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The State of Solid State Storage
carlmenezes writes "Pretty much every time a faster CPU is released, there are always a few that are marveled by the rate at which CPUs get faster but loathe the sluggish rate that storage evolves. Recognizing the allure of solid state storage, especially to performance-conscious enthusiast users, Gigabyte went about creating the first affordable solid state storage device, and they called it i-RAM. Would you pay $100 for a 4GB Solid State Drive that is up to 6x faster than a WD Raptor?"
Nope. I'd rather wait longer and have more capacity for less money. After all, I use Windows as my primary OS. I'm used to waiting.
Truthfully, though, if the price came down, I'd be interested in this for a Windows install, and then install all my apps and save all my docs to an external IDE.
Mercy was given to me by Christ...I must give the same to others.
Having disk in parallel will speed up your storage much cheaper. 6x faster is not significant.
The card itself goes for $150, not including any RAM. So add 4 1GB sticks of RAM and you are looking at $500+ for the whole setup. So that is about $125 per GB...ouch!
I remember seeing this sort of thing way back in the DOS days. Battery backed RAM on an ISA card. Product died out because RAM was more expensive than HD.
Well this tech will never catch on if they can't make it affordable. Then again, it won't ever catch on if it is affordable but not worth the price.
15,000 for a 500gb solid state drive isn't affordable
100 for a 4gb solid state drive is affordable, but not worth the price.
What they need to do is make the tech better, yet affordable. What makes it so expensive to competetivly price large solid state storage devices?
On a sidenote, is anyone going to buy this drive that is 4gb and costs 100 bucks? I don't think it's much use to anyone.
$150 + (4x$90) = $510 for 4 GB of solid state storage. Definitely not worth it.
"Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb."
Not if its called an iRam.
RamDrive, FlashDrive, etc. are all appropriate names, but iRam? Could the product name be any less descriptive?
The performance numbers Anand came up with on this are a little disappointing, in my view. It's nice, of course, to get a few seconds quicker startup of apps or level loads, but I doubt this is really worth it to most of us at this stage (aside from the coolness factor). Once capacity of these rises enough to make them capable of replacing HDs, though, they might be really nifty in the entertainment/HTPC space due to that silent operation. Basically, an interesting concept, still not quite ready for prime time, but getting a lot closer. Worth a quick read, anyway...
That being said, I do like the idea, and when they have something that's 300GB+ and solid state, I'd be happy to pay a few hundred dollars for it. It would be quite useful for a media system.
"Teleporting Rodents with D-Cell Battery Displacement" theory -- IgnoramusMaximus (692000)
I'd consider buying it if I were building a system that needed some fast write speed... maybe video capture. Be neato if I could get a few and stripe 'em.
I'd love to have a super quick HD for the OS because it's accessed more frequently than, say, some old data file you haven't touched in over a year.
Music, movies, documents, pictures - I don't think these need to be on solid state drives, because they're accessed just fine (except moving GB's of files still needs to be faster), but things like the OS and applications would seem to run a lot quicker if they would all be in ram-like storage.
If you use this to hold your swap and your main partition, I think the speed improvement would be well worth it! Then buy a 300GB drive for your MP3 collection and all the other junk that that doesn't need such access speed and you are set.
Switching to Linux can be an adventure!
Wow, this thing looks almost EXACTLY like the RAM add-in cards we stuck into ISA slots in the mid/late 80's for our zippy '286 and '386 based machines.
:)
Looks like they dug up an old PCB screen, added a battery backup and changed the connectors to work with modern RAM
Among other things, I handle the physical hardware design spec for my companies product (the product is software which is loaded onto a hardware to make an "appliance"). I've received emails from quite a few vendors recently offering this sort of solid-state NV storage. I think this market sector is really starting to creep forward, and these might be the kinds of "disks" we see as the norm in the not-so-distant future.
I think first off, though, these will be like caching drives - holding only the data that is most seek-time sensitive to a particular application.
-This sig intentionally left blank
Mmmm, hyper-fast builds that don't depend on the latency of moving parts...
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Yes, I would buy one. It would make a great swap partition!
