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DSI Delivers up to 3GB/s with Solid State Disk
olivesaregross writes "'Running at what the company says is 250 times the speed of conventional hard drives, it won't come cheap, but it will be fast. It uses DRAM memory to store data instead of spinning platter hard drives, giving an access time of just 20 microseconds.' It still does use platter-based drives but it's a cool idea anyway.
Techworld has another story on it."
Traders link to the system over FDDI, T3 or ATM links, and the Eurex back office servers connect via 2Gbit/s Fibre Channel links and switches to the SSDs. The system uses DSI's 3200 solid state disks, with two to eight Fibre Channel ports that can push out 250,000 IOPS - up to 3Gbit/s - and contain 16-64 GB of capacity. There are two hot-swappable power supplies and three hot-swappable drives per DSI 3200. Uptime is five-nines - 99.999 percent.
Well! A consumer-level version ought to be cheap in about... ten years.
The coolest voice ever.
then it must be good. cheap, fast, good, pick any two.
I can imagine this kind of technology being really applicable in situations where large databases are in use -- but potentially, slightly cheaper then just keeping the entire database in ram. I think it would be interesting to use, but a bit more interesting to play with.
Their website or hosting firm isn't very dynamic, at least. Right now, it's not even static. It's slashdotted.
What would the use for this be? I can see how it would be nice to have no loading time at all in every game etc, but is anyone except NASA going to use this now? Any ideas?
I don't know if I find this to be too offtopic. I mean, technically it IS a possible use if I'm not mistaken.
I think you got an offtopic because you posted too soon. In another 15 minutes it would have been modded Funny (though it was only marginally funny at best).
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
Are already starting the hard work on getting the components together to meet the minimum specs for running Longhorn. Huzzah!
ive been waiting for this since hd's were 1st envisioned... platters suck...
until the power goes out.
Ultra fast access prOn!
It will be great for you since finally the picture will load before you shoot your load.
...or does this blurb makes no sense and contradict itself?
Maybe they should be serving their website from SSDs
*waits for the groans*
I wonder how long it will be before microsoft add this technology to their list of requirements for longhorn!
Let's see:
Imperial folded, Platypus folded, Solid Data is barely hanging on and Texas Memory survives on defense contracts.
SSD is a great technology, yes.
SSD makes commercial sense, no.
How many more VCs can be fooled into investing into SSD startups?
We pretty much expect things to get increasingly bigger and faster, so is another RAM-based pseudo-disk that big a deal?
Wasn't there already a solid state transfer rate of 80GB/s reported from SGI/Cray a year or so ago?
I can trade in my 2 ata Raid drives and just get one of these "Mothers" Never have to wait for load, and just rip all my game CDs to my harddrive and no mo downtime... I will name my computer lighting 0 for it is fast!
- Your stupidity got you into this mess, why can't it get you out? -Will Rogers
Cheap and Fast.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
The TechWorld article (titled: Welcome the Ferrari of disk drives) has an ad for the Iomega Rev on the page which might confuse the average schmoe out there that it's the Iomega that is the Ferarri, shudder.
(click-death!)
Screw speed. At least for me, that's not an issue. I want a r-e-l-i-a-b-l-e hard drive. I've tried all the brands, but they all come down to this: You have moving parts. It's going to break, eventually. The bearings will go. The head will hit a platter, etc. Personally, I've been saying for years that a solid state hard drive will be the next big boost in PC technology, and I think this is the beginning.
I don't understand why the company isn't touting reliability. If I have a slow hard drive... eh. No biggie. I wait an extra second. If I have a hard drive crash, that's potentially days of lost work and business, even more if a backup failed recently. I'll be buying these just as soon as I can afford them. With these drives in place, the next reliaibility bottleneck are the stupid little cooling fans failing. Electronics (printed circuit boards, chips) rarely fail on their own. It's almost something with moving parts (like a fan) that leads to their death.
To me, this is the most exciting advance in computing since Ethernet.
Hmmm, one of the fastest slashdottings in recent history, methinks. Google cache is here.
Slashdot - News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters, in ISO-8859-1 Has just realised that beta makes this signature redundant
These units store the data in RAM and on disk (a RAID array). At some point the data has to be written out to disk and this will not be as fast. Alternatively, it's possible that when powering off, the entire contents fo the cache could be written to disk -- the time to power off would be quite large though. I see at least one unit has it's own UPS to manage this.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
This idea seems to have been around for a while. I remember seeing a few years ago a hd controller that you could plug standard ram into to act as a fast cache. Now granted this is on a much larger scale, but. :P
It is still cool though
It still does use platter-based drives but it's a cool idea anyway.
