You are previewing premium content. Samsung's 256GB SSD offers capacity, speed
I was deeply in techno-lust when I opened a UPS box the other day and pulled from it Samsung's new 256GB, SATA II laptop solid-state disk (SSD) drive -- stainless steel all around and oh-so-sleek. It sat in front of me and veritably screamed, "a quarter of a terabyte on flash memory." I didn't care that I didn't need that much storage capacity on my laptop. I wanted it anyway.
Samsung is marketing this 2.5-in, 256GB SSD as a drive with more than double the performance of its earlier 64GB and 128GB SSDs. It also claims this drive has the "highest overall performance in the personal computer industry." I tested that claim.
I put the drive is up against Intel's X25-M SSD , which I consider the industry leader for SSDs when it comes to performance. Intel gets tremendous throughput on its SSD by interleaving NAND flash chips and using 10 parallel channels and optimized firmware, and it sips CPUs with just 2% utilization.
For my testing, I used a Dell Latitude D830 laptop with an Intel Core 2 Duo processor running Windows XP Professional SP2.
Like Intel's X25-M, Samsung's SSD is based on multi-layer cell NAND flash memory, which means it packs two or more bits per cell versus more efficient, but lower-capacity single-layer cell memory, which only lays down one bit per cell. Samsung also has a multi-channel interleaving chip architecture with 8 parallel channels. And the company said it has upgraded this model's firmware and controller.
I also compared the Samsung SSD to a spinning hard disk drive: Western Digital's Velociraptor. While the Velociraptor comes in a 3.5-inch enclosure, which won't fit in most laptops, it's actually a 2.5 inch disk inside the larger enclosure. Either way, it's the fastest consumer-grade hard disk drive we've ever tested at Computerworld , so I thought it fitting to compare it with the newer technology of SSD.
From the start, Samsung's drive has an advantage in my mind over Intel's SSD in that it offers more than three times the capacity of the 80GB X25-M.
In our tests using Simpli Software's HD Tach , Intel's X25-M turned in I/O burst speeds of 256.7MB/sec. and an average read speed of 230.2MB/sec. Intel said its X25-M has a two million hour mean-time before failure (MTBF) rating, or 100,000 write cycles -- the same number of writes offered by more expensive single-layer cell NAND memory. According to Brian Beard, SSD product manager for Samsung Semiconductor, the MTBF for the 256GB SSD drive is one million hours. Beard said that "if writing a large amount of data to the drive, say 20GB a day, our 256 SSD would last over 100 years."
Like other newer SSDs using multi-layer cell memory, Intel uses wear-leveling firmware, which more evenly distributes writes throughout the drive instead of concentrating them among a group of cells. Samsung does the same.
Samsung claims sequential read rates of 220MB/sec with sequential write rates of 200MB/sec. Samsung also claims the new drive consumes 1.1 watts of power versus two or more watts for a comparable HDD. A problem with SSD is that writing data takes longer than with hard disk because NAND flash memory cells are only marked for deletion and not overwritten until new data is ready to be laid down. At that point, the disk must perform an operation often referred to as "garbage collection" where old data is deleted or moves in order to make room for the new data.
Samsung said its new firmware increases the drives erase cycles to 100GBs per minute, allowing the entire drive to be re-written much faster. That accounts for the only 10% discrepancy between reads and writes -- at least on paper.
The HD Tach results for Samsung's SSD were excellent, but they didn't beat Intel's drive. The average read speed on the drive was 180.3MB/sec. The sequential read speed was also 180MB/sec. The burst speed was 229.4MB/sec and the random access time was .1 milliseconds. Not surprisingly, the only other random access time I'd ever seen that low was on Intel's X25-M. The CPU utilization on the Samsung SSD was notably higher than Intel's X25-M at 11%, but low enough that it does not tax the system and slow other applications.
By comparison, the 10,000-rpm spindle speed Velociraptor had a 250.2MB/sec. burst speed and 105.6MB/sec. average read through HD Tach.
Boot up time was remarkable using the Samsung drive. The laptop was up and running in about 25 seconds. Samsung also claims the drive launches applications 10 times faster than the fastest 7,200-rpm laptop HDD. With the Fujitsu 7,200-rpm 160GB drive that comes standard with the Dell laptop I was using, boot up took exactly one minute. For the fun of it, I ran HD Tach tests on the native Fujitsu drive and found an average read speed of 51.3MB/sec, a burst speed of 148.5MB/sec, a random access time of 18.4 milliseconds and a CPU utilization of 4%.
Like all SSDs, this is an extremely light drive at only 2.8 ounces, or 81 grams. While Samsung hasn't yet released a price for this drive, the one I received came with loan agreement that valued it at a suggested retail price of US$500. Ultimately, Samsung's reseller partners will decide how much this drive adds to the price of their laptops. Alienware, a Samsung reseller, said an upgrade to the 256GB SSD on its M17 laptop would indeed be $500. (By way of comparison, upgrading to a 256SSD in Apple's 17-in. MacBook Pro costs $750).
Intel slapped a $595 retail price on its X25-M, but you can easily find it for under $400 on sites such as Pricegrabber.com . Still, Samsung has Intel beat by a mile on price, given the 256GB storage capacity.
You can also find 256GB SSDs from Super Talent Technology Corp. on sites such as Newegg.com for $489, but read/write rates are substantially lower on that drive.
Suffice it to say, no matter which model you choose, you'll be paying a hefty price tag for the speed and reliability of a high-capacity SSD. But when it comes to bang for the buck, if that $500 MSRP holds true, Samsung's newest model -- at $2 per gigabyte -- wins the fight of SSD titans handily.
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