You can't re-use code, if you can't find it.
could be useful for a triple setup, use your ram and hd as you normally would but all the crap that windows usually sticks in the vcache and swap file could be stashed on the Solid State drive. you could then feasibly dump your ram state into it when doing a shutdown and have an instant "reboot" but as the standard HD still has everything on it if the battery backup fails then you can still do a standard boot. if you use it as a speedy ramdisk too you could build a redundancy setup on your standard HD that mirrors it, (albeit not in real time, obviously) keeping your frequently accessed documents and suchlike to hand but also safe from said power failures
If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.
Back in the DOS 5 and 6 days, I used to make an 8 meg ramdrive, copy the X-wing game files to that and run from there. No load times for the cut scenes or new missions, and I still had 8 meg to use for regular memory. X-wing only used 4 meg with all the options, so as long as I could get 620K free I was good to go.
There are 01 kinds of cars in the world. The General Lee, and everything else.
Before I RTFA, I would have said YES! But it looks like it uses PCI only for power; all data transfer is done over SATA-bus, which becomes the speed bottleneck at something around 150 Mbit/sec. Since that's the case, I don't see why they made it a PCI card at all... I assume the FPGA and the DDR memory require low-voltage power not offered by a normal hard-drive-style 12V molex connector. Meh.
:/
It just seems to me that the card itself is very bulky, and a similarly-priced RAMdisk with greater storage and a better form-factor is just waiting to be implemented. Oh, and it's not 4GB RAMdisk for $100, b/c you have to purchase the DDR as well
May the threads progress competently.
I don't agree. I record music on at least 8 tracks at a time into a single cpu. I NEED higher transfer rates. If it's 4 gigs, thats enough to keep it recording without a drop in an entire days worth of recording. Then I can dump all that data to a slower, larger drive. It may not fit everyone's needs.. but this is PERFECT for me.
** "It's not my job to stand between the people talking to me, and the ones listening to me." -- Pego the Jerk
Nice troll.
It's called "lazy writes", i.e. the OS waits until all the disk buffers are full, or a time limit expires before it writes a buffer to disk. It's a pretty standard operating system optimization - Windows uses it too. "The whole sync() thing" flushes all the buffers and updates the superblock, telling the OS that the file system is "clean". Windows does this also, this is why you see CHKDSK (the Windows version of fsck) running after a rare Windows system crash.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
The i-RAM only uses SATA for data interface... if I recall, SATA is limited to about 150 MB/sec. Raptor speed is 72 MB/sec. Where is the 6x coming from?
Other bottlenecks are sure to limit this (CPU, etc).
Until I see a way to make this actually very useful (other than having one modern game on it to get better fps), there's no way I would buy at that price.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
The main problem (other than the limited capacity and price) is the volatility. It has a battery pack, though if the power is out for more than 16 hours (or less, as the battery ages), it loses its entire contents. Which is somewhat precarious.
A better idea would have been to have a bank of Flash EEPROM built onto the card as a backup device, with loss of power triggering the automatic dumping of RAM contents to Flash, and resumption of power repopulating RAM from Flash on demand/during idle time. Given that it is now possible to fit 4Gb in a Compact Flash card, there is little excuse for not having such a backup subsystem.
From the summary it sounded like a 2.5" or 3.5" 4GB IDE drive using flash instead of an IDE emulator and battery-backed up RAM using a PCI slot for power... and no memory included!
I'd pay $100 for 4GB of flash in a PCI or hard drive form factor, for a solid-state BSD or Linux webserver.
I don't think I'd pay $100 for a 0GB hard drive emulator that takes up both a PCI slot AND an SATA cable, and I still have to populate with RAM, and that will lose all its data if you leave it off too long.
Given that you can get a 2GB Compact Flash drive for $100 or 4GB for around $200 and you can hook those up to PATA with a $40 adapter, and populating this thing to 4GB will set me back more than that... I don't see the point.
It's not as cheap as $100. If the story submitter had RTFA, the card itself costs $150, and that doesn't include the cost of equipping it with 4GB RAM, which costs around $90X4=$360. The total cost comes out to be $510.
