Samsung 840 White Paper page 4

Let's continue with an analogy. Imagine you are making a cake and you need to collect all of the ingredients. You have
a big house – and a kitchen to match. The flour is in the cabinet on the other side of the room, the eggs and milk are in
the refrigerator, but you forgot the sugar downstairs in your car. It can take a considerable amount of time to gather the
things you need, since you have to physically walk to the location of each ingredient and bring it to your prep area. Now
imagine that, through some miracle, all of the things you need are instantly accessible without moving from the spot you
are standing. How much time would that save? This simplified analogy helps to explain one of the primary advantages
SSDs enjoy over HDDs. There is no need to wait for a mechanical drive head to swing into place, just as there is no
need for you to move from your prep area in the analogy above. The result? Your PC just became a dramatically more
responsive companion.
Furthermore, an SSD benefits from massive latency advantages. Think about how quickly you can get up and moving in
the morning with and without a cup of coffee. An HDD's speed profile will be more akin to your pre-coffee morning self,
whereas an SSD would represent how you feel after a couple shots of espresso. This measurement is important because
how long it takes to get ready and actually locate a piece of data directly affects how fluid the user experience is.
Performance
Multi-taskers and speed demons rejoice. The incredible access times just discussed contribute directly to the performance of
a machine under typical to heavy loads. The ability to access any drive location without a performance penalty means you can
have more applications open at the same time with less lag. SSD users also experience dramatic improvements in boot time,
shutdown, application loads, web browsing, application installations, and file copies. The copy dialogue box and the spinning
hourglass will be gracing you with their presence much less frequently and for much shorter periods of time. You'll also be
able to open and close your laptop without the frustrating delays, allowing you to experience the "sleep" and "wake" features
the way they were meant to work – without a "groggy" state in between.
The performance benefits just discussed are a result of the sequential and random performance capabilities of an SSD. Fast
sequential speeds allow for quick file copies and smoother performance when working with large files, like videos. However,
it is random performance, measured in Input/Output Operations Per Second (IOPS) that is, perhaps, the most important
performance metric for SSDs. A large portion of storage activity is made up of 4K random writes, a metric that measures how
well a drive will perform when writing small chunks of random data (e.g. changing a small piece of a Word or text file and then
saving the changes). Users spend a majority of their time not copying large files or installing applications, but multitasking (e.g.
email, web-surfing, listening to music, etc.) and working with various work and media files - tasks influenced by IOPS. An SSD
can offer up to a 200x improvement in IOPS over a traditional HDD (results may vary based on HDD model). For this reason,
Samsung put a heavy focus on random performance when designing its SSD lineup, offering users industry leading Random
Performance of up to 100,000 IOPS. This is performance for the real world; performance you will notice and appreciate every
day; performance that represents a dramatic leap forward in usability.
Performance Sustainability
Moreover, SSDs will deliver consistent performance regardless of how much data they contain. HDDs, on the other hand,
can suffer a performance decrease of over 50% when full or containing a lot of fragmented data. This is the result of the
physicality of the disks, which benefit from being able to sequentially write to the space along the
outer area of the platter (where there is more surface area to cover) in the early days of a drive's
life. Over time, as the outer sectors fill with data, the drive must write to progressively smaller
sectors, which naturally store less data. Thus, additional movement is required to switch to the next
available sector if more space is required. Additionally, data becomes fragmented with extended
use, forcing the mechanical drive head to jump among inner and outer sections of the platter,
negatively affecting performance even further.
* If an HDD is rated for maximum sequential performance of 160MB/s R/W, such performance is guaranteed only for the initial, clean state,
after which performance may decline to around 70-80MB/s
Durability
How resistant do you think a record player would be to a few healthy blows? Would the arm and needle be
able to withstand any significant force? If you're too young to remember what a record player is, think about