Seagate to Offer Solid State Drives in 2008

Lucas123 writes "Seagate will introduce drives based on flash memory in various storage capacities across its range of products including desktop and notebook PCs, according to Sumner Lemon at IDG News Service. The drives are expected to consume less power (longer battery life), offer faster data transfer rates and be more rugged than spinning disk, which has moving parts that can be damaged from an impact."

Comments

Warranty?

[excelblue]

How long of a warranty will these have? Doesn't flash memory break down after a good number of rewrites?

It sounds like a good idea, but I see a flawed product coming up here. Or, maybe it'll just fit in with the trend of degrading quality computer products.

Re:Warranty?

[imamac]

The rewrite issue has been rehashed a million times. It will be fine. I promise.

Re:Warranty?

[Adambomb]

Based on what precisely?

Not trolling, I just havent ever seen hard stats on current flash/solid state durability over time recently.

Re:Warranty?

[maxume]

Do the math. When rewrites were a problem, how big were the chips? How big are the chips now? How many more writes are possible now? The amount of data that becomes a problem is astronomical at this point...the 'rewrite problem' will kick in long after a spinning disk has found a reason to die.

Re:Warranty?

[MarsDefenseMinister]

Wear levelling. If you have a gigabyte drive, and you can write each byte a million times, then you would have to do 10^15 writes to the disk before you'd start seeing problems. And man, that's just a crazy way to use a hard disk.

Re:Warranty?

[PingPongBoy]

Flash memory can die?

THen Why not ordinary RAM on top of a normal drive?

When I first bought a hard drive it had less capacity than all the RAM on this computer, and it was a big drive. The salesperson laughed at me thinking there was no way to fill it. And I paid more for the drive than I paid for this RAM by a factor of 2 or 3.

UPS + RAM + disk drive - cache all the stuff you use a lot in RAM, and it's all good. I suppose even Flash can be used for the Program Files and Windows folders.

Re:Warranty?

[sufehmi]

Same here - yet to find an article addressing the lifespan of these solid state drives.

I've got LOADS of working hard drives which won't boot, because its boot sector has wore off.
They're fine when plugged into the computer as slave drives, but that still means that I gotta buy a new hard drive just to boot the ocmputer from.

It would be REALLY annoying to see that happens on these SSDs.

Re:Warranty?

[absoluteflatness]

It will be fine. I promise. Now there's the kind of warranty I want to include in my products.

Re:Warranty?

[Amiga Lover]

Not trolling, I just havent ever seen hard stats on current flash/solid state durability over time recently.

Take a 40GB hard drive, and pretend it's Flash memory. If you wrote 40GB worth of data to it every single day (with the circuitry inside a drive to spread writes out over cells evenly), then you would average 1 write per day across each cell. Flash memory can be written to a minimum of 10,000 times before dying, most is even more reliably by an order of magnitude (100,000 writes). Assuming we have crappy 10,000 write limits, we could write 40GB to the drive every day for 10,000 days, or 27 years, before failing is an issue.

Looking at the 40GB drive in one of my machines, the total writes in its uptime comes to about 800MB, which is a shade under 24 hours uptime. That's 800MB worth of writes in a day, 50 times *less* than writing 40GB to the drive every day, so a 40GB flash drive at my current usage rate could be expected to last 27 * 50, or 1350 years.

A lot longer than I have to worry about. The numbers are going to differ for some people, but the initial stats work out - few people would write to every cell every day, and even then that's decades worth of use.

Re:Warranty?

[SixDimensionalArray]

I have been researching some of the more current SSD drives lately, and I know that they greatly improved the technology/algorithms behind how they write data to the physical memory. Most companies use some kind of wear-leveling techniques that evenly distribute the writes over the entire surface of the disk, maximizing the disk's life span. I have also read that the different-sized memory modules have different physical characteristics such that smaller modules are actually outlived by larger ones.

I can't give exact figures, but I've seen comparisons showing a reasonable life span (>20 years @ 100GB of writes/day) - some of the numbers are even comparable to those of spinning/mechanical hard drives. Considering how often mechanical hard drives seem to fail, it doesn't seem that there will be any major roadblocks in terms of reliability.

I know what I've written is mostly qualitative (apologies on that), but I know the research into how to mitigate the problem of life span has truly advanced in the last few years as interest in SSD has increased. Jim Gray of Microsoft Research fame, predicted that SSD would replace mechanical drives not far off from now. Check out his paper "Flash Disk Opportunity for Server-Applications" for more on that.