First off, this thing costs WAY too much in both terms of the card and terms of the memory to populate it. This board should cost about $50 not $150. I'm saying mainly $50 mostly for the fact that it comes with the lithium battery and charging feature.
Secondly, it is way too small. If it were 8GB I could use it for something like backing up dvds that play hell with hard drives and make you defrag them often. I could use this thing at that point, and so could you.
Third, for a memory based i/o board I can think of nothing more silly than to ladden it down with a disk i/o interface. It does make it more "compatible" or whatever, but it also makes this board antiquated in about two years. If they had just made the i/o controller talk directly to the cpu this board would be smoking, and probably twice the speed.
I was actually excited to read something about a product like this, but this one is not ready for prime time.
Anyone remember Boca boards? :)
- Mind
Yeah, I think I might have to snag a couple of these.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
What kind of quality are you recording at? At 10 MB per minute (Stereo 44.1 16bit), assuming 8 mono tracks, that's 40 MB a minute, 4000 MB drive (in reality it would probably be less, say 3800) that gives you 100 minutes of recording time. Just over an hour and a half. Now, recording music, it would be more likely, and a good idea, to record at 24 bits and dither later if going to CD, so your record time would be far far less. Just a guess, but probably under 50 minutes. So that gets you 10 5 minute songs. But if you do 2 takes of everything (which is plausible), now you have room for 5 songs. You'll probably do more than 2 takes of quite a few tracks, so...realistically, you'd be able to fit *maybe* two full songs on a 4 gig drive. It doesn't appear that a 4 gig drive would be enough really, unless you were prepared to dump your files quite a few times a day. Doesn't seem worth it. Not to mention that a plain old IDE drive can easily handle 8 tracks, even with a moderate CPU. SS storage isn't there yet for media work, at least not from a cost/performance point of view.
On a sidenote, is anyone going to buy this drive that is 4gb and costs 100 bucks? I don't think it's much use to anyone.
In the era of cheap, throwaway crap, I'm pretty much by myself when I say "I want QUALITY". So yes, I'm planning on buying several of these later today to put them in my main machines in my business. they'll be running our mission-critical cash registers.
Anyone that says this isn't worth it is not very technical in my book.
An affordable 4 GB is fantastic for this kind of thing. Use your imagination:
1. Imagine how fast your system would be installed on a battery-backed up RAM drive.
2. Imagine how fast your system would be with your memory swap file installed on this.
3. Imagine how fast your database server would be with its transaction log installed on this. Hey, throw the tempdb (for SQL Server) on there as well.
4. Many other things.
If you're thinking of this as a standard hard drive to store your DivX movies and MP3 files, you're not thinking right. Solid state drives are miracles that can speed up systems beyond anything you would expect.
I'm a big tall mofo.
I submitted this as a story back on June 4. Since it was rejected (too verbose?), I posted it to my /. journal. My main question to other folks relates to how this
would compare to using a regular ramdisk. The main deficiency with a
ramdisk is that you'd have to reload the contents every time you reboot.
Here's my article, with all its links:
Giga-byte Technology recently came out with a DRAM-based PC card that operates as a SATA hard drive. The product, iRAM, uses power from the motherboard to keep memory active when the system is shut down. During power outages, the product uses a on-board battery to retain memory for up to 90 minutes. The iRAM card is being talked about in the news (InfoWorld, itWorldCanada, engadget, PCWorld, multiplay forum) as a means of booting Windows faster. That is, you install Windows onto the iRAM drive to take advantage of the RAM's faster read-access time. Just hope that you don't lose power for more than 90 minutes.
Is boot time really that important, since many computers are on all the time? A ramdisk might have better uses, perhaps for caching frequently-accessed files such as databases and webservers. Or, if you insist on having faster bootup, instead of putting Windows on the iRAM disk, why not just store the hibernation file there?
