I personally would rather then not waste space on this type of memory/storage which likely takes up a good chunk of available space and instead be far far more concerned about making them tougher, lower cost and much larger battery then the "average" which seems to currently be in the 2500-3400 when they should be in the 3500-5200 these days ^.^
IMO (for me) 64gb available storage is AMPLE for a damn phone..but then again, I do not use my phone for computer like stuff, it is just a phone that I can do some invoice stuff, take notes, listen to music, maybe occasional pictures with...why do they not "segrate" their line a bit more, for people like me that want a bit of everything (much larger battery) ones that could care less about "simple" phone things prioritize for great pictures and increased storage speed/size and battery life etc ^.^
Greater market segmentation would benefit consumers, assuming they spend the time to match their needs to an suitable phone. OEMs would have to soak up the cost of developing, manufacturing, and shipping additional SKUs. That would harm efficiency and hurt shareholder value for a potentially small benefit. As a stakeholder, I want the companies I invest in to put a priority on adding investment value and paying out dividends. Social responsibility is nice, but is a secondary concern.
Phones are good enough with a microSD slot. If you only require 64GB, then you ought to be served well by internal memory only. For those of us that need more, we can easily add up to 512GB by purchasing a suitable storage device. However, I do like the idea of additional internal storage for ever growing programs that can't make use of a removable memory card. A single BGA chip and the traces needed to connect it to the SoC would not really speak for very much battery capacity anyhow. What you'd benefit from is a thicker handset that offers more internal volume for a larger battery and adding thickness isn't appealing to a lot of customers right now.
Marketing folks at giants like Samsung are not completely incompetent. They don't make a phone like that because there aren't enough buyers to pay for the r&d&m.
How are these DRAM-less SSDs? ADATA sells the 250GB SU650 with a 140TBW rating (just below the 150TBW of the 860 EVO which has DRAM). Do the drives chew through the TBW a lot quicker due to the lack of RAM, and how's the performance?
The HP EX900 has the DRAMless Silicon Motion SM2263XT NVME controller, there are a few tests of it around the web. It uses the Host Memory Buffer (HMB) feature to utilize the system memory instead of onboard RAM like other SSDs. Considering that the RAM on SSDs does not hold user data, just overview tables, I don't see how it should eat into P/E cycles. Performance is low compared to other NVME devices and high compared to normal SATA based ones. I wouldn't buy one at this moment, because SATA is still much cheaper (140€ for the HP NVME DRAMless one and 90€ for the SATA WD Blue 3D). And if I go for NVME, a 960 EVO is the same price (500GB in both comparisons, Germany).
FusionIO was the highest-performance Flash Memory market leader a couple of years ago, pioneering PCIe connectivity and a "native API" to avoid all the overhead of a block storage abstraction and an OS that mentally was a DOS (disk based operating system): Their designs put all the logic and buffering into OS drivers, for much better speed and also because SSD controller chips at the time were non-existant or very primitive. The FPGA controller on the card really just supported the "analog" art of trapping and counting selected numbers of electrons in cells that aged and changed over time, temperature and with usage and translate that in to a binary or ternary digital illusion.
So in terms of performance these "primitive" SSDs are actually hard to beat, as long as your CPU is faster and has RAM left over for the mapping tables. And with mobile devices, the UPS is built right in and DRAM nominally operated non-volatile with it. Of course a bug in any other kernel driver could rain right into your precious mapping tables, so it's probably a bad idea to rely on DRAM based write-back caches, even if they'd be so much faster than an SLC mode cache on the device.
I guess eMMC offers SATA abstractions these days, but early mobile flash was direct mapped, I believe, and it was the SoC responsibility to do manage endurance with a translation layer, just like here.
