Toshiba rolls out PC-busting monster: 1 terabyte TLC flash SSD It’s a PC disk drive killer: a 1TB SSD built by Toshiba, using TLC flash, and built with 15nm cell lithography. The SG5 series comes in both M2 and 2.5-inch SSD format and signals a wave of product refreshes as Toshiba's existing 19nm SSD products are changed over to use denser 15nm NAND during the next six to 12 months. With …
One thing's also not noted: the PRICE. Sure in terms of sheer performance SSD's going to eventually overtake spinning rust, but in terms of mass market adoption, they're going to have to do something about the price first, and if similar products are any indication, the prices will be such that anyone outside of an enterprise setting will probably wince.
4 times is still a bit over the top, plus there's the matter of bulk storage needs (where the price shoots up considerably). Get it down to around 2x even at high capacities and then you can declare a sunset on spinning rust (much as getting players below $100US was pretty much the sign that BluRay had overtaken DVD as the movie disc format of choice).
>BluRay had overtaken DVD as the movie disc format of choice
Um, not really. Blu-Ray has about 40%+ market share in 2014, and that's probably the high-water mark as both Blu-Ray and DVD are declining at about the same rate in the face of streaming. (The sub-$100 Blu-Ray player was just a thing that happened because manufacturing cost, not a sign of anything.)
What is really interesting, though, is that the buyers of Blu-Rays and DVDs are often different in their tastes. For example, the #1 selling Blu-Ray in 2015 in the US was Jurassic World, which was only #6 on DVD. #1 on DVD was American Sniper, but only #10 with Blu-Ray buyers. Broadly speaking, children's movies and "serious" dramas tend to do better on DVD, summer blockbusters do better on Blu-Ray.
The remake of Robocop is on UK TV at the weekend, I might watch it, but I really wanted to see the original again first. Went to Amazon, it's not on prime so would have to pay £7.99 to stream it, but they sell the DVD for £3.49. Ordered 10pm last night, here 8am this morning - chalk a win up to DVDs there!
"Broadly speaking, children's movies and "serious" dramas tend to do better on DVD, summer blockbusters do better on Blu-Ray."
Probably due to the target. The stuff trending towards DVDs are probably being targeted for portable players (where resolution is less of a selling point, thus why you don't hear much of portable BluRay players). The blockbusters are normally snatched up for home theaters where you can see and hear the difference.
Yep. SSDs provide a lot of bang for the buck.
I upgraded my wife's aging Thinkpad to a 480GB SSD and it's massively faster, especially startup. There's not another investment that would have remotely come close in terms of performance improvement versus cost. And when I do eventually replace the Thinkpad, I'll move the drive over.
The only downside is that here in consumer-land we're still stuck with legacy interfaces (SATA) designed for spinning rust. It's going to get really interesting when NVMe reaches consumer-friendly prices...
Compared to absolutely massive boost between HDD and SSD. Yeah SSDs don't look like that big of a difference if you are talking about copying big files, but the thing it really speeds up is dealing with small files and fragmented filesystems (to the point where there's no point in caring whether they get fragmented or defragmenting them if they do)
Sure NVMe boosts that sequential I/O and drops latency that helps gives you more IOPS for random I/O, but you are unlikely to notice the difference. That's why there's been no rush to put NVMe in the typical laptop.
I bought a 1"TB" drive from Amazon for £142 last month. That's getting to sensible price points and certainly not as much as the PC. Sure it's SATA, probably low tech and everything but it's interface is faster than my motherboard supports and it's way better than a magnetic drive in performance.
One thing's also not noted: the PRICE ... in terms of mass market adoption, they're going to have to do something about the price first
Not really, since the value of HDDs only applies when users want and use huge drives. If they're satisifed with 256GB it's already cheaper to buy the SSD; the more that production shifts to SSDs, even the wee ones, the harder it is for HDDs to maintain economies of scale.
I just don't get it. The same Flash chips arranged in parallel will provide a massive I/O rate improvement. Just plug into a wider bus. Cost is only very lightly higher. Possible busses are PCI-e x16 or a DIMM slot.
Yes, I know that SATA is easy because it's a direct SSD/HDD replacement, but you would think that at least one vendor would like to differentiate their high-end laptop.
"Yes, I know that SATA is easy because it's a direct SSD/HDD replacement, but you would think that at least one vendor would like to differentiate their high-end laptop"
Consumer laptops may be limited to SATA but the HP Elitebook/Zbook laptops sport a PCI-e3 x4 M.2 slot which should by quick calculation allow transfer rates of >3GB/s.
I expect Dell and Lenovo to have PCI-e enabled M.2 slots as well in their laptops.
You do know that SATA Express runs on the PCIe bus now, right? It's not limited to legacy 6 Mbps at all, though you CAN plug it in there for backward compatibility. SATA Express is about 16 Mbps, three times as fast as SATA 3.
Not that TLC was ever meant to be any kind of speed-demon anyway....
Is this an ad or a sarcasm? What is the PC Busting part?