I implemented a RAM-based database for an internet tool in 1998 to alleviate the read/write load on my local hard drive. It turned out to be a simple solution for the problem. At the time, it was just a matter of using a DOS-based ramdisk driver (ramdisk.sys). On application startup, it copied the database files to the ramdisk. During operation, everything was read/written to the ramdisk, and periodic backups were made to the physical disk. There are some inherent risks, such as loss of data during a crash since data isn't immediately written to a physical hard drive, so it may not be a great solution for a mission-critical production database. The iRAM product would make this type of database even more stable, in that the risk of loss of data is much less.
That was a while ago, so I thought I'd look into setting up a ramdisk in XP for some amusement. Follows are the results of that search. It seems that the options are relatively sparse beyond the DOS-based driver. A few freeware and commercial packages are available, though. One key factor beyond price is the size limit of ramdisk.
Microsoft's ramdisk offerings since Win2k are limited. Included with the XP OS is a ramdisk sample driver that "provides an example of a minimal driver. Neither the driver nor the sample programs are intended for use in a production environment. Rather, they are intended for educational purposes and as a skeletal version of a driver." Installation isn't simple enough for most users to benefit.
Alternatives include a shareware ramdisk, AR ramdisk (archive link: http://web.archive.org/web/20041011170408/http:/ww w.arsoft-online.de/products/product.php?id=1) (freeware, 2GB limit, discontinued, available for download here), a freeware (64MB limit) and shareware (2GB limit) version here,
On the contrary, I've always been amazed at the rate of price/performance evolution in HD technology.
Consider that in 1982 a 10 MB disk cost something on the order of $3500 while today you can reasonably expect to get an 80 GB disk for $50, that's a drive that has 8000x the storage for 1/70 the price or a price/MB improvement of roughly 420,000x. And, that doesn't take into account the dramatic improvement in reliability and speed (both access and interface) that the newer drives exhibit. Do you think CPUs have kept up with this?
I've heard people predict the end of moving-parts mass storage for years now, but it still seems pretty distant considering the great values we're getting with HD technology.
It all depends on the application. I remember 11+ years ago I was a developer on the NY state tax processing project. We were using Sun Sparc 20s connected to Kodak 923D scanners to scan tax returns at a very high rate (something like 72 pages per minute duplex), the barcode information obtained from the tax returns was used to move the returns into a workflow process and the images were copied from a local filesystem over to massive (at the time) fileservers. HD's at the time (even the fastest SCSI drives available) were not able to keep up with the scanner writing the barcode info and images, our custom app processing the information, and moving the images to the filesystem. Our only alternative was to use a "RAM" disk. We stuffed our Sparc 20s will all the memory they could hold (512MB) and created a 256MB filesystem in RAM. We used a thirdparty ramdisk software product for the first release which ran on SunOS 4, but Sun actually implemented a pretty slick ramdisk with Solaris 2 which we used the following year. Benchmarks at the time found that these ramdisks were some 20+x the speed of HDs of that era. I'm suprised that the Gigabyte card is only 6x faster than a HD. You'd figure it'd be more, but I guess they are using SATA as the means through which to get to the "drive", so it may be hitting some physical limitation based on the interface... I wonder if it'd be more cost effective and faster to stick an extra 4GB of memory onto the motherboard and setup a ramdisk device similar to what we had on the Sparcs... Sure it wouldn't survive reboot, but it should only be a hair slower than reading and writing from RAM itself!
Power consumption goes up when it is removed from the PCI slot, says the article. If that's so, there is a design fault somewhere - it suggests that there are floating inputs .
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
But wouldn't a hyperfast 4GB drive be perfect for virtual memory? But then again, the people who really need that much memory are the ones who need a lot of storage too...
Would you pay $100 for a 4GB Solid State Drive that is up to 6x faster than a WD Raptor?
Yeah, I would only have my OS and applications on there with everything else on a second hard drive.
FoundNews.com - get paid to blog.,
When you already have lots of RAM and your DB indexes and temp tables are constantly being swapped, this might make sense.
Information: "I want to be anthropomorphized"
SATA2 is not yet provided, and it's true I was wondering about getting 300MB/s from a ram module that is quite capable of that.
I thought that, maybe, the FPGA they use cannot reach such a performance yet, and it could come with next revision, when they produce their own package from end to end.