From the article, I gather these are merely SAN boxes with up to 64GB of DRAM, fiber channel output, and 3 hot-swappable hard drives that act as backup.
Has a record been broken? Has anything special happened? Sure this is high-end stuff, but it doesnt seem new or particularly exciting.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
What about the HDD noise?? Are solid state disks quieter??
And..........yes. Funny. Modding patterns I believe are as predictable as anything ever gets
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
I certainly hope they're using RAMBUS memory..unless they want to be sued for "not wanting to pay loyalty fees"
$cat
This technology would be purely for database read speed at the present moment, though down the track I would imaging that this technology will be used to rapid access, Read only, operating system storage. Basically to make idiot proof operating systems for future, high speed computer systems.
"I have a problem with my computer, it says boot disk invalid"
"Please remove the cartridge from the front of the PC and replace it with one that will arrive at your door shortly, and don't worry, you wont lose any information"
Is this sort of thing more or less expensive than plain ol' RAM? If it costs more, then just caching 3gb of data from disk into memory at bootup is more cost-effective. If it's cheaper, then perhaps people will start using this technology for swap space, etc. In any case, I've been waiting to see an HDD using solid-state RAM for quite some time now. If we're lucky, it'll be cost-effective before too long.
-Amalcon
All the people who complain that Linux 2.6 uses too much swap for disk cache can buy one of these for a measly cost, set swappiness to zero, and shut the hell up.
Obiviously it's not that fast, it's already /.ed
A number of other companies have been making DRAM disks for several years
Solid state drives have been around for a long time. Hell, the old RocketDrives could hit 4GB with four 1GB RDRAM sticks.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
You think by now. Someone would have started selling these solid state ramdrives with empty RAM sockets & simply support cheap off the shelf SDRAM. No firmware limit of 4gigs or anything. Just a bunch of SDRAM slots on the logic to address them. Is the hardware *that* expensive?
There's hope that with enough public ridicule these problems would get fixed... Also it looks like he posted pretty quick so he didn't have time to read the comments you boob
*groan*
This is NOT a solid state disk. It's a SAN server with a cache as big as the disk array (which is fairly small).
This is chump speed when you start talking about true high end computing, the kind most slashdotters have never heard of. If you think DDR is fast memory or gigabit would make a good "interconnect" for a supercomputer or that a supercomputer even uses TCP/IP at any point (ie rather than a host controller interfacing via another method), you're not playing in the same ball park. top500.org is a joke
damn and I thought I could get a 3GB/s DSL line...
Is it true that more people vote for the winner of American Idol, than vote for the president? -Ali G.
At 3 GB/sec, you can get 3000x3000 uncompressed video at 100 Hz refresh rate, with 1600 channels of uncompressed 96kHz 32-bit sound. Or compress it and get 35000x35000 resolution.
Pure bliss. But, at that rate, the largest drive (64GB) would only last 21 seconds.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
How many 1G sticks of RAM could you put into your standard Firewire/USB2 enclosure? Why couldn't someone make a USB2/Firewire/SCSI enclosure that the host system saw as a mass storage device but was actually just a smaller version of the above? It might be really useful for some DB applications, video editing, etc.
/. are almost never affordable but by the richest organizations.
I can't imagine that an enclosure of that type would run more than $500, plus the cost of the RAM that went into it. It might not be consumer cost effective, but it could be worthwhile at the prosumer or low end, where the RAM disks shown on
DSI's Solid State Disk products provide the easiest and fastest way of removing I/O bottlenecks and increasing system performance. Utilizing a DRAM architecture for storage rather than traditional magnetic disks, these high-performance devices are capable of delivering data of up to 3 GB/s! With no latencies associated with head positioning or seek times, the resulting read/write operations are hundreds of times faster than conventional rotating disks.
DSI's current line of Solid State Disk products include the DSI3200, and the DSI2100. With no changes to the existing operating system or processor hardware, installation is easy and usually performed in less than one hour!
Accelerating the Application
Computer systems and networks have increased exponentially in both speed and performance throughout the 'Digital Age'. Conversely, storage device speed-- measured by seek time, operations per second, total bandwidth, and other mechanics--have remained relatively stagnant.
