Samsung Announces PM830, Its First 6Gbps SSD with up to 512GB Capacities
by Anand Lal Shimpi on August 10, 2011 10:00 PM ESTWith each subsequent generation, Samsung's SSDs have been getting noticeably better. Two years ago its drives were unrecommendable, but just this year we met the Samsung SSD 470. While still slower than the competition, the 470 was fast enough to at least consider. It's biggest selling point? Reliability. The OEM version, the Samsung PM810, is used by many large manufacturers. In fact, one of the two SSD options in the 2011 MacBook Air uses a custom version of the PM810.
Today Samsung is announcing its successor: the PM830. Two major changes accompany the new drive: 6Gbps SATA and 2x-nm Toggle NAND support. The move to 6Gbps SATA helps boost sequential read/write speed. Samsung is claiming up to 500MB/s reads and 350MB/s writes, both very impressive numbers if they're accurate. Supporting 2x-nm Toggle NAND should help drive costs down in the long run as well, similar to what we saw with the 25nm ONFI move that Intel and SandForce partners made this year.
The drive still uses Samsung's own controller with its own firmware. New for the PM830 is AES-256 encryption for all data written to the NAND (similar to SandForce and Intel SSD 320 drives). Samsung couldn't give me any more details on what's changed since the PM810/SSD 470, only to say that the tweaks are likely evolutionary in nature.
The PM830 is shipping to OEMs now in 128GB, 256GB and 512GB capacities. A consumer branded drive will follow at some point in the future.
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MikhailT - Thursday, August 11, 2011 - link
Can you explain why 2x-nm Toggle NANDs would drive down the costs? I assume you meant the smaller 2x-nm process (more NANDs per waffers due to smaller size) and not the actual Toggle DDR part, right? From what I’m seeing so far, the current 20nm NANDs are now the same price as what the pervious gen NAND pricepoint was when it was first released last year for the same capacity.I was wondering when we should expect the next drop in price or more precisely, more storage for the same price and not the speed? It feels like we won’t get any until later next year when they do another nm process improvement.
I hope the companies would focus on giving us more capacity in the next gen instead of more speed. I doubt most customers care about getting 500MBps read/write, especially at whatever is possible in the next gen.
Hope to see 240GB (current gen) for 300$ by the end of the year and 512GB for 400$ by late next year.
MrSpadge - Thursday, August 11, 2011 - link
2x nm toggle NAND is expected to drive costs down because current toggle NAND is 3x nm.People would care about getting 500MBps read, as that would be just 62.5 MB/s - dog slow compared to current SSDs and not even on par with sequential 2.5" HDD speeds ;)
And there's not much the controller can do for making SSDs cheaper, except not costing too much itself. The bulk of the cost is the flash, independent of SSD speed and controller. So optimizing speed and cost are almost independent, both are being worked on at the same time.
Regarding cheap 240 and 512 GB SSDs: try to use the smaller capacities in a smarter way..
shardey - Sunday, August 21, 2011 - link
Mb = megabits MB = megabytes.Actually SSD's far surprass sequential speeds. These sata III drives can theoretically hit 750MB/s read speeds but usually do not go over 550-575.
"People would care about getting 500MBps read, as that would be just 62.5 MB/s - dog slow compared to current SSDs and not even on par with sequential 2.5" HDD speeds ;)"
^^^ Very wrong.
iwod - Thursday, August 11, 2011 - link
So those stupid Macbook will finally have SSD that is half modern.