Ultra Fast Disk Drives With No Moving Parts

saccade.com writes "Let's face it, the slowest part of PC's today is the disk drive. Bit Micro has come up with a nifty solution - flash memory based disk drives available in typical disk form-factors. These e-disks are electrically compatible with ATA, SCSI, etc. but run orders of magnitude faster - access times down to 40 usec and transfer rates over 100 MB/sec. What's the catch? Cost. Currently going for just under $1K/G, a 30G model I recently held in my hand was worth much more than my car. However, as flash memory prices drop, so do the price of these drives. Within the decade the spinning hard disk may go the way of the floppy and CRT."

Comments

End User upgradable

[Anonymous Coward]

I need an EE to build an ata interface to a raid series of about 100 flash either (SD or compact). Now allow the end user to plug in how many cards he wishes and just use them. Imaging that if you have a raid 5 setup of say 128 256mb cards costing about $40 each would cost about $5000 1/6th of the $30k and it is end user upgraded and so cool to be able to ad more storage instead of rebuilding a whole computer and drive.

Re:Not that new.

[Nos.]

Maybe not, but if they start going a little bit mainstream, we'll start to see the cost go down. I know I've thought about using some sort of flash device for my boot drive just to have extremely fast boots.

Problem with number of writes.

[spiff42]

I wonder if they have solved the problems with a limited number of writes to flash memory. Most flash-chips only have a 1000 or 10000 cycle write endurance. Sometimes this gets higher because virtual pages are used and the data shuffeled arround on the "disk" each time it is written. But that will still cause problems if you fill up the disk, say 90%, and then keep writing and rewriting the remaining 10%.

I know that 10000 writes seems like a lot, and perhaps it is. Anyone knows how this figure looks for normal harddrives?

Still it seems to me that the limited number of writes sets the biggest limitation.

/spiff

SSD is an old idea

[UnderAttack]

Old enough, so the first 'generation' of SSD companies is already out of business. E.g. Platypus (I think that was the name) build RAM based solid state drives, some of them in the right shape and with appropriate disk interfaces to match existing disk drives.

I looked into SSD for a database at one point. But I found that you can get almost the same performance by using lots of drives in a fast RAID setup. Striping the content over multiple disks does wonders! And its much cheaper.

E.g. look at something like a 12 disk setup with RAID 5+1. You got a full mirror, and essentialy 4-8 times the speed of a single drive. So you are already close to the 'order of magnitude' they SSD drives claim.

Re:Not that new.

[b-baggins]

Not always. Sometimes things are expensive because they are technically difficult to manufacture, or because the raw materials are expensive, or because the environmental regulations are expensive.

memory chips require many expensive and hazardous chemicals to manufacture like fuming sulfuric acid for dissolving the photoresist inks and hydroflouric acid for etching the circuits. These chemicals have a large environmental regulation cost associated with them that's not going to go down any time in the forseeable future and is entirely outside the control of any manufacturing process.

Re:Not that new.

[networkBoy]

As far as I can recall, there ARE people working on alternatives to memory as we know it

Without giving away too much (and getting fired in the process) there is a whole new tech on the horizon. It still uses all the nasty chemicles, but in traditional flash memory, the chip is broken into three major components:

charge punps (to provide the 9.5-12 volts required to program the chip from the punny 1.8 - 3.3 volt supply

the control circuitry (basically a mini CPU)

the flash array
all these elements are "flat", that is they are one structure deep. This new tech coming up, if someone can perfect it, uses multiple layers to make the flash array several layers deep. Thus you could (in theory) shrink your die size while increasing the memory density.
-nB