These storage device limitations have created a significant bottleneck, resulting in a substantial performance gap over the years. In high-demand networks, this performance gap is painfully obvious--the fastest processors in the world are underutilized if the storage device can't carry out its orders fast enough. And in situations where "hot-files" and databases are constantly read from or written to by multiple sources across a network, this bottleneck creates a crisis for the entire network infrastructure.
Bringing storage devices into the 'Digital Age', solid state disk technology removes the I/O bottleneck by replacing hard disk drives with high speed circuitry. Instead of a rotating disk, a solid state disk uses memory chips (typically SDRAM) to read and write data, resulting in full utilization of existing processors and bandwidth. With an access time of only 20 microseconds, SDRAM delivers data 250 times faster than conventional disk drives. Uncompromised SDRAM data integrity is maintained through both battery backup and redundant disk drives, so your data is always protected.
The 3200 has been designed to achieve a 99.999% expected up time, and includes redundant data storage media to ensure data integrity. The primary storage media is the SDRAM, with three independent disk drives providing secondary storage as well as optional data mirroring (active backup). Writes are performed to all four media while read operations are performed by the SDRAM (active backup option), thus solving the SDRAM volatility issue--three disk drives each have an updated copy of all data sets even when the 3200 powers off. Two redundant and hot swappable power supplies, fans and multiple drives allow the 3200 to survive multiple points of failure while maintaining data integrity. Additionally, 3 internal batteries are used in the event of a power failure. By utilizing a 3 GB/s bandwidth and 250,000 I/Os per second, the 3200 gives you the best of both worlds; fast data access and high data reliability.
DSI3200 BENEFITS:
Accelerate Database Applications
Eliminate I/O Bottlenecks
Improve Response Times
Data Mirroring
Open System Support
"Plug-and-play " Functionality
99.999% Performance Reliability
SDRAM with Built-in ECC Circuitry
DSI3200 SPECIFICATIONS:
Sustained IOPS: 250,000
Capacity: 8 GB to 64 GB
Bandwidth: 3 GB/s
Access Time: Less than 20 sec Latency
Size: 5.25"(3U) x 25"
2 Hot-Swappable Power Supplies
3 Redundant 30-minute Internal Batteries
Fibre Channels: 2 GB (2 to 8 ports)
DSI3200 brochure
Testimonial: Mid-State Bank
Testimonial: Texas State Bank
Testimonial: TrustCompany Bank
Testimonial: Bar Harbor Banking
(pdf, 250 kb)
(pdf, 132kb)
(pdf, 196kb)
(pdf, 176kb)
(pdf, 71kb) Interactive Web Management Demo (Flash, 90kb)
The 2100 was designed for today's Storage Area Network (SAN) environments which is demonstrated by its ability to support redundant fabric switch connections for high fabric a
What interface are they using? Even the fastest SCSI can't provide 3GB/s!
The site's /.'ed, and probably not listed in plain sight anyway. How much are we talking for one of these babies?
That green slime had it coming.
That's about 10 seconds more than anyone should need.
You're nothing; like me.
...for Longhorn!!
So basically what you're saying is that this is the pr0n device that most of Slashdot has been waiting for all their lives?
The SSD we have is a Nitro!Xe from Curtis, Inc.. It looks like a standard 3.5" wide 1" high Ultra2 SCSI drive with an 80 pin SCA connector. We have a 2G model with a 2.5" notebook drive for backup (it has a battery to dump RAM to disk on power off) and it greatly improved the performance of our mail server (high performance mail queue is all about I/O TPS).
Man, we've been seeing more than a few of these here lately. Looks like you can fill in the blanks during a slow news day nicely with some commercial offerings and please the offerers at the same time. The /. editors have probably received some cool new toys recently...
Whatever happened to wafer-scale integration?
I read an article about this years ago. The idea was something like this:
Memory chips are made on wafers. They are made side-by-side, then sliced apart, then each tested and mounted in a package. (Then eventually mounted on a little circuit board, and thence into our hands to install into our computers.)
The idea was to make a wafer of memory chips, but not to just have them side-by-side; actually have traces connecting one chip to another. Then use the whole wafer as a RAM unit. You would need to test and find any defective RAM chips in the wafer, then cut a trace (or burn out a fuse, or whatever) to disconnect them from the rest of the wafer. (Not too different from bad-block management on a hard drive, really.) Finally you could make a stack of these wafers in a box, and sell it as a disk drive.