Performance - unimpressive
Size - nothing new, 1TB SSDs has been around for a while
Price - not even mentioned
Manufacturing process - TLC, is nothing revolutionary and it's not even 3D NAND, 15nm or lower is already in use by competitiors
All in all an average looking SSD, what's with all the fuss
...considering all those news about PCM memory and similar technologies that have been profusely reported lately. Toshiba's investment may vanish if those technologies flourish in the next few years.
Though they probably know one or two* things about this market that I ignore! ;-)
*or three million.
Still gonna need a bulk storage medium for the medium term, and the money for that is going to be on this taking over spinning rust in that department, unless that 5D Crystalline tech manages to shake things up.
Legacy issues. My computer, for example, is almost nine years old. Back then, PCI Express was primarily for graphics cards (mine's a 1.0 with only one x16 slot and one x1 slot). Solid-state PC drives hadn't even hit the market yet. But it DOES have plenty of SATA ports. There are many old laptops out there that work perfectly fine...but could stand a bit of a boost, and after you max out the memory, switching out the hard drive for a SSD is a solid next step, but many of them are pre-NVMe and of course don't have any spare PCIe slots, so the only option is to use the existing SATA bus.
even with a sata 3gbp interface, the performance increase is considerable. also much more reliable (although i only use samsung 850 pro's - probably 200+ used by now including 840 pro's before the 850's were out) and not a single problem yet.
its the single best thing you can do to an old laptop....
I'm inclined to think maxing out the RAM is the single best thing, as it takes out one of the big issues with too little RAM: thrashing due to paging (and thrashing is not a good thing for SSDs, either). Furthermore, most laptop RAM is pretty cheap, especially for old laptops that don't use cutting-edge SODIMMs (ex. I upgraded a pretty old laptop from 512MB to 4GB for about $20). That said, switching out the hard drive for an SSD is still the second best thing.
I upgrade a lot of laptops old and new and the SSD is the best thing period. RAM is secondary....very secondary. Most have come with 4GB for the past 6 years so they are at least functional on that point.
I could put 8GB in a 6 year old laptop but if its still got a 60MBps 5400rpm 320GB HDD in, then it will still crawl. But if I keep the 4GB and put a 250GB SSD in it...even at SATA II it will still perform a lot better
"I upgrade a lot of laptops old and new and the SSD is the best thing period. RAM is secondary....very secondary. Most have come with 4GB for the past 6 years so they are at least functional on that point."
Then we're in different worlds because I'm lucky to find a laptop with 4GB standard (I eventually got one, but as an exception to the rule). Most I run into (and they're about the same age range as yours, about five years) are lucky to have 1GB on board and frequently only have 512MB. And trying to run anything serious on XP+ or even a recent Linux distro on something THAT small is Chug City. No amount of disk speed is going to save you from a thrashfest (not to mention thrashing adds wear and tear to your drives), in which case the RAM takes priority over the disk.
PS. I DO game and do a lot of media work. I'm getting ready to step up to a Core i5 that'll double my throughput but I want to put some extra work into it first.
Fair enough. That's what I do, too. It's a lot cheaper to get the SODIMMS aftermarket. But I'm pointing out that unless it's a late Win7 laptop or later, chances are it's going to be under-provisioned in RAM going forward, especially if the laptops you run into (like mine) are from the XP era.
"Then we're in different worlds because I'm lucky to find a laptop with 4GB standard "
Wow...I'd say possibly a different decade too!
I run a PC repair/support business and haven't seen a laptop with less than 1GB in it for over 5 years now. I saw a netbook about three years ago.
If a machine arrived to me with less than 2GB in it I would say to them to get a new one (would probably be IDE anyway). Or someone nicked half their ram at some point.
That may explain it since most of the laptops I see come from secondhand stores: either hocked off or given away to make room for new ones. Thing is, I routinely find new life in many of these devices. I routinely use a dual-core AMD x64, for example, that started with 512MB and was pushed up to 4GB for $20, turning it from unworkable to quite the dependable work device. And this is replacing an OLD P4 laptop that I pushed up to 1GB but eventually found too clunky (mainly, it uses USB1 ports and the CD drive on it--the only thing it can boot other than the hard drive--is just about dead; I only keep it because it has a 1600x1200 screen handy for remote work.
Yeah that explains it! Funnily enough had a customer today bring in a classic Compaq desktop running Windows 7 (came with XP originally)...on a single core Athlon 3200 with 3GB of DDR ram. Had to smile when I opened it up.
Running a bit slow apparently. I'll just scan the HDD for any bugs on the house and tell him to get a new one.
I threw all my spare old DDR ram and SKT939 chips out a while ago.
Because not everyone buys a new PC when they buy new storage.
More to the point, if you take a 10 year old PC with its spinning hard drive that seems slow even with a fresh install or Windows or Linux on it and toss in a SSD and max out its RAM, unless you are gaming or running demanding workstation level software you are unlikely to notice the difference in performance between that 10 year old PC and a brand new one.
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