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  • jabber - Tuesday, February 19, 2019 - link

    I just looked at the price in the specs and stopped reading right there.
  • Dragonstongue - Tuesday, February 19, 2019 - link

    Amen to that LOL
  • FunBunny2 - Tuesday, February 19, 2019 - link

    well... if one were to run a truly normalized RDBMS, i.e. 5NF and thus substantially smaller footprint compared to the common NoSQL flatfile alternative, this could be quite competitive. but that would require today's developers/coders to stop making apps just like their COBOL granddaddies did.
  • FreckledTrout - Tuesday, February 19, 2019 - link

    I have no idea why you are talking coding and database design principles as it does not apply here at all. To carry your tangent along, if you want to make max use of a SSD's you denormalize the hell out of the database and spread the load over a ton of servers, ie NoSQL.
  • FunBunny2 - Tuesday, February 19, 2019 - link

    well... that does keep coders employed forever. writing linguine code all day long.
  • FreckledTrout - Tuesday, February 19, 2019 - link

    Well it still is pointless in this conversation about fast SSD's. What spaghetti code has to do with that I have no idea. Sure they can move cloud native way of designing applications using micro services etl al but what the hell that has to do with fast SSD's baffles me.
  • FunBunny2 - Tuesday, February 19, 2019 - link

    " What spaghetti code has to do with that I have no idea. "

    well... you can write neat code against a 5NF datastore, or mountains of linguine to keep all that mound of redundant bytes from biting you. again, let's get smarter than our granddaddies. or not.
  • GreenReaper - Wednesday, February 20, 2019 - link

    They have at least encouraged old-school databases to up their game. With parallel queries on the back-end, PostgreSQL can fly now, as long as you give it the right indexes to play with. Like any complex tool, you still have to get familiar with it to use it properly, but it's worth the investment.
  • FunBunny2 - Wednesday, February 20, 2019 - link

    "They have at least encouraged old-school databases to up their game. "

    well... if you actually look at how these 'alternatives' (NoSql and such) to RDBMS work, you'll see that they're just re-hashes (he he) of simple flat files and IMS. anything xml-ish is just another hierarchical datastore, i.e. IMS. which predates RDBMS (Oracle was the first commercial implementation) by more than a decade. hierarchy and flatfile are the very, very old-school datastores.

    PG, while loved because it's Open Source, is buggy as hell. been there, endured that.

    anyway. the point of my comments was simply aimed at naming a use-case for these sorts of devices, nothing more, since so many comments questioned why it should exist. which is not to say it's the 'best' implementation for the use-case. but the use-case exists, whether most coders prefer to do transactions in the client, or not. back in your granddaddies' day, terminals (3270 and VT-100) were mostly dumb, and all code existed on the server/mainframe. 'client code' existed in close proximity to the 'database' (VSAM files, mostly), sometimes in the same address space, sometimes just on the same machine, and sometimes on a tethered machine. the point being: with today's innterTubes speed, there's really no advantage to 'doing transactions in the client' other than allowing client-centric coders to avoid learning how to support data integrity declaratively in the datastore. the result, of course, is that data integrity is duplicated both places (client and server) by different folks. there's no way the database folks, DBA and designer, are going to assume that all data coming in over the wire from the client really, really is clean. because it almost never is.
  • GruffaloOnVacation - Thursday, March 18, 2021 - link

    FunBunny2 you sound bitter, and this is the sentiment I see among the old school "database people". May I suggest, with the best of intentions for us all, that instead of sneering at the situation, you attempt to educate those who are willing to learn? I've been working on some SQL in my project at work recently, and so have read a number of articles, and parts of some database books. There was a lot of resentment and sneering at the stoopid programmers there, but no positive programme of action proposed. I'm interested in this subject. Where should I go for resources? Which talks should I watch? What books to read? Let's build something that is as cool as something you described. If it really is THAT good, once it is built - they will come, and they will change!
  • patrickjp93 - Tuesday, February 19, 2019 - link

    Okay, no, just no. Pursuing normalisation beyond 3rd normal form is lunacy. You actually start losing ground on compression at that point, and your queries get ridiculously more verbose. 4th & 5th normal form are touted by academics who never have to work with them and DBAs who have more time on their hands than sense.