This should be much cheaper than current RAM-based disk drives. It would be slower (the traces connecting the chips would be slower than a direct memory bus to each chip) but still way faster than a drive with moving parts.
My understanding is that wafer-scale integration isn't very interesting for most applications, but for the specific niche of RAM-based storage units it seemed promising. Clearly I'm wrong since it didn't happen. Anyone know why?
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
- PCI @ 150MHz * 64bits is still 1200MB/s (that handwaves away any sort of overhead a bus might impose). So how are they getting 3036MB/s into a machine? Certainly not FCAL or SCSI. magic?
-
When offered SSDs to work with for a project that needed lots of writes/reads of short lived files, I found them expensive, but good. I'm sorry to hear that Platypus ate it, I liked them and the idea of RAM on a PCI card - and they had linux and freebsd drivers. But SSDs COST a BUTTLOAD.
- I've used these guys' disks for years because they have tested to be as fast as SSDs. But with a half terrabyte behind them.
I don't work for them, I just like their stuff. They're a small(ish) company that just does raid with lots of Wall St and corporate clients.With a battery backed cache of mirrored RAM, we found that for quick read/write stuff, the disks never got hit. If the data stayed, they ended up on the drives. If power was lost, the battery kept the cache alive for well over a day (I got bored and it met the "30 minutes" criteria we were looking at).
The cache isn't huge (512? 256MB?) but it never filled. Basic elevator algorithms (we all did CS classes, right?) let the RAID side take data out of the cache in DISK order and write it out.
And, not being Computer Vendor RAID, we found that it was fast and not expensive (given professional RAID). 15KRPM disks and dual controllers and dual PS and all that. Not for home use, but certainly for pro use. Oh and it gives great stats. Find stripe usage and cache hits on a Sun T3 that performs at half the speed for a good bit more money.
isn't the Compact Flash card I have sitting on my desk considered solid state? Why not just make a larger Flash card to replace a hard drive? Seems like the easier (and cheaper) way to go...
If you don't fall occasionally, you're not doing it hard enough.
You clearly need to push those drives more.
I've had one or two (I'm not sure about the second one yet, it could be something else in the system) drive failures at home. This is out of a great many hard drives I have owned. Several more have failed after laying about somewhere and not being used for a couple of years, but I don't count those.
When I worked at a medium sized office (550 PC's) we would have roughly one drive failure a week, and a PC replacement cycle of 3 years (which would occasionally stretch to 4 years depending on the economic situation, but let's ignore that for now).
So, If my tired mind is not playing tricks on me, that means 30% of the drives failed within their first three years of operation. A home computer is generally not used as much (it's the spinning up and down that wears most on the drive), and often has better quality components(!) than the utter crap HP/Compaq put in their machines these days.
The interesting thing is that significantly more of these drives failed in their first year than in their third.
Actually, the one failure a week number is probably slightly exagerated, the real value is likely closer to 20% failed within three years.
...ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.
...that you can actually do in software (get a PowerMac or AMD-64, load it up with 8-12GB of ram). What usually cost money, is to have some sort of flush-to-disk feature.
I'd love a SSD at least big enough to boot from, to combine with some other fanless stuff to create a 100% fanless, no moving parts PC (except from burner, which is silent when not in use). That + GbLan (to copy everything in from fanless machine, no damn spinning CD/DVD) using a direct crossover cable to a file server, preferably in a sound-isolated galaxy far, far away.
That is my dream for my next setup. I've looked at doing the same simply dragging DVI + USB cables + external burner at machine, but it's not that great. A network cable can go so much longer...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Congratulations mods! Keep up the censorship!
Cenatek offers the Rocket Drive. Basically, it's RAM on a PCI card that requires an external power source via AC adapter. Of course, you could use a RAM drive setting in your OS. And if you need gigs of memory to start out with, your better off going with a 64bit platform as it scales.
http://www.cenatek.com/product_rocketdrive.cfm
Life is not for the lazy.
