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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."
then it must be good. cheap, fast, good, pick any two.
We pretty much expect things to get increasingly bigger and faster, so is another RAM-based pseudo-disk that big a deal?
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.
We know. But thank God you pointed this out. We'd be completely lost if no one informed us of the Slashdot effect, each and every time it fucking happened.
I would call it "a hard disk with a big cache"... however... I can have a cheaper disk with a bigger cache just by adding more RAM to my system and it would be much much faster... wonderful eh?
I may be wrong... but I cannot RTFA.. the site is
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?
What interface are they using? Even the fastest SCSI can't provide 3GB/s!
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
What's the point?
Any speed gain you'd get from using solid state media would be lost if the device is hooked up to such a bus. And if you really want something small, think about the iPod. It holds many gigabytes of data in a handheld form factor; all it has is a tiny hard drive.
Also, RAM needs a constant supply of power to keep it useful. If the device is going to be portable at all [and why shouldn't it be, if you hook it up to Firewire or something similar?], it's going to need batteries, something that a hard disk based device wouldn't need to be encumbered with.
http://cylan.deviantart.com/gallery/
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?
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.