    Anyone who's ever worked even in 3rd normal form knows those pivot tables that are just key-key pairings are ridiculous wastes of space and code for an extra join or the smartass who'll use Unpivot+Roll-up which 90% of SQL users will not understand and which doesn't perform any better than just using another join!
  • prisonerX - Wednesday, February 20, 2019 - link

    You really don't have a clue about databases, normalized or otherwise. You're entirely FOS.
  • JTBM_real - Thursday, February 21, 2019 - link

    Database servers evolved a lot. High end database servers have the whole database in memory and have scaleable CPU - in practice multiple CPUs. Every processing and storage what is not database can be pushed to other purpose built servers. Purpose built server can be processing or storage heavy as needed.

    If you go to the extremes and cannot build a larger iron you can split your database and have two (or more). This is probably only an issue at google for example.
  • Opencg - Tuesday, February 19, 2019 - link

    no price is too high to stop me from instalocking pharah
  • jrs77 - Tuesday, February 19, 2019 - link

    Bring the price down to a fifth of whats announced in the specsheet and I'll buy it.
  • DigitalFreak - Tuesday, February 19, 2019 - link

    I don't think Samsung cares if you buy it.
  • Samus - Tuesday, February 19, 2019 - link

    That's what I'm saying this is TWICE as expensive as X-Point. The 480GB Intel 900P is $500 and that was already ridiculous. The insult is it's DWPD is identical and performance is still high enough to saturate a PCIe x4 interface.
  • boredsysadmin - Tuesday, February 19, 2019 - link

    It's not competing vs 900P, but vs P4800X and now you could see Samsung is a better deal (relatively speaking)
  • RSAUser - Tuesday, February 19, 2019 - link

    You are not the target, this is for certain professional workloads where $2/gig is worth the increase in productivity/efficiency.
  • XXL_AI - Tuesday, February 19, 2019 - link

    if I'm going to buy this hardware its for sure I'm going to do more than 10 DWPD
  • eddman - Tuesday, February 19, 2019 - link

    It's certainly better than other flash solutions but this is supposed to compete with optane and yet is unable to beat or match it in use cases that matter.

    I don't see customers, looking for absolute performance in those use cases, choosing this over optane even at these lower prices. Endurance seems to be lower too.

    P.S. I remember comments from people, specially a certain individual, vehemently claiming that SLC can easily compete with 3D xpoint and that companies are simply not bothering with making it happen because the money is in MLC/TLC only.
  • Kracer - Tuesday, February 19, 2019 - link

    Is the Samsung 3D NAND Comparison table right?

    9x layer nand has the same capacity as 48 layer.
  • Billy Tallis - Tuesday, February 19, 2019 - link

    These days, Samsung is making both 256Gb and 512Gb TLC parts, but the data shown is what they announced for the 256Gb 9xL part. The higher density of the newer generations means the die size is smaller for the same capacity, but I don't have those numbers and don't feel like decapping any of my working drives to measure.
  • Kracer - Wednesday, February 20, 2019 - link

    Huh, ok.

    Thanks for the reply.
  • Samus - Tuesday, February 19, 2019 - link

    You can buy SIX 480GB Enterprise-class eMLC drives with around half the write endurance and slightly less performance for the same price. That means you could double up TWO drives 3x in varying configurations or RAID to have similar endurance.

    The margins on this thing must be ridiculous. We thought X-point prices were out of this world but this is out of this galaxy. It would be competitive at HALF the price, but the fact is X-point is better and somehow, shockingly, its actually cheaper!?
  • PeachNCream - Tuesday, February 19, 2019 - link

    Why would prices need to be in this galaxy when we're talking about a Samsung Galaxy instead?

    Sorry, I couldn't resist...I'll leave now.
  • eastcoast_pete - Tuesday, February 19, 2019 - link

    Definitely NOT a consumer drive.
    @Billy Regarding the Optane drive performance: any information or experience with DIMM format Optane? I believe Intel launched DDR4 slot format compatible Optane modules. How much faster are they than the PCI-E drives?
  • ksec - Tuesday, February 19, 2019 - link

    I don't think any consumer would be interested in these. Would love ServeTheHome doing some DB testing with it. Looking at the price and performance I think that is going to Win a lot of business from Optane. NAND price are dropping as well, so Samsung would have lots of capacity for Shipment.
  • MamiyaOtaru - Tuesday, February 19, 2019 - link

    where's ddriver? He was constantly banging on about how terrible "hypetane" is (and how clever he was for coming up with that nickname) and how SLC would kick its ass

    ""no other alternative nonvolatile memory technology is close to being ready to challenge 3D XPoint"

    Except for SLC, which was so good it was immediately abandoned once inferior and more profit friendly NAND implementations were available.