I run into hard drive bottlenecks all the time working with large graphic files. They could be interesting for a "C" drive. 5 to 10 gig is adequate for operating system, basic software and the file you are working with. Just store your saved files on another drive. The big downside is safety. I haven't read the article yet but these systems rely on batteries to keep the ram active. If you loose power you loose the infomation and have to start from scratch. I've had hard drives setting on the shelf for over a year plugged them in and pulled off files. I'm sure the batteries have a long life but they are still another risk to data. If the ram drives get large enough, 100 gig+, they would be excellent for editing film. You could run full res 35mm captures real time. If the software was rewritten you wouldn't need to load a scene to edit it could be done right off the drive. As some one else pointed out the bus system on the motherboard would have to be improved as well. I guess the real question is there any reason the C drive can't be ultimately replaced by ram? Other than the fact most use Microsoft. Can you say reboot to clear ram?
Yeah, I liked that movie the first time I saw it, when it was called "Ram Disk."
Uncompromised SDRAM data integrity is maintained through both battery backup and redundant disk drives, so your data is always protected.
dinner: it's what's for beer
It's not just the solid state memory, it's the ability to independently mirror it on disk as well. I suppose you could do that with software, but having that taken care of transparently and without CPU is a huge convenience factor.
dinner: it's what's for beer
* when fully configured
Say you do lose power with this thing. Sure- it's got backup on the platter drives. Triple Redundant too- enabling odd-man-out error correction. So for the first SEVERAL minutes, you're restoring the RAM from the hard disks, doing three reads at a time, comparing the result, and placing it back into RAM.
This alone will keep us from *ever* seeing a consumer version
But dangnabit, if I was running a huge data center I'd want a RAED (redundant array of expensive disks) of these puppies- two alone mirrored would create 100% uptime easily. Lose power to one, replace it's power supply, and run off the other until the first one boots again.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
These guys need a faster web site.
What happened to Platypus? Those guys had an 8Gb Solid-state disk that plugged into a PCI slot.....
http://www.superssd.com/default.asp
==>Lazn
OK, so they put some memory sockets on a PCI card, made an ASIC that pretends to be an IDE controller or something, and they charge $999.00 for it.
No wonder I haven't heard of them before.
ARE THEY NUTS!!! power outage...woops there goes my paper, and my OS.
how about ust giving a hard drive a 32 MB cache? or more perhaps?
that would be cheaper and be more reliable until MRAM hits the market and can replace Hard drives with no worries, not to mention no more hybernation by writing to disk, you can just turn off the computer and it will boot right back up to where you left off in a few seconds.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
How can this possibly be better than just putting more RAM in to your computer. Ok, sure, if you have a 32-bit machine, then you're stuck. But if you have the money for this beast, than you have a 64-bit server box, and you can install 64MB of RAM.
This would be EVEN FASTER because you don't have to get your disk data from over some SCSI bus or whatever. Instead, you just rely in your OS to do a good job of caching disk blocks in RAM. If all of your data fits in RAM, then the only disk access that will ever happen is writes, and that'll be so well buffered that it'll never impact anything. (Just be sure to use a journalling file system!)
It uses DRAM memory to store data instead of spinning platter hard drives, giving an access time of just 20 microseconds.' It still does use platter-based drives but it's a cool idea anyway.
<jon stewart> Whaaaaaa? </jon stewart> How can you use DRAM instead of platters but still be platter based?
Oh, yes. Now I understand. Way to be crystal clear there. I know the formula, (submit well written story with exacting details that clearly illustrate the point minus "well written" and minus "with exacting deatils that clearly illustrate the point"), and yet... I keep taking the bait.
and let me beat you to the punchline:
(Score: -1 Duh)
I make these: http://beatseqr.com
http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~solomon/cs537/disksche
The same link web browser friendly :
:P
the link
Why is this so much better than a bunch of additional system memory?
Theoretically if you throw a bunch of RAM into a computer with a remotely modern OS, some of that memory will be used to buffer writes, and performance will improve. An exception would be in cases where applications go out of their way to force writes all the way to disk, such as in databases with their transaction logs.
Is the problem just that there are so many applications that sync() all the time, that a hardware buffering solution such as SSD is required because otherwise the OS's file buffers are constantly being flushed? (Yes I understand that SSD is persistent, or at least much more persistent than plain old RAM that dies when the power goes off.)
I can see the enterprise-friendly angle of "just add this disk and the whole system goes much faster" instead of trying to rewrite existing apps or tune the hell out of the OS. I'm just curious about particular cases where adding RAM doesn't work but SSD works well... are there enough to justify the existence of these devices?
