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posted by martyb on Saturday June 01 2019, @07:09PM   Printer-friendly
from the good-fast-cheap...pick-3? dept.

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


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  • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Sunday June 02 2019, @11:26AM (5 children)

    by Immerman (3985) on Sunday June 02 2019, @11:26AM (#850532)

    >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.

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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday June 02 2019, @12:18PM (4 children)

    by takyon (881) <{takyon} {at} {soylentnews.org}> on Sunday June 02 2019, @12:18PM (#850542) Journal

    You can get a decent name-brand 1TB SSD for $50 if you catch the right sale.

    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.

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    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 02 2019, @03:06PM (2 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 02 2019, @03:06PM (#850584)

      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)

        by takyon (881) <{takyon} {at} {soylentnews.org}> on Sunday June 02 2019, @04:14PM (#850599) Journal

        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.

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        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 02 2019, @05:43PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 02 2019, @05:43PM (#850619)

          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

      by driverless (4770) on Monday June 03 2019, @06:23AM (#850740)

      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).

      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.