SanDisk's Says New MLC Solid State Drives Equivalent to 40,000RPM Hard Drive
SanDisk's Says New MLC Solid State Drives Equivalent to 40,000RPM Hard Drive
Posted 01/08/2009 at 12:46pm
| by Paul Lilly
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Now in its third generation of solid state drives (SSDs), SanDisk says its new G3 series qualifies as the world's fastest multi-level cell (MLC) based SSDs, equating the performance to that of a theoretical 40K RPM hard drive. That's a big claim considering that, for the most part, SSDs have thus far failed to push real-world performance boundaries.
SanDisk rates the G3 series at 200MB/s read and 140MB/s write, which the company says is five times speedier than the fastest 7,200 RPM hard drives, and twice that of SSDs shipping in 2008. On the reliability side, which is another concern when it comes to high usage Flash memory, SanDisk says its G3 series can withstand 160 terabytes written (TBW) for the 240GB version before the cells turn into read-only. By SanDisk's measurements, that translates to over a century of typical usage.
"SanDisk's G3 SSD has met the demand of a 120GB SSD at less than $250 with an exceptional user experience" said Rich Heye, senior VP and GM, Solid State Drives (SSD) business unit, SanDisk. "Three key features developed by SanDisk enable this new design: a new SSD algorithm called ExtremeFFSTM allows random write performance to potentially improve by as much as 100 times over conventional algorithms; reliable 43nm multi-level cell (MLC) all bit-line (ABL) NAND flash; and SanDisk's new SSD controller, which ties together the NAND and the algorithm."
SanDisk plans to start selling its G3 SSDs by the middle of 2009 in 60GB, 120GB, and 240GB capacities for $150, $250, and $500 respectively.
Image Credit: SanDisk
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ghot
January 08, 2009 at 8:24pm
"can withstand 160 terabytes written (TBW) for the 240GB version before the cells turn into read-only...."
160 / 2.40 = 66.66~ rewrites or am I missing something? I too believe we we be solely SSD's in a few years, but NOT until they solve this rewrite problem, which I am sure they will. I just wonder if 240TB with 66 rewrites is worth $500?
Even if I missed a decimal place that would only be 666.66~ rewrites....I wonder what "typical usage" demographic that comes from?
Inx
January 09, 2009 at 2:59am
Well first, yes you are off by a decimal (0.24, not 2.4). But even if
you write data to every last GB on the drive and the next day, you
rewrite data to cover the whole drive again, ad infinitum, Sandisk's given figure should mean it lasts nearly 2 years...not bad for such a severe workload. However...Second issue here is that for the figures given --whether for HDD's or SSD's-- most of the first few articles that comes upin a google for HDD + MTBF ...are enlightening. Basically what each manufacturer claims can be about as accurate as saying "This Samsung TV is rated for 10,0001 dynamic contrast (DC) and the competitor is only rated for 3,000:1 DC, so the Samsung must have better picture-quality". :-)
Jox
January 08, 2009 at 6:47pm
"SanDisk says its G3 series can withstand 160 terabytes written (TBW)
for the 240GB version before the cells turn into read-only. By
SanDisk's measurements, that translates to over a century of typical
usage."
1) Define "typical usage"
2) 120 GB for $250??? That's only 13 (uncompressed) DVD9's. I can get 1.5TB for less than $200.
3) Yes, I can see this being great technology in a few years. The low noise/heat output of these drives is a definite plus, but honestly, I don't see them becoming mainstream within the next 3 years. Until SSD technology can provide par performance and capacity, their extraneous features won't count for much when there is a 3:1 price disparity. Magnetic storage capacity will continue to grow, access times will continue to diminish. It's not enough for SSD to be as good, it needs to be better or the majority of consumers will simply ignore it.
-Jox
kleinkinstein
January 08, 2009 at 4:11pm
Prices will fall in line, we'll all be SSD'ing within 24 months! HDD's will go the way of Atari!
Inx
January 09, 2009 at 2:06am
EMC says in 24 months, SSD's will only be as cheap as special fiber-channel disks (Check pricewatch.com for prices of "fiber channel" HDD's: the decent (and not "pre-owned") fiber-channel ones cost 5 times more $-per-gigabyte than a standard 7200-RPM disk): http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/05/24/179242
Ahm, I'll be sticking with RAID'ing 7200-RPM drives together (to be faster than 3G SSD's @ less $-per-GB... even 24 months from today, they wil be that expensive) until SSD's get more cost-competitive. I use
RAID-0 for OS+program files+swap
and RAID-1 or -10 for any user-files that I can't afford to lose + my boot-sector. (RAID-1 gets read fast, but has slower writes than RAID-0.),
with a 'mirror' (including boot sector) of OS+program files stored on a USB-flash drive.
Only problem with the 100-year lifespan they tout for SSD's is that it's nearly worthless b/c only 25 years from now, we'll probably look upon their largest 3G drive (the 250GB one) as I look upon the "huge" 20MB HDD that came with my first PC that I bought 23 years ago (and that was the BIGGEST option offered by the company, PC Limited, which changed their name to 'Dell'. Anyone heard of them?? ;-) )
farlo
January 08, 2009 at 1:40pm
that 60gb or 120gb would make a nice os/ap/game install drive-after seeing some real world benchmarks anyways, can keep my larger sata3 drives for audio and video backups.
Kaasiim
January 08, 2009 at 12:55pm
Mothers milk in a cup!
PLEASE tell me that its priced somewhere within a humane range, or is this mainly for business corporations?
How soon can we expect to have benchmark results?
nekollx
January 08, 2009 at 1:01pm
SanDisk plans to start selling its G3 SSDs by the middle of 2009 in 60GB, 120GB, and 240GB capacities for $150, $250, and $500 respectively.
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