    A SLC based product coupled with MRAM cache will easily humiliate hypetane in its few strong aspects."
    https://www.anandtech.com/show/11953/the-intel-opt...

    I am still disappointed by optane, and now I'm disappointed by znand (performance and price). Wish we had some non-volatile memory that was affordable and not trending towards more and more fragility (QLC)
  • JoeyJoJo123 - Tuesday, February 19, 2019 - link

    Looks like I'm not the only one that remembers the absurdity in trying to bring back SLC for common end user machines.

    The price/GB says it all. It's for enterprise or extreme enthusiasts only, and that's fine, because these deep wallet customers push the industry forward. It's just at the end of the day, if you need the best, you need to pay to get the best. Whining about MLC/TLC/QLC/Optane etc doesn't make the end-user products better.
  • WithoutWeakness - Tuesday, February 19, 2019 - link

    Hahaha I was hoping someone else would remember the absurdity of that comment thread. I thought of it as soon as I read that this drive was running SLC. Shame ddriver hasn't shown up here to provide his valuable insight and tell us what the engineers at Samsung did wrong and what they should have changed in order to beat Optane in mixed workloads.
  • PaoDeTech - Tuesday, February 19, 2019 - link

    Ovonic is the word.
  • Fujikoma - Tuesday, February 19, 2019 - link

    "The tradeoff is that they offer less density per cell – one-half or one-third".

    Should be one-quarter, not one-third... power of 2.
  • Billy Tallis - Tuesday, February 19, 2019 - link

    TLC is three bits per cell, which is three times the density of SLC. The powers of two show up when you count the number of possible voltage levels that a cell may be programmed to, but that doesn't directly affect density, just endurance and the required amount of error correction.
  • FunBunny2 - Wednesday, February 20, 2019 - link

    "TLC is three bits per cell, which is three times the density of SLC. "

    but... is it still true that T and Q cells are being constructed on much larger nodes (layered) of 40 to 50 nm? or is there a move afoot to exploit nearer to current nodes in order to make more moolah?

    and so far as density measures: how to do an apples to apples comparison SLC planar at 1x nm (could be done, but it isn't, right?) to 50 nm TLC layered? what about SLC 1x nm *layered*? might that not approach T and Q 50 nm layered? or is layered only possible are very large nodes with current machines? and so on.
  • ianken - Tuesday, February 19, 2019 - link

    It's not for overclokerz gaemrz d00dz.

    ITT: overcloxoring gam3r d00dz bitching about the cost.
  • haukionkannel - Wednesday, February 20, 2019 - link

    It seems that if you want to get speed, you just go for optane, or this should be much cheaper...
  • cm2187 - Wednesday, February 20, 2019 - link

    I can understand super fast SSDs for database cache and other industrial applications. But who would need such high performances in the retail space? Like what for?
  • ballsystemlord - Wednesday, February 20, 2019 - link

    Spelling and grammar corrections:
    Performance at such light loads is absolutely not what most of these drives are made for, but they have to make through the easy tests before we move on to the more realistic challenges.
    Missing it:
    Performance at such light loads is absolutely not what most of these drives are made for, but they have to make it through the easy tests before we move on to the more realistic challenges.

    ...incrementally reduce the rate until the test can run for a full hour, and the decrease the rate further if necessary to get the drive under the latency limits.
    Should be "then" not "the":
    ...incrementally reduce the rate until the test can run for a full hour, and then decrease the rate further if necessary to get the drive under the latency limits.

    I read the whole thing and found only 2 mistakes, good work!
  • MDD1963 - Friday, February 22, 2019 - link

    I was expecting some numbers that looked at least impressive compared to a 970 EVO; seeing as the only significat number difference is the price at nearly triple EVOs price,.... I'll pass....
    (Someone wake me up when we start seeing 4,000 MB/sec reads....)

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