
Samsung Unveils SSD Delivering Speeds of Over 2 GB/s - notsony
http://techgage.com/news/samsung-unveils-first-pcie-3-0-x4-based-m-2-ssd-delivering-speeds-of-over-2gbs/
======
WestCoastJustin
Has a Lenovo part # on it, so I suspect this is the PCIe SSD inside the new
ThinkPad X1 released as CES 2015, and there was a nice discussion on HN about
it yesterday [1]. In that article, the author mentioned that in the tests "
_read speeds reached 1350 MB /s_", which is pretty freaking awesome for a
laptop!

Update: Yeah, the SM951 (shown in this article) is in the X1 [2 - see
specifications heading].

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8847411](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8847411)

[2] [http://www.thinkscopes.com/blog/2015/01/06/lenovo-
thinkpad-x...](http://www.thinkscopes.com/blog/2015/01/06/lenovo-
thinkpad-x1-carbon-gen-3-review-2/)

~~~
JoshTriplett
That's amazingly frustrating. I bought the second-generation X1 Carbon last
year, on the theory that Lenovo had killed off mouse buttons permanently so
there was no sense waiting for a new system that had them; now they release
the third-generation X1 that not only has the mouse buttons back, but kills
off the insane touch-strip in favor of real function keys again.

~~~
walterbell
The trackpad/keyboard change made me so happy, because I can now buy a Lenovo
laptop again. Now they need to bring back the Ultrabay (so we can have 2
spindles (1 swappable) + M2 SSD in a 14" laptop) and get rid of non-removable
batteries.

The customer backlash must have had a substantial financial impact for Lenovo
to reverse course. Other than Blackberry, has any technology vendor trumpeted
their own course-reversal in launch marketing for a new product?

~~~
super_sloth
The 8GB ram limit on the X1 and X250 is still pretty crazy.

I have virtually no reason to upgrade from my X220 (i5 2410, 8GB/SSD+HD)
unless it breaks. Sad.

~~~
MichaelGG
I'd agree except the X220 screen resolution is idiotically bad.

~~~
ekianjo
Bad for what ? If you had a full HD resolution on that size you would lack
proper display on Linux for high DPI screens (it's still not perfect at this
stage).

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drzaiusapelord
What if we gave up on the idea of fixed disk storage and just filled our
computers with enough fast RAM to use as a permanent RAMdisk that wrote to
these super fast SSDs on occasion, effectively treating the SSD as a backup
for the RAMdisk? With a proper battery backup implemented, I imagine it could
work.

2 GBytes/sec is crazy fast. That's my entire steam library in 20 seconds. What
percentage of those files change per day? 10% or so at most? So when I shut it
off, its syncs up the diff in 2 seconds.

When storage gets this fast and RAM this cheap, why bother with fixed disks?
Imagine the new Macbook Air with 8gb RAM installed and another 128gb as a RAM
disk and a 128gb SSD to back up the RAMdisk.

~~~
vessenes
We have servers like this, and under a surprisingly large number of load
scenarios you only get a little speedup. There are use cases where it's
helpful, but there are lots of little things that slow down performance that
aren't disk-bound, like single-threaded waits for a piece of networking code
to timeout, or waits for code that's CPU bound, they all add up.

I used to dream of what you're talking about, but from my own experience in
the last year, it just doesn't matter that much for the daily experience using
a computer. 16GB of RAM is plenty right now, SSDs are very fast for many
tasks, I'd look at upgrading your internet bandwidth after that if you want
your computer to feel faster.

------
jfb
That's great, but I'd settle for half the speed and twice the density.

~~~
vidarh
It usually works the other way with SSDs: The bigger the capacity, the faster.
The reason is that to increase capacity they usually add additional flash
chips in parallel, so apart from on the very low end it is not unusual to see
peak performance double when capacity doubles except where you're limited by
the maximum performance of the controller or interface.

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ck2
How long until they just use dimm slots?

~~~
wmf
Hopefully never. Flash's characteristics are so different from DRAM that flash
DIMMs just confuse people.

But there is [http://www.sandisk.com/enterprise/ulltradimm-
ssd/](http://www.sandisk.com/enterprise/ulltradimm-ssd/)

~~~
pslam
You can use the DIMM slot for the DDR bus interface, but not used in the
traditional way DRAM would be. The DDR interface is _extremely_ fast, and can
be purposed for uses other than the standard row/column/select/precharge etc
commands.

You would likely need chipset support for it to be used in this fashion,
though.

~~~
wmf
That's what flash DIMMs do. The problem is that if you stick something in a
DIMM slot people expect it to behave like RAM, not like an I/O device.

~~~
xanderstrike
I don't think the kind of person who buys a DIMM SSD is the type of person who
is confused by that sort of thing.

To a non-technical person, mSATA, DIMM, and PCIE SSDs all look the same. These
products aren't for them.

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dzhiurgis
> offered in 128GB, 256GB, 512GB, and even 1TB capacities

Same as current Apple offering, although Retina MacBook Pro's only supports
only 2x link.

I hope some larger capacities will become available in next year or two. Also
I have noticed no difference in daily computer use when went from 500 MB/s
SATA drive to 900 MB/s PCIe.

~~~
aduitsis
Actually, it can go to 4x : [http://blog.macsales.com/25878-owc-gets-1200mbs-
from-ssd-in-...](http://blog.macsales.com/25878-owc-gets-1200mbs-from-ssd-
in-2014-macbook-pro-with-retina-display)

They simply plugged in an SSD from a 2013 Mac Pro. Go figure.

~~~
notsony
But can they plug in the new Samsung SSD (when available) or any of the PCIe-
SSDs currently available on Amazon?

My understanding is that Apple (deliberately) changed the physical shape of
the PCIe-SSD connector so you could not upgrade the SSD yourself.

------
aruggirello
This. Sata Express/M.2 looks promising; there are no mobo's with multiple M.2
ports so far though, so sorry, your 2 GB/s is still not enough for me - a
raid0 mdadm device with 4+ very good Sata3 SSD can beat it.

OTOH if a mobo with 2 (or more) M.2 ports hits the market, things are probably
going to change...

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goeric
How does this compare to the PCI-e based SSD's in the Mac Pro?

~~~
wmf
It's a newer model. I suspect the difference is negligible in real-world
usage.

~~~
Someone1234
Twice the maximum speed is "negligible?" Hmm. Certainly at sequential tasks it
should be marked, maybe not so much in random.

~~~
wmf
Besides copying large files, do you have an app that can consume 2 GB/s?
That's more than two streams of uncompressed 4K.

~~~
foone
Yeah, one of my main debugging tasks right now is primarily limited by my SSD
write speed. Instruction-level traces take 9gb at minimum, any more
significant work takes quite a lot more.

~~~
dman
How are you generating the instruction traces? What format are you writing
them to on disk?

~~~
foone
Ollydbg run traces and in a plain text format. I'm constrained by my target
application only working on older versions of windows, so I can't easily
insert a compression step in the log generation or switch to a more compact
binary representation.

(I'm currently looking into solutions like a custom filesystem driver, running
a second VM and using internal networking to stream to a FUSE filesystem, or
possibly even hooking the filesystem access of my debugger and inserting a
compression step into WriteFile() calls)

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NoMoreNicksLeft
Speed's nice, but get the price-per-terabyte down, I beg you.

~~~
rasz_pl
Speed's nice, price-per-terabyte is important, but do something about
endurance and how it acts when it dies. I want my drive to tell me "x and Y is
broken, only Z is available, read your data before I die" instead of simply
VANISHING from my system on next power up like EVERY FRICKIN SSD does right
now (even ones promising read only failure mode like Intel).

~~~
moe
Any electronics device can die at any moment without a chance to tell you
anything.

That's why you have to make backups and run your disks in a RAID.

~~~
rasz_pl
Yes, any electronic device can die, thats normal.

What is not normal is SSD drive going dark just because there was a SMALL
corruption on one of critical flash cells (usually caused by firmware error,
or power loss or wear). Its quite rare for magnetic drive to die because of
few bad sectors, on the other hand it seems to be a standard failure mode on
all SSDs on the market.

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monochromatic
Are there issues with booting from PCIe slots? I assume if there are, they'll
get sorted out quickly as drives like this become more popular.

~~~
wtallis
Unless your system has very buggy firmware, any PCIe lane is as good as any
other, even if it's behind a switch. The real difference here that limits
compatibility is that the controller uses the NVMe host controller interface
and command set, instead of the AHCI standard used by SATA controllers and
previous PCIe-based SSDs. Software (firmware or OS) that doesn't have a NVMe
driver won't even recognize this drive as being a storage device.

------
harisamin
would love to update my 128gb SSD on mid 2011 macbook air :(. Should’ve
upgraded to 256 at least …damn you hindsight :)

~~~
wmf
[http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/SSD/OWC/Air-Retina/Apple-
MacB...](http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/SSD/OWC/Air-Retina/Apple-MacBook-
Air-2011-Drive-Internal-Flash)

~~~
bluedino
You're better off just finding and OEM 256GB drive on eBay or something. You
can use any 2010 or 2011 SSD in the 2011 Air, but the 2012, 2013/2014 Airs are
not interchangeable.

