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."

Comments

Not cheap, but fast

[Anonymous Coward]

then it must be good. cheap, fast, good, pick any two.

Why is this significant?

[John Jorsett]

We pretty much expect things to get increasingly bigger and faster, so is another RAM-based pseudo-disk that big a deal?

RELIABILITY!!!

[NineNine]

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.

Re:RELIABILITY!!!

[neurojab]

>I don't understand why the company isn't touting reliability.

Traditionally, DRAM-based storage units are LESS reliable than hard disks. Why? Power loss. Yes, you can always create a massive UPS, but to be really considered "stable storage", you need to be able to store data without power for years on end. The advantage here is that the unit writes data to its hard disks, giving you some assurance that you won't lose your data even then. That turns the RAM in the unit into a giant cache. This helps with read operations, but does nothing for writes. Besides, if the hard drives fail in this unit, the unit still fails. That makes it no more reliable than RAID.

>To me, this is the most exciting advance in computing since Ethernet.

This concept has been around since before Ethernet. The concept of storage in solid-state isn't new. Even using RAM for a hard disk isn't new. Ever run VDISK in an expanded-memory DOS system? This concept was available in the higher-end comptuer world far before that.

Used interface?

[Karamchand]

What interface are they using? Even the fastest SCSI can't provide 3GB/s!

That would work fine

[Mr. Neutron]

until the janitor tripped over the power cable and all of your data goes *poof*

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.