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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.
Are already starting the hard work on getting the components together to meet the minimum specs for running Longhorn. Huzzah!
Ultra fast access prOn!
It will be great for you since finally the picture will load before you shoot your load.
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?
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
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!!!!
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
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?
A UPS is one way to keep the data going, but it's much simpler and more effective to use the method that Sun used years ago with its Prestoserve disk-cache boards years ago: you put a little lithium watch battery on the board with the RAM. If the system loses power, the battery powers the RAM for, I don't know, a year or two. Then you also build in a little software-accessible battery monitor that tells you when it's time to replace the watch batteries.
Of course, you have to have some software so that after a crash or power failure this disk cache can be properly synchronized with the real disk. But that's not super difficult.
(Also, if anyone wants to know, the purpose of the Prestoserver was to accelerate NFS performance. Especially on the old NFS v2, write performance was bad because the protocol specified the data must be committed to nonvolatile storage before the NFS request could be acknowledged. So you have a lot of threads sitting around that could be serving other NFS requests but instead they're waiting on something to be written to disk. The solution was Prestoserve, basically a queue of things to commit to disk but stored in battery-backed RAM. It was goofy, but it provided all the benefits of write cache with basically none of the risk, so that was nice.)
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
What interface are they using? Even the fastest SCSI can't provide 3GB/s!
That's about 10 seconds more than anyone should need.
You're nothing; like me.
...for Longhorn!!
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).
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.
...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
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.
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
http://www.superssd.com/default.asp
==>Lazn
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
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
The way I understand it the system shadows the entire hard drive in DRAM. Reads come from the DRAM, writes first update the DRAM and are written back to the drive.
Envision an 8G SCSI hard drive with 8G of cache, pre-populating the cache when you turn on the computer. Same idea.
In fact this is a hardware manifestation of the Superspeed software that used to be marketed by Cenatek (not sure if they still do - Google it.)
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
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.