I was more wondering about some tests missing using databases.
What better test than a database, say for a small website, with few modifications to the base and the biggest problem being that hdds are a latency hell when the db is waiting for the data to be unstored....
Under linux, I know I can easily script the partioning at each reboot, and have another script syncing the db to a hdd say every 5 minutes (x% of a max 4 gigs db @10MB/s writing speed... , syncing only the last 5 minutes journal... largely possible if your are not running a Enterprise class website...)
What would be the results of this test, aka a db with almost no latency and 100MB/s bandwith ?
Wouldn't that have been more intersting than using it as a pagefile ?
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
4Gigs at 20MB/s will fill up in a little over 3min 20 seconds.
Now most HDD will do 20MB/s so either this is going to be to small or a normal HDD is going to work fine for you. Anyway look into getting a 4+ disk RAID 5 array. I got one for 800$ that can store 900Gigs and can do something like 50MB/s transfers.
PS: What this disk is going to be great for is non-sequential storage. If you work with 30+ tracks you either need to have a lot of buffer / ram space (So you can store up lots of info then put it to disk.) or a non-sequential storage system.
It may not fit everyone's needs.. but this is PERFECT for me.
/.ers haven't reacted well to this. I'd personally say 10GB would be the sweet spot, but 4GB is a very nice start - it's a shame it's not actually $100 for the whole unit - if it was I'd buy three and RAID0 them, then mirror the lot onto a 12GB partition on a standard SATA drive - fast, usable and redundant, all in one. Not entirely necessary for most, but we're geeks - this is the kind of stuff we do.
I agree - I'm suprised that more
Having said all that, I'd probably wait a year or two for a slightly cheaper, slightly larger version to be released when you look at what 4GB of DDR actually costs (especially since I don't really actually need one, I just think it would be cool, and more speed+less noise is always good).
Actually I don't know where they even got $100 from because the article says:
"Gigabyte has told us that the initial production run of the i-RAM will only be a quantity of 1000 cards, available in the month of August, at a street price of around $150. "
OH, and did anyone notice the price does not include RAM? So you're paying $150 for a card that can accept up to 4GB not "$100 for a 4GB Solid State Drive ".
That's got to be the most misleading quote ever on a /. article description since u'll spend closer to $500+ for the card and four 1GB DIMMS
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
OK WTF??
Again, from the freaking article:
"Armed with a 64-bit memory controller and DDR200 memory, the i-RAM should be capable of transferring data at up to 1.6GB/s to the Xilinx chip; however, the actual transfer rate to your system is bottlenecked by the SATA bus. The i-RAM currently implements the SATA150 spec, giving it a maximum transfer rate of 150MB/s."
Someone please explain what's going on here?? Did the person that wrote the description EVEN READ THE FRICKIN ARTICLE?? 150MB/s is no where near 6x faster! Modern SATA drives easily get 80MB/s, so how is 150MB/s "up to 6x faster"??
IMHO this seems to be the biggest waste of money ever. For much cheaper I could RAID 0 two SATA drives and get the same transfer rate and have 100x more storage.
Even the article proves it:
Game Level Load Time Comparison (Lower is Better)
_________________Splinter Cell: CT___Doom 3___Battlefield 2
Gigabyte i-RAM (4GB)_______8.0s__19.6s__20.83s
Western Digital Raptor (74GB) 10.59s__25.78s__25.67s
wow, so for $500+ I can load Battlefield 2 five seconds faster?!? Yeah, that's worth it :rollseyes:
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
[Modern SATA drives easily get 80MB/s, so how is 150MB/s "up to 6x faster"??]
Seek times and sustained transfer rates. The memory-based-disk has essentially 0ms seek times, wheras the Raptor averages 8.6ms. Also, the Raptor can only put out a sustained 63MBps reading start to finish from an contiguous, unfragmented file. If you are doing random seeks (database or file fragmentation) -- and most hard drive access is random -- the memory unit will kick the rotating hard drive in the teeth.
DRM 'manages access' in the same way that a prison 'manages freedom'