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8 Comments
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deil - Thursday, September 13, 2018 - link
Can we get this in any phone ? please ?Dragonstongue - Thursday, September 13, 2018 - link
I personally would rather then not waste space on this type of memory/storage which likely takes up a good chunk of available space and instead be far far more concerned about making them tougher, lower cost and much larger battery then the "average" which seems to currently be in the 2500-3400 when they should be in the 3500-5200 these days ^.^IMO (for me) 64gb available storage is AMPLE for a damn phone..but then again, I do not use my phone for computer like stuff, it is just a phone that I can do some invoice stuff, take notes, listen to music, maybe occasional pictures with...why do they not "segrate" their line a bit more, for people like me that want a bit of everything (much larger battery) ones that could care less about "simple" phone things prioritize for great pictures and increased storage speed/size and battery life etc ^.^
rpg1966 - Friday, September 14, 2018 - link
Cool story, bro.Anyway, what do you mean, "waste space"? Do you think existing storage has zero dimensions?
PeachNCream - Friday, September 14, 2018 - link
Greater market segmentation would benefit consumers, assuming they spend the time to match their needs to an suitable phone. OEMs would have to soak up the cost of developing, manufacturing, and shipping additional SKUs. That would harm efficiency and hurt shareholder value for a potentially small benefit. As a stakeholder, I want the companies I invest in to put a priority on adding investment value and paying out dividends. Social responsibility is nice, but is a secondary concern.Phones are good enough with a microSD slot. If you only require 64GB, then you ought to be served well by internal memory only. For those of us that need more, we can easily add up to 512GB by purchasing a suitable storage device. However, I do like the idea of additional internal storage for ever growing programs that can't make use of a removable memory card. A single BGA chip and the traces needed to connect it to the SoC would not really speak for very much battery capacity anyhow. What you'd benefit from is a thicker handset that offers more internal volume for a larger battery and adding thickness isn't appealing to a lot of customers right now.
surt - Saturday, September 15, 2018 - link
Marketing folks at giants like Samsung are not completely incompetent. They don't make a phone like that because there aren't enough buyers to pay for the r&d&m.altair_auditore - Thursday, September 13, 2018 - link
How are these DRAM-less SSDs?ADATA sells the 250GB SU650 with a 140TBW rating (just below the 150TBW of the 860 EVO which has DRAM).
Do the drives chew through the TBW a lot quicker due to the lack of RAM, and how's the performance?
Death666Angel - Thursday, September 13, 2018 - link
The HP EX900 has the DRAMless Silicon Motion SM2263XT NVME controller, there are a few tests of it around the web. It uses the Host Memory Buffer (HMB) feature to utilize the system memory instead of onboard RAM like other SSDs. Considering that the RAM on SSDs does not hold user data, just overview tables, I don't see how it should eat into P/E cycles. Performance is low compared to other NVME devices and high compared to normal SATA based ones. I wouldn't buy one at this moment, because SATA is still much cheaper (140€ for the HP NVME DRAMless one and 90€ for the SATA WD Blue 3D). And if I go for NVME, a 960 EVO is the same price (500GB in both comparisons, Germany).abufrejoval - Monday, September 17, 2018 - link
FusionIO was the highest-performance Flash Memory market leader a couple of years ago, pioneering PCIe connectivity and a "native API" to avoid all the overhead of a block storage abstraction and an OS that mentally was a DOS (disk based operating system): Their designs put all the logic and buffering into OS drivers, for much better speed and also because SSD controller chips at the time were non-existant or very primitive. The FPGA controller on the card really just supported the "analog" art of trapping and counting selected numbers of electrons in cells that aged and changed over time, temperature and with usage and translate that in to a binary or ternary digital illusion.So in terms of performance these "primitive" SSDs are actually hard to beat, as long as your CPU is faster and has RAM left over for the mapping tables. And with mobile devices, the UPS is built right in and DRAM nominally operated non-volatile with it. Of course a bug in any other kernel driver could rain right into your precious mapping tables, so it's probably a bad idea to rely on DRAM based write-back caches, even if they'd be so much faster than an SLC mode cache on the device.
I guess eMMC offers SATA abstractions these days, but early mobile flash was direct mapped, I believe, and it was the SoC responsibility to do manage endurance with a translation layer, just like here.