The SSD Anthology: Understanding SSDs and New Drives from OCZ
by Anand Lal Shimpi on March 18, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
The OCZ Summit: First with Samsung’s New Controller
Well before Intel ever introduced the X25-M, there was one chip company who had already been making well behaved SSD controllers: Samsung.
The fit just made sense; Samsung makes NAND flash, Samsung makes microprocessors, thus Samsung should make SSDs.
Samsung is a unique company in that it is very well known in both the OEM and consumer spaces. You’ll find Samsung ICs in nearly everything; DRAM, smartphones, even the flash on the JMicron drives I’m always complaining about - Samsung makes it. With strong OEM ties as well as a good-sized HDD business, it didn’t take long for Samsung to get into the SSD market.
Because it was primarily selling SSDs to OEMs like Apple and Dell, the controller had to be perfect. Stuttering, pausing and strange reliability problems wouldn’t cut it. Apple wouldn’t dare ship a MacBook Air with a SSD that would deliver anything less than a flawless usage experience.
With that sort of pressure, Samsung’s SSDs and its controllers always just worked. Even before the JMF602A ever shipped, Samsung’s controllers were doing just fine. They had to. Their customers were Apple and Lenovo, there’s no room for silliness.
There were two problems with Samsung’s controllers: 1) they were expensive, and 2) they weren’t very fast.
The cost drove SSD makers to companies like JMicron, to drive SSD prices down faster than Samsung would allow. The performance made it so that the very first SSDs weren’t much faster than the fastest hard drives, and in some cases they were slower.
Late last year Samsung announced a new version of its MLC controller that would slowly replace all of the existing Samsung MLC drives in the market. OCZ was the first to get us a sample based on this new controller, even faster than Samsung and the drive is called the Summit.
OCZ's Summit, it's an early sample
Lots of glue and no screws on the pre-release Summit. The final drive should be ready soon.
I’ll save a detailed investigation into the Summit and Samsung’s controller for another article, this one is already long enough. The Summit should be priced similarly to the Intel drive, although OCZ is trying to make it cheaper. The performance level is designed to be greater than the Vertex and competitive with the Intel X25-M. We’ll see about that shortly.
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matrixireland - Thursday, December 24, 2009 - link
hi would like to know what you pros think of the;Golden Leopard ASAX-ZIF1.8-SSD? what would you add to it?
And how would you rate it against other ssd?
Specifications:
product description
ASAX-ZIF1.8-SSD is a high-performance design solid state drive based on the high-end micro-control IC with flash memory storage medium integrated advantaged of high speed,convenient ,aseismatic,energy-saving etc.
specification
Model
Size
Interface
Material
ASAX-ZIF1.8-SSD
1.8inch 70×54×6mm
ZIF
Aluminum-magnesium alloy appearance ,drawbench and colorful oxidation surface,elegant temperament
performance
read speed:80- 96Mbytes/second write speed:50- 60Mbytes/second
support ATA-7 V3 PIO/multi word/ultra DMA MODES
Low power TFBGA,4 channel of flash controller,masked ROM and data SRAM
SAMSUNG flash keeps the data faster on reliability and endurance
Dynamic and static wear-leveling prolong NAND FLASH and SSD for longer life
8/16 bit BCH ECC data error correction ability effectively guarantee the data read security.
Design consideration
Capacity
16G/32G/64G/128G/256G
Average access time
<0.25MS
operating temperature
0-85°
power consumption
DC Input Voltage(3.3V or 5 V ± 10%)Read and write:135mA/194Ma wait:70mA
shock
1500G
Application
the Laptop, pc, server,workstation,portable media player,digital collection apparatus and any computer equipment which need consecutive read and write speed and high reliability storage.
jay401 - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
yeah, he wants "more expensive than" or "too expensive for".Spoelie - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
Second page as well:missing charts before and after this paragraph:
"The chart above shows how much faster these affordable MLC SSDs were than the fastest 3.5” hard drive in sequential transfers. But now look at random write performance:"
Spoelie - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
chart 1 on page 2 now shows sequential read but the paragraph is changed to mention random read ;)page 21: As far as I know, this is THE one of THE only reviews
Some very surprising benchmark results for the ocz vertex, I thought the new firmware tanked sequential read speeds (to 80-90) based on the explanation beforehand, but not according to the actual graphs.
Spoelie - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
third page, first table, first column: SSD and HDD entries are switchedmikaela - Tuesday, March 16, 2010 - link
yeah great info. also great resourceSpoelie - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
page 19: I’d never reviewed it'd & -ed?
HolyFire - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
"I'd never reviewed it" is correct. "I'd" here means "I had", it's Past Perfect tense.FishTankX - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
That should have bolded "too"FishTankX - Wednesday, March 18, 2009 - link
Also, I think the velociraptor vs X-25 figures are swapped. 6 odd ms for the intel drive and 0.11ms for the velociraptor..