a flash drive in minutes, if you (or more accurately your software stack*) are careful, you can make it last well beyond the manufacturer's spec.

      * Current-gen OSes and applications aren't really optimised for this. As using flash for the OS/App/Immediate-data storage device becomes ubitiquous I imagine they will be tuned that way.

    2. Simon Bramfitt

      >> So is the idea that SSD drives are now *designed* to only work for a few years?

      Not so much designed only to work for a few years, more a case of a technology that will only work for a few years before wearing out. More accurate to say can only be written to so many times, read operations don't affect drive life.

      Worse as cell geometry shrinks (and IOPS goes up) endurance falls off.

      1. Chris 2

        http://techreport.com/review/27436/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-two-freaking-petabytes

        SSD endurance is really overplayed. The Samsung Pro drives have a 10 year warranty - I don't recall seeing consumer-space mechanical drives with that kind of confidence from the manufacturer before.

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