back to article Samsung gets 'stupid fast' in gaming grab

Samsung is pitching its fast 256GB solid state drive (SSD) at desktops and notebook gamers and cites a YouTube blogger saying it will make their systems "stupid fast." The drive uses 2-bit multi-level cell technology to produce its 256GB capacity and this is twinned with a Samsung-developed controller using an ARM processor …

COMMENTS

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  1. Lionel Baden
    Thumb Up

    ill take 2 please

    stripey raid anyone :)

    they are probably doing the right thing selling it to gamers not many other people are prepared to pay the premium for shaving off those few seconds load time

    Must add to wedding list doubt ill get em though lol

  2. Alpha Tony

    Want!

    That is all.

  3. Adam 10
    Gates Horns

    Vista bottleneck?

    Ah, but will it sustain 200+MB per second when coupled with the still-present DRM-related file copy bottleneck that Vista is plagued with?

    (with SP2 it is less frequent, but still present from time-to-time on large file copies)

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Thank God...

    ... I've decided to sell the financial black hole that is my gaming PC, and instead build a SFF with cheap AMD internals for media / general internet use and an xbox 360 for gaming. Not sure how much those drives will cost but they won't be cheap.

    However if I could afford a couple of those, I'd go for them in an instant. Sound very nice indeed.

  5. Jason Hall

    Gaming Market Increasing?

    "A Samsung marketeer, VP Jim Elliot, talks of blistering speeds and dazzling photorealism. Samsung quotes Jon Peddie Research as saying the PC gaming market will reach a size of $30.7Bn by the end of 2012, meaning it could sell a lot drives."

    Surely that's a mistake as everyone knows home taping is killing the music industry oops gaming industry?

  6. David Austin

    Nice

    Let's see 'em benchmarked ASAP - Look like they could Give Intel's X25 (Perhaps both the E and the M variants) a run for it's money

  7. MinionZero
    Gates Horns

    Not just games what about boot time

    In principle, I don't see why a PC can't boot up Windows in under a second, instead of minutes these days. There's no technical reason other than lots of poor designs all combining to slow the whole lot down taking way longer than it should. Still I wonder how much faster a very fast SSD can improve current boot times?

  8. kingwahwah

    UK Price and stocked already

    Samsung PB22-J £427.82 ex VAT

    The smaller models are also easy to find. Beware sadly the 64gb (£141.99) is not the same performance.

    Crosair rebadged ones seem easier and cheaper to find.

    I'm waiting to Windows 7 launch and price drop on these. Maybe 128Gb £264.99.

  9. Paul H
    Go

    Re: Thank God...

    You only need a £50 3D graphics card on your cheap AMD to run the vast majority of games perfectly acceptably. At least as well as an 360 Eggs Boxes. It gets expensive when you try to run one of those huge new flat screens at native resolution.

  10. cybersaur 1
    Go

    @MinionZero

    I have an intel X25-M with Ubuntu 9.04 installed on an EXT4 partition. From the time I press the power button to the login screen is 15 seconds. Most of that is due to the BIOS (which could be further optimized to reduce boot times). Once I log in, there simply is no waiting for the OS to continue to load whatsoever. Opening applications is instantaneous. Even very resource intensive apps completely open in just 2 or 3 seconds.

    I've read up extensively on SSD controllers. Samsung's ranks 3rd. Intel is first followed by Indilinx. JMicron SSD controllers are junk and exhibit severe stuttering problems. The sequential throughput is not the most important factor in SSD performance for typical end user usage patterns. What makes the intel controller excel is small random write performance.

    This is encouraging news from Samsung, however.

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Linux

    db servers

    would be interesting to see a few of these in a raid array for the smaller size/ <1TB database storage requirements.

    Guess it depends how they hold up in industrial use.

  12. Paul 87

    But it's software not hardware...

    ... that's the biggest barrier to speeds past a certain point. More particularly it's designers who code games for the "next generation" hardware instead of ensuring it works on this generation.

    These items like SSD will never get used properly in PC's, because of the sheer complexity of "what if's" PC developers have to cater for. Yes Windows can theoretically boot in 1 second, but to do that, you have to strip out a tonne of checks and what if's and work with a known hardware configuration.

    Sometimes, the free market sucks...

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Badgers

    Video editing

    Video editing on one of these beasts would be interesting as the biggest bottleneck in the system is the HD, even with RAID.

    Trouble is that the cost per GB is eye watering.