SixD

Re:Warranty?

[Anonymous Coward]

That isn't the issue. The issue is the pathetic sizes of solid state drives. A measly 160GB? Hell, By that time a true TB HDD will be released for a whole lot less.

Re:Warranty?

[alphamugwump]

I think that may have been a problem on older flash drives, especially b/c fat32 keeps the fat all in the same place. But newer models have built-in wear leveling. The only thing you'd need to do would be to turn off seek-time optimization, as there's no rotating disk.

A more interesting question would be how these things hold up when used for swap.

Re:Warranty?

[spagetti_code]

Current flash technology has 1-5 million *write* cycles MTBF.
All modern flash drives use write levelling to ensure writes
are evenly spread across the device.

This article
takes those numbers and using a hypothetical "write logger" app that
continually writes, estimates an average life of 51 years.

MTron specs for their SSDs estimate:

Write endurance

In the case of 32GB capacity Mtron SSD: >85 years @ 100GByte / day erase/write cycles

So lets lay this one to rest. SSDs are worth it.

Re:Warranty?

[Adambomb]

If they're being used as system drives though, how many times will it have to rewrite the same bits over and over again versus being able to constantly apply your rewrites so you only stress each bit once before rewriting the first bit again?

you cant just say "its more bits, so it'll take longer".

Re:Warranty?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah but for someone like me who runs tons of VMware machines I write way more data than that. Way more.

I may write between 100 to 200 GB every few hours. The main cause is swap, each VM has a swap file plus the host computer often needs swap to handle all the VM's.

Say I write a paltry 400 GB per day, that means my hard drive has a lifespan of 2.7 years. Not so good, eh? Consider I write way more data than that so this flash drive would not be usable.

Re:Warranty?

[Adambomb]

Assuming it never rewrites the same bit twice before having applied a write/rewrite to every other bit.

are the controllers and file systems going to be able to do that?

I still cant find anything worthwhile concerning these types of drives in this respect.

Re:Warranty?

[Adambomb]

THANK you.

I was trying to find details between issues here at work, but was failing to do so. This actually answers a lot of my previous questions.

Re:Warranty?

[Adambomb]

Scratch that, Spaghetti Code pasted some articles that DO explain exactly how this works in another reply to my previous post. I didnt realize how solid the wear leveling deal is set up already, let alone for future production.

Re:Warranty?

[larry bagina]

ZFS will. Traditional RAID may suffer though: all the drives will have the same write pattern. Make sure your flash drives aren't all the same age!

Re:Warranty?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you are really interested in specific performance metrics, contact the companies that make SSD and ask them - there are a lot of metrics that people have which are under NDA and can't be disclosed, but you can probably obtain yourself for the purposes of your own research! BitMicro (http://www.bitmicro.com) is one company that has a very impressive lineup in 2008 - think huge capacity drives, and think > 100 years life span.

Re:Warranty?

[Datasage]

How do you know that the drive will evenly distribute writes per cell? Its more likely that some cells may remain untouched, which other cells may get written or changed much more frequently.

Re:Warranty?

[Cyberax]

You just need to have some spare space (say 20% of additional capacity) and dynamically remap areas from the 'working' part of the disk.

Re:Warranty?

[Anonymous Coward]

The drive controller will do wear leveling, so it will not rewrite the same bits over and over again, even if the OS thinks it does. This has also been rehashed a million times.

Re:Warranty?

[Clover_Kicker]

Relax, they still sell mechanical hard drives.

Re:Warranty?

[EagleEye101]

I believe there is a some load factoring going on also, to try to spread the wear across the whole disk also.

Re:Warranty?

[644bd346996]

...but without the wear leveling.

Re:Warranty?

[Bearhouse]

You SURE it's a million? Arf

Re:Warranty?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or maybe just a few years with Vista. Most flavors of Windows NT love to thrash the heck out of hard drives, regardless of whether the user is doing something or not. Plus, background virus scans and defragmenting are sure to take their toll.

However, I would love to put a solid state drive in my happy little Mac, something to think about when this puny 60 GB drive dies (my warranty and ProCare plan have long since expired anyway.)

Re:Warranty?

[delphi125]

Next thing you'll be saying they still sell RAM sufficient for your working set.

Re:Warranty?

[Bearhouse]

The integrated electronics do it for you, otherwise the flash drive would 'fail' sequentially, in order of cell use, and you'd steadily see your reported usable capacity dropping. Does not happen. In my experience, flash drives just keep on working - even in intensive use - but then just somtimes fail suddenly and totally, with no warning.

