SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop. Only 17 submissions in the queue.
SoylentNews
A USB Stick as an SSD? A New Silicon Motion SM3282 Single-Chip Controller for USB SSDs
Silicon Motion has introduced its first single-chip controller for portable USB SSDs. The SM3282 promises to enable makers of portable drives to offer up to 400 MB/s sequential read speeds in a cost-efficient manner previously unachievable by external SSDs.
[...] Previously, makers of external SSDs had to use a USB-to-PCIe bridge alongside an SSD controller to build their products, which greatly increased BOM costs as well as the final price. The SM3282 packs all the necessary functionality into a single chip and thus reduces BOM cost of external SSDs.
SSD - Solid State Drive
BOM - Bill of Materials
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
Silicon Motion Controller to Enable High Speed, Low Cost Portable USB SSDs
|
Log In/Create an Account
| Top
| 12 comments
| Search Discussion
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Cole's Law:
Thinly sliced cabbage.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by jmorris on Saturday June 01 2019, @07:50PM (9 children)
400MBps read and write. It ain't quite NVMe speeds but it will do for an external device. Should be shipping for this Xmas and cheap by next year.
(Score: 2) by linkdude64 on Saturday June 01 2019, @08:29PM
+1 Agree
(Score: 4, Interesting) by driverless on Sunday June 02 2019, @01:26AM (7 children)
USB drives use the cheapest, slowest flash you can get away with, the top-binned stuff goes into SSDs because that's where the money is, so you're unlikely to see anywhere near SSD-like performance in practice unless you also pay SSD prices. Also, the USB/PCIe bridge isn't really the bottleneck, nor is it a major cost factor compared to the flash. So this is mostly just clever marketing, they've shaved a bit off a non-critical part, and note how they carefully omit several performance-related specs like RAM for marshalling writes which indicates it's less than spectacular. The fact that no other vendor has bothered doing this until now indicates how minor a goal it is.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 02 2019, @03:25AM
oh oh ... always so negatif.
pretty sure usb 3.x is faster then regular SATA 3 (6Gb).
also the article mentioned said ">400 MB/sec" not ">400 Mbps" (~50 MB/sec), so that's already very close to SATA III.
probably there's room for improvement tho it will probably (?) never reach the bandwidth of a NVme connected via PCiE?
however, if for some reason the computer needs fast (cheap) storage and hasn't got the win-bios -aka- UEFI then chances are really good
that a old-skool BIOS will be able to boot from a USB3 port without having to inject a driver into the BIOS-firmware or such and having to use two cables (power and SATA)!
also, methinks, from a engineering(?) standpoint that 4-pin connector USB3.0 with THOSE speeds versus the more then 4 pins on a NVme is ... amazing.
lastly, most USB3 comes with at least 1 meter of cable length and are mostly also accessible from the "outside" whilst NVme is pretty well tucked away inside a case?
not sure how the (formarly) "southbridge" shares all the I/O bandwidth but if usb3 SSDs become as fast as SATA3 SSDs then we can disable the SATA3 in BIOS and free up some of those I/O lanes?
the new "steam VR index" (left eye monitor: 1440 x 1600 / right eye monitor: 1440 x 1600) recommends a USB3 port so if the CPU has 16 I/O lanes and some from the chipset, being able to disable some I/O like SATA will probably help latency when the single GPU already gobbels up ALL I/O lanes from the CPU and all that is left is from the chipset?
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Sunday June 02 2019, @11:26AM (5 children)
>you're unlikely to see anywhere near SSD-like performance in practice unless you also pay SSD prices.
Fine by me. You can get a decent name-brand 1TB SSD for $50 if you catch the right sale. It won't be anywhere near as fast as what you could get for $200+, but it'll still run circles around a USB flash drive.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday June 02 2019, @12:18PM (4 children)
I haven't seen 1 TB [slickdeals.net] lower than about $90 on sale (I did find ADATA 1 TB for $80 [slickdeals.net]-$85). I haven't been looking that hard, and I wouldn't be surprised if it got that low on Black Friday or in 2020 with a new round of 3D QLC NAND savings, but I think $50 is unrealistic for now.
The speeds in TFA are very fast for USB drives and could become the norm. IOPS is not mentioned, but if those are decent then you could think of good use cases for such a drive.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 02 2019, @03:06PM (2 children)
The shittier the flash, the dead-snail slower the useless trinket once the faster cache (all 4GB of it) gets exhausted. And good luck on returning your "decent brand" idiot bait.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday June 02 2019, @04:14PM (1 child)
I'm sure you can get one with more cache if you are willing to pay more. And you can find reviews of SSDs and flash drives where a large amount of data is copied to see how much the speeds drop once the cache is filled.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 02 2019, @05:43PM
Not for better ways of fooling the gullible. QLC is not just shitty write speed and write endurance, but also data retention measured in MONTHS. Don't know about you, but I do not HAVE terabytes of throwaway data, so am paying my €'s for MLC.
As to honest reviews that one can find - yes you can, but not quickly or easily in my experience. If you do know a recipe how to ask a search engine NOT bury them under mountains of "commercial speech", please do share.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Monday June 03 2019, @06:23AM
Yeah, that's Adata, you're paying close-to-USB prices but also getting close-to-USB performance. We got suckered into buying some of those a while back based on price, write speed was so atrocious we binned them, they were literally unusable for anything that wasn't read-mostly once you filled the onboard write buffer. As I said in a previous post, you get what you pay for, and you're not getting a Samsung EVO when you use a USB key for storage, whether it has an SM3282 or not.