Ok, one that works better this time :
grrr
Because as a FC based device, which looks like spinning storage
such devices can be used as the back end storage for large
clustered file systems, i.e. data/files can be accessed from
a variety of systems, MPP, PVP, etc.
Because not all processes will continue while something is still in RAM. They will wait until they are written to disk before going on. In those cases, they will still be waiting for that poor little platter to spin around. The oodles of ram in the computer won't make a difference.
Ugh, moving VFS out of system memory and into dedicated memory on the HD doest make it any better. Its still not perminate storage. And when you do hit that memory critical you swap out memory to memory.. instead of just skipping the swap. It seems like this is really targed against PAE or 64bit chips. Bah I like my memory where it belongs swaping out early just becouse the OS doest know that its just a one big memcpy is LAME.
You know, 25+ years ago they had solid state paging drums for the mainframes of the time. Sure they were larger in size, less capacity, slower than this unit, and more expensive -- but so were computers in general. This is hardly a new idea.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Hot damn! Gimme gimme gimme!!
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
You can use a KVM Extender to set the keyboard, mouse, and monitor several rooms away from the computer. Many of them also do serial, audio, and usb. Just get one that uses Cat5 cable between the transmitter and receiver.
I cant wait for MRAM solid state disks. Non-volatile fast, dense...etc
Has all the makings of a great future hard drive replacement.
Small sizes of it are already available, at least on paper.
Datasheets here.
It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
Ya the price is lame, I know :(
But if your after a true SSD in both IDE and SCSI configurations, check out the stuff M-Systems has to offer. They even come packaged in the same form factor as a standard HD.
http://www.m-sys.com
Life is not for the lazy.
Aren't conventional hard drives solid too?
My heart is pure, but make no mistake, it's pure evil
Well it's not swap or VM (and yeah, I've been using 64bit systems for 9 years when I got an Alpha in). It's fast storage that survives reboots.
For applications that need quick read/write access like a, er, MAIL SPOOL, this is perfect. If my main box just spools up to 4 Gig of RAM, then fine. If it's full, there are secondaries (and fallbackMX hosts in sendmail can push slower mail off to another machine).
Wonder if drivers for various un*xes are available. Or even (heaven forbid) documentation needed to write drivers for those dead OSs like BSD.
about that PREVIEW button that we all have...
I know a guy who works for BlueArc. They do most of the network and filesystem stuff in hardware, hardly anything is firmware. (the rare filesystem permission checks or something)
20Gbps is only 16% short of the 3GBps metioned in this article, and you get up 256 TB. Really expensive shit, but it's pretty cool.
The backend runs OpenVMS and the critical files are kept on solid-state disks. Originally DEC ESE20s. In particular, the order-books are kept on mirrored solid-state disks to allow for fast matching between buyer and seller.
For each of these items there is a price/time linked list of bids and offers which are used to determine a market. This could be done in memory but if you pull the plug on the system, then the order-book dissappears. This is why they put it onto disk. However with a requirement of subsecond response to any of the several thousand participants - high performace disks are a must.
I own a 4GB SSD Rocketdrive. First i set it up to host my "temporary internet files",my %TEMP% environment variable, and my pagefile. I've got a Athlon 64 3.2ghz system with 1 gig of PC3200 ram. I didn't notice the system running any faster. Even when i used the drive as my photoshop scratch disk it seems about as fast as my raid 0 WD raptors (36gb's). I'd say save your dough unless your machine is a real POS and then yeah maybe one of these would help.
Is there actually something new here?
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
...for pointing out a non-solution to a non-problem. Unless you have a need for *one* master version (e.g. database), it is pointless. It's like using a Cray to render a movie.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I have a $950 2.5GB barracuda I bought. I hooked it up to the home SPARC 2 and moved 4 535MB disks onto it. And turned off those disks. External with a little soft gasket work between the disk and the frame, it was pretty quiet. AT least from the next room over (bed).
$1k for bus speed disk is GREAT.
The M-Systems (disk on chip) and CF disks and those are nice for, say, storing configs, but not live data. A CF is typically faster than a floppy, but can be slower that a CD (and is much slower than a disk drive).
Now, can we get a file system that journals onto a big bit of NVRAM disk? If I have a 1GB NVRAM card let reiserfs cache meta data and even files to it. And in the background (after the fsync()), move the data from that to the drive as time allows).