Re:Warranty?

[Anonymous Coward]

Current flash technology has 1-5 million *write* cycles MTBF.
All modern flash drives use write levelling to ensure writes
are evenly spread across the device.

This article
takes those numbers and using a hypothetical "write logger" app that
continually writes, estimates an average life of 51 years.
MTron specs for their SSDs estimate:
Write endurance
In the case of 32GB capacity Mtron SSD: >85 years @ 100GByte / day erase/write cycle

So lets lay this one to rest. SSDs are worth it.

yeah, kinda like the 1-5 million hours for the MTBF of current hard drives. With estimated life of 1000 years.

Re:Warranty?

[B4D BE4T]

If you wrote 40GB worth of data to it every single day (with the circuitry inside a drive to spread writes out over cells evenly), then you would average 1 write per day across each cell. Flash memory can be written to a minimum of 10,000 times before dying, most is even more reliably by an order of magnitude (100,000 writes). Assuming we have crappy 10,000 write limits, we could write 40GB to the drive every day for 10,000 days, or 27 years, before failing is an issue.

Will this circuitry be present in all flash drives? These calculations work if this circuitry exists, but actual results could be very different if it does not. Will it be possible to write to the same cell every time that the drive is written to? Say you store 1 byte on the drive and immediately delete it afterward. Then repeat it 10,000 times. That would happen pretty quickly and without the circuitry that you mentioned it could wear out a single cell.

Also, what kind of error checking will these drives have? If it writes to a bad cell, will it catch this and try to write to another cell?

Re:Warranty?

[coop247]

So can you swap out an old HD with a SSD drive nice and easy, or does this require special motherboads?

Re:Warranty?

[YrWrstNtmr]

Will this circuitry be present in all flash drives?

Yes. It already is. No reason not to include it on future flash drives.

Re:Warranty?

[Shrubbman]

A more interesting question would be how these things hold up when used for swap.

Vista has its "ReadyBoost" feature which AFAIK is pretty much like using a USB flash drive as a kind of specialized swap file. While I have no firsthand experience, but I imagine some googling could yield some info, Vista's been out long enough that if people's flash drives were gonna die from using it that way then someone's would have croaked by now and blogged about it.

Re:Warranty?

[r_jensen11]

Couldn't this be worked around by using RAM instead of the hard drive? I mean, if manufacturers are practically being required to have 2GB of memory installed, I don't see too much need for frequent re-writes....

Re:Warranty?

[Anonymous Coward]

Remap (or even swap places) cells with heavy usage to other cells.

Say you have the OS in one area that is very rarely written to. As other areas exceed the low end of your usage rate, you remap the low usage data to the high used areas, and vice versa, eventually averaging out their usage.

Basically if a cell is more than a certain threshhold of writes above the lowest (or avg lowest or some other clever metric), exchange them. Repeat as necessary as the different levels of wear move away from average.

Re:Warranty?

[Comatose51]

One of my former professors told me that's actually one usage of Log structured file systems. Changes are appended to fresh blocks and the pointer is updated.

Re:Warranty?

[Dan Ost]

Somewhere on the order of 1 million erase-write cycles per bit. That should be more than enough even for swapping purposes.

Re:Warranty?

[geobeck]

The chances are astronomical that this floating-point error will ever cause any problems.

Oops, wrong issue.

Re:Warranty?

[TimTucker]

CompactFlash to IDE adapters can be had for $5 or so and work fine with most motherboards.

Re:Warranty?

[WindBourne]

Other than the fact that a LARGE number of embedded systems use these? Personally, I have a IDE-CF converter on my home server. In it is a 4G CF that I use to store my root. All that goes on the disk is /home, /opt, and a few of the /vars/. Finally, I load squid on a tmpfs partition. The system now runs a LOT faster, quieter, and about 10 degrees cooler. In about a year or so, I will upgrade again. At that time, I will add a second CF (possibly a much faster 4G). But at this rate, I expect the 4GB CF to last at least 5 or more years.

Re:Warranty?

[Anonymous Coward]

This has also been rehashed a million times.

They're doing it with hash functions?

Re:Warranty?

[WindBourne]

JFFS2.

Re:Warranty?

[Afecks]

This has also been rehashed a million times. I know.. but my brain's wear-leveler keeps storing that knowledge in random places.

Re:Warranty?

[Punchinello]

4 Years ago we purchased and deployed 12 new workstations at one of my client sites. Over that 4 year period we have had 10 hard drive failures.

