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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."
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?
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
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?"
RAID has a couple of semi accepted meanings,
The I can mean either Inexpensive or Independent
and the D can be either Drives, Disks, or Devices.
However it's always a Redundant Array, which of course makes RAID 0 not RAID, but just a good way to lose even more data faster(as any drive/disk/device failing on RAID 0 takes down all your info).
- 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?
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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.
Oh and reading in the article it actually tells you whats used to obtain the 3gb/sec
"with two to eight Fibre Channel ports that can push out 250,000 IOPS - up to 3Gbit/s"
If you read the PDF brochure, it explains that there is a regular disk inside as well. The device is constantly backing up the DRAM contents to disk, and the device contains battery power which guarantees that in the event of a power outage, there is enough time to fully back up the DRAM contents. So power outages won't hurt it (unless maybe you average more than outages per hour.)
# Erik