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Samsung Wants To Rid Of Hard Drives, Makes A 256-gigabit Flash

by 14 Comments

samsung-2t

Up until not too long ago having a complete system made with SSDs was not really a practical option for the most photographers. I mean the highest capacity SSD was 2TB and it was a hefty sum of $800, give or take a byte.

But now, Samsung is in the process of manufacturing a huge 256-gigabit SSD (32GB) should enable significantly more storage on each SSD drive. Considering that 80Gigs of data were around $70 just a few years back on 2004, I think that it will not take a lot of time until SSDs will replace HDDs completely. I mean, price per HDD storage dropped from $0.5/Gig to $0.0317/Gig in the course of the last ten years (that is a 96% drop) so it would not be surprising to see these huge SSDs drop from $400/TB to $25/TB in a similar time frame or to $130/TB in the next two years.

Engaget reports that Samsung are upping their yield and planning to ship during 2015. This means that even this year we will see bigger SSD drives at cheaper prices.

Why does this matter to photographers:

Of course, widespread SSDs deployment will probably have an impact on the entire industry, and the ideas below are not limited to photography and videography, but as heavy users of tech and computers our workflows are bound to change.

Backups/Archives

Of course the first thing that comes to mind is backups, and I see two ways that this will impact our backup workflow:

  • Smaller failure rate – less moving parts mean less failures (assuming all others factors are similar). If you’ve ever experienced a hard drive crash. Especially one that has client data on it, you know how stressful it can be. So while this will not (by any way) change the industry recommendation to keep every piece of data backed up twice, it will add some piece of mind to the backups we store.
  • Longer decay – HDDs are way better than cassettes and DVDs (remember those?) but they still ‘suffer’ from decay. That means that your data should be refreshed around every 5 years. SSDs should last without decaying for around 10 years, though this is theoretical data as they have not been around long enough to gather stats.

Processing Speeds

For videographers this means the world. As we are moving from HD to 4K (and to 8K) the amount of ‘fast memory’ that we need just to edit a clip increases pretty fast. Now some are using 256MB drives for the edits, and slower HDDs for the rest of the stuff, but I think we are only 2-3 years away from when you would need a lot more space just to edit a birthday clip. Time will tell…

Am I a going to shell out the money to get a 2TB SSD as soon as its get cheaper? I will probably wait for the price to hit the $150 mark before I do so. Hoe about you?

Related posts:

Samsung announces the new X5 super fast 2.8GB/sec external SSD Samsung Wants A Bigger Piece Of The Selfie Action, Launches The Sub $600 NX MiniSamsung Wants A Bigger Piece Of The Selfie Action, Launches The Sub $600 NX Mini Affordable HyperCam reveals What’s Under Your Skin You could probably store your photographic life’s work on Seagate’s new 60TB SSD
  • patiferoolz

    The title and text is a bit confusing. What was introduced was a 256 Gbit chip, which doubles the highest available unit so far.

  • Anonymous

    gigabyte, not gigabit!

    • Actually it’s gigabit

      • mike

        Everything on that page is correct, though the bits = data transfer and bytes = storage is mostly by convention. A byte is simply 8 bits, and you could use either unit to describe either thing.

        There are more subtleties to it, but that the basics of it.

    • Zygmunt Zarzecki

      Bits are generally used when measuring rate of data transfer.
      Bytes are generally used when describing data capacity.
      http://www.theverge.com/2014/9/12/6139057/sandisks-512gb-sd-card-is-the-biggest-in-the-world
      What’s up?

    • Rick

      The statement includes the “(32GB)” part after the “256-gigabit SSD” reference for a reason. 32GB = 256Gb

      The author however should have used the complete reference

      “…256-gigabit (32GB) 3D vertical flash memory…”

      which would have made much more sense, showing that this is in reference to the internal modules, not the overall drive.

    • mike

      He did get it right, the new chip is 256-megabit, which is 32 megabytes. But the switching back and forth between units is needlessly confusing.

      And obviously 32MB is not terribly impressive, since all drives have multiple chips. It will eventually drive prices downwards, but it isn’t a revolutionary jump in technology.

  • “Samsung”, not “Samsung’s”!

  • HDD, not HHD.

  • Renato Murakami

    Sorry, but the post is extremely confusing, convoluted and not helpful at all. It left the most important information of the original Engadged report out, while presenting lots of numbers and abbreviations, plus weird comparisons with previous tech, that only further makes it harder to understand.

    What Samsung announced is the start of manufacture of a new SSD drive line. It has a new 3D vertical flash memory (which is not the main memory, but a component of the drive) of higher capacity than previous models that will theoretically enable for more overall capacity (up to double the current limit), at lower costs, while keeping the same form factor (size).

    It also announced that it’s manufacturing is 40% more productive, which might imply that you will pay cheaper for a 2Tb drive using the new tech vs a 2Tb drive using the older tech.

    That said, about the comparisons: first of all, regular HDD production is different from SSD. Yes, prices will probably go down, and it is possible that we’ll have cheap SSDs in the future – but I definitely wouldn’t put a time frame to it because the production proccess is plenty different.

    The scenario is different too. While SSDs are taking a big part of the market, HDDs are still around and also evolving. You have competing tech there, so things might not go as fast as when we only had a single option (HDDs).

    Second, failure rates and decay are still problems regarding SSDs. They are admitedly smaller than HDDs because that’s just a thing regarding magnetic drives vs solid state memory. But it’s good to note that SSDs have a fixed number of read/write cycles before the guarantee ends, and should a SSD fail on you, there are no ways of recovering data (like magnetic disks have) – you will loose everything in it.

    • Mike McIntire

      Spelling and grammar would likely help with the confusion as well…

  • mike

    Nothing in this article makes sense.

    2004 was just a few years back?
    Samsung is revolutionizing something by introducing higher capacity SSDs… even though everyone else has been making them for years?
    Directly comparing current SSD to Spinning drives from a decade ago?
    Confusing price drop speculation?
    Comparing hard drives to removable media for backup purposes?

    At least you did not confuse gigabits and gigabytes. 🙂

  • Worst paid endorsement ever with spelling mistakes and also 256gb SSD its no big deal for 2015, more like 2009

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