While this failure rate may seem exceptional, it's not too far from reality. Today's hard drives have extremely unpredictable lifespans. If you get a bad lot of drives like we did here you are in for a lot of headaches. Sure they were covered by warranty, but time is lost waiting for the overnight replacement part and then re-imaging the new drive.

Frankly, I'm hopeful that eliminating moving parts will remove a serious potential point of failure.

Re:Warranty?

[Short Circuit]

Make sure your flash drives aren't all the same age! You'd think proper integration with SMART data would make this almost a nonissue.

Re:Warranty?

[arashi no garou]

Apples and oranges. A floating-point bug or a long-division bug or any other processor bug affects any and all software run on that machine. It's not a loss of storage space over time but a random, "your computer just barfed at the worst possible time" error. As others have pointed out, it will be at least two or more years before your 300GB flash drive degrades to 280GB. By then you will have probably replaced it with a 500GB or larger flash drive.

Re:Warranty?

[Short Circuit]

You just need to have some spare space (say 20% of additional capacity) and dynamically remap areas from the 'working' part of the disk. It's worth pointing out that magnetic hard disk manufacturers already do this, because magnetic drives have limited surface lives as well.

Re:Warranty?

[Nikker]

Will partitioning the media be physical? For example if I have a 20Gb drive, unpartitioned it will last (2x10^6)(10^6) erase-writes balanced across the whole disk. By partitioning won't you physically circumvent the whole wear leveling idea? Maybe not completely circumvent but you would kill erase-write potiential by a factor of 20 in this case, and since a swap partition can get pretty intense you might run out faster then you think.

Re:Warranty?

[RMingin]

Plus the only parts of most OSes that gets written 'over and over' is the swap file. Put that on a different medium and you're golden for many many years. Heck, Vista's Readyboost is a step in that direction anyways. For those of us using good OSes, some 'Vista edition' motherboards are out with semi-integrated USB flash drives, connected to the mobo. Set that whole thing to swap, set the bigger SSD for your OS and programs.

JUST DON'T DEFRAGMENT!

Re:Warranty?

[musikit]

i know i come late in the game on this article. i just thought i'd like to point out

1 day = 86,400 secs.
40gb = 40,000,000,000

40gb / 1 day = 462,962 bytes per second.

now i understand that people will not have their computer on all day.
I am also not a memorizer of drive write statistics.
but approximate a current sata drive at 15mbps then a solid state drive would die out at approximately 1/30 the time you say it will last which is approximately 1 year.

people complain about replacing a iphone battery every year.

it certainly would force people to upgrade more often.

Re:Warranty?

[Xichekolas]

Every time a story comes up on /. about SSD, this is invariably the first question in the comments. Seriously, I've seen like seven of these now. Yes, the writes are limited... but with efficient algorithms to spread the writes correctly, and operating systems that are aware of the media, we are talking 10-20 years before it becomes an issue.

No company would want the nightmare of releasing a product that is going to fall apart in 2 years. It would tarnish their reputation forever. Think of the notorious IBM Deathstars (now Hitachi). Those were even on warranty and many will never buy them again because of the hassle of returning so many.

Re:Warranty?

[SpleenVenter]

Unfortunately, on the 1,000,001th rehash, we began to see read errors. Who knew?

Re:Warranty?

[The_Fire_Horse]

Yeh sure, and 640K ought to be enough for anybody.
Come on, in a perfect world where people backup once a day a million rewrites would be fine, however when people start running apps on these things there can easily be a million rewrites in a few minutes.
And what about the OS updating the time last accessed date for the file?

It would take one sneaky program (malicious or just bad design) to wipe out a flash drive in no time.

Re:Warranty?

[Drgnkght]

I don't remember who makes it, but there is a company that sells a PCI card which connects to a SATA controller as a ram disk. Card has places to put four memory sticks and supports up to 4GB of ram. Has battery backup so it could be used like a standard hard drive. Never used one myself so I don't know if they are any good, but I'd rather use something like that for swap than a flash drive.

Re:Warranty?

[supersat]

You can't really compare hard drive writes to flash writes. Even if you change one bit in flash, you have to erase the whole block and write it out again. Of course, as the size of the writes approaches the block size, this becomes less of an issue.

Re:Warranty?

[tknd]

How do you know that the drive will evenly distribute writes per cell?

You don't. But what we do know is that if you take a balanced 6-sided die and roll it a large number of times, the distribution of faces to come up will be uniform. That is, each face has an equal chance of being selected. So if we randomly choose a sