- Saturday, 28 November 2009
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If sex sells products, does bad sex sell bad products? - The Chicago Savant
The future of storage dissected
THE FUTURE IS of storage is a mix of SSD drives and conventional hard disk.
Conventional hard drives offer the best price/performance ratio when it comes to capacity. The technology built inside a hard drive, is impressive since it requires an insane amount of mechanical precision in order to get the device working.
We got the opportunity to dissasemble and analyse Samsung's SSD drives that Vadim Computers is offering as their default SSD offering.
Vadim offers single, two or four 32GB drives in RAID0, achieving peak speed of over 200MB/s in many operations that regular drives can only dream of.
Samsung 32GB solid state drive
SSDs used in here are known under the friendly name of MCAQE32G4APP-0XA, or just simply Samsung Flash SSD (Solid State Disk) 32G Byte.
The drive is little more than a plastic casing that protects a single PCB with memory chips on both sides and an ARM processor serving as an IDE and logic controller.
Bottom
of the drive sports Samsung ARM processor and NAND chips..
The ARM processor is Samsung's S4LD166X01, manufactured in the ninth week of 2007. Memory chips are all from the same series, K9WAG08U1A-PCB00. This 48-ball package chip sports capacity of 2GB, or 16 Gigabits.
This is how SSD looks outside its plastic casing
When you compare the PCB from the front and the back, it is really easy to see how these 16 chips are configured. There are 12 chips on the back, protected by casing, and four chips plus ARM processor on the front.
Compared to regular drive, SSD looks compact and rather
elegant
We have talked with Vadim over the future of its SSD offerings and he stated that current line-up consisted of Samsung and Mtron 32 and 64GB drives will be replaced with those new 64GB SATA-II native drives, once that they become available. µ
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Why would you show a picture of the SSD and compare it to the size of a 3.5" drive. THIS IS FOR NOTEBOOKS! Compare it to a 2.5" next time.
At these speeds it's no longer for notebooks, it's for all systems.
If it weren't for the price...
These devices are so much faster than traditional HDDs that desktop users will want them too. The size of a standard 3.5" HDD is something that almost all INQ readers be familiar with. This gives a good reference for comparison. The fingers shown in one of the pics may not be so standard.
The SSD drive is in a 2.5 " form factor so wouldnt look much different if they put a 2.5" drive next to it.
I think the point theyre looking to make is how elegant a PCB covered in chips is compared to a great big motor driven platter spinning hunk of precision engineering. 

With USB keys and flash memory becoming plausible replacements for optical drives in some scenarios were not far off a potential revamp of small form factor machines with no moving parts... well maybe a lazy spinning fan, but without the 2 big standard size devices - optical and magnetic drives we can build a system that doesnt resemble a traditional computer in form.
I count 20 chips.
the SSD is being compared to the 3.5" drive as Vadim appear to be using them in their hardcore gaming rigs, its useful to know how much space you would be saving if you were to integrate these drives into your build
Oh my god I hope you didn´t pee in your pants... have you thought about how much work The Inquirer writers have? Is it such a drama putting in a similar picture to give the article a little more life? Do you think they have time doing all the flashy pics? 

You really must have a very good life if this picture upsets you so much that you have to comment on it.

Cheers

P.S. Keep it up Inquirer :=)
... drives won't have to be of 3,5" size by the time SSD drives are cheap and readily available? In the future, the grass will be greener and the drives will be smaller, faster, cooler, quieter etc etc. It will happen, and I couldn't be happier. Nevertheless, that should have been mentioned in the article if that was what the author intended. ;)
This isn't "only" for notebooks. You're just looking at one model. Can't you get your grey matter to grip the fact that these drives can be made to be used anywhere? Notebooks, servers, desktops, and eventually small enough for handheld devices? People are really funny when they think they know it all. I'm not one of them, but at least I can see the possibilities for this technology.

Use that brain, "next time".

Keys
Though the flash drives may be nice, I'll still wait on SSDs till I see an affordable NVRAM SSD using DDR-2 or 3 type memory using USB 3.0 for connection. 600 MB/s sustained read/write :) Sorry, I'll stop shorting out my KB now.
Dell offers their 32GB SSD on a number of notebooks. At $550 for a 32GB drive only notebook users would pay it. Next year it'll probably be half that and start to creep into desktops. If you put your OS & applications on the SSD and data on a conventional drive, the thing will boot & run like a rocket!
Anyone would think that Vadim made these drives the way this article goes on! They are just a reseller, like a thousand others, all of whom can buy these from distribution. Why make them out to be anything other than this? Advertising revenue?
Not including the ARM controller there would be 16 chips. If you counted 20 you counted the 4 bottoms ones twice from the two different pictures.

If each memory chip accounts for 3 chips you'd get your 48 mentioned in the article.
Not including the ARM controller there would be 16 memory chips (mentioned in the article too). If you counted 20 you counted the 4 bottoms ones twice from the two different pictures.

If each memory chip accounts for 2gigs per chip (mentioned in the article) you'd get your 32 gig SSD.

Perhaps the author could have better explained what 48-ball means to avoid confusion.
Impressive.
Now wake me up when I can get a 200GB SSD for $80.
Strange this device should be IDE, when most Laptops and PCs are fitted with SATA \ SATA II connectors these days. Not that I have anything against the IDE interface, even today there seems to be little to choose interms of performance between the two on decent machines.