  14. Joshua 1

    RAID speeds

    I've built 4 servers recently with 8 of these each in a RAID5 (redundancy) .. make sure you use a good RAID controller and fast system to match.. Highpoint RocketRAID 3520 was a good choice to complement to the SSDs.. needs PCIe x8.. we were seeing sustained read and write speeds >1500MB/s and ridiculously high IOPs (90000+)... as a speed indication, Windows XP boots from cold to fully usable in 4 seconds... and you can copy the equivalent of a DVD-R every 3 seconds.. I highly recommend it! :)

  15. Joshua 1
    Thumb Up

    Disk geometry / parition offset.

    Forgot to mention - for SSDs, don't forget to set your partition offset to allow for the 4K NAND block sizes and RAID striping .. boot from winPE or similar (before installing the OS), run diskpart:

    list disk

    select disk # (corresponds to RAID volume)

    create partition primary align=2048

    select partition 1

    active

    exit

    When installing the OS, use 'quick format' on the partition you created.

    This can make *huge* performance differences for write speeds, as it helps reduce the build up of 'garbage blocks' over time, which plagues SSD performance. Some people were saying up to 300%.. I'm yet to quantify that with my own tests.

  16. exit...quit...bye...quitbye.ctrl-C..ctrlX.ctrl-alt-X...aarrrr*slam*
    Linux

    And its still outrun by a couple of smaller drives

    Why anyone would buy a single, expensive SSD instead of two (or four) smaller ones in a raid0 setup behind a *proper* Controller - something like the HP smartarray p410 with half a GB of write cache AND a PCIe 8x connection to actually transfer the data - is still beyond me. Maybe its the 500Eur pricetag on the controller, but you´ll have to shell out that money only once. And migrating to another board suddenly is a charm, too.

    Just a thought, maybe I am completely wrong...

  17. Des
    WTF?

    Stupid Fast?

    Or just... Stupid Expensive?

  18. This post has been deleted by its author

  19. derek burns
    Thumb Up

    Saw these on youtube a while ago

    Search youtube for the 'Samsung SSD Awesomeness' video

    24 of these beasts in a raid array, the speed is eyewatering!

  20. Andy Barber
    Gates Halo

    Who said...

    ...640Mb ought to be enough!

  21. Wortel

    Am I the only one

    Who doesn't want harddrives/flash drives to be that enormous in capacity? the more you can store on a single disk, the more you risk losing when it breaks.

    And you need equal or larger backup storage to keep up with big drives. Costly.

  22. Barry Whyte
    Stop

    only 2x?

    Not sure why everyone gets so worked up about MB/s - this is only 2x or maybe 2.5x a fast HDD... what are the IOPs numbers, then we can see if these really make a difference.

  23. Joshua 1
    Unhappy

    Samsung 24 SSD Awesomeness

    This one was a law of diminishing returns.. the reason they only saw half the performance they should have relates to the PCIe bus speed and the RAID controllers they chose. Basically this is the next bottleneck in the equation. 2.5GB/s is impressive, but they should have been able to get that with about 12 of those P256 SSDs.

    A lot of the RAID controllers max out around 1GB/s, which is a pain in the backside. I've had a reasonable run with the HP P410, but seems to max out around 1GB/s also. The Adaptec 5xxx / 3xxx had similar problems. The HPT 3520 was the only one (so far) I've used (I am sure there are more) that has performed consistently well above 1GB/s... providing the motherboard allows it to!

  24. Anonymous Coward
    Gates Horns

    @Andy

    I believe it was 640Kb, which still applies to all PCs. Everything else you have is cache memory, extended memory and of course, hard drives etc or whatever kind which is nothing to do with what he was talking about. I don't believe I just backed up Bill Gates there, but there you go.

    Multicores of course, kind of expand on it but it's still basically the same architecture per core.

  25. Goat Jam
    Unhappy

    PC Gaming growing?

    Not according to my extremely unscientific EB shelf percentage survey. It seems to me that as the wii, xbox and ps shelf real estate grows, the PC games section shrinks.

    It's a shame actually because I hate consoles but I'm getting old now and don't have much time to play games anymore.

    RTS games on a console? No thanks. World building games? No way. FPS, um no again.

    The only console game I *really* loved and still play to this day is Toe Jam and Earl on the Sega Megadrive which I guess hints at my age, but I digress.

  26. Hombre sin nombre

    RE: Goat Jam

    I haven't bought a PC game at a retail store in over a year now. The ease and convenience of Steam and other online purchasing methods is far superior, so shelf space at a local store isn't really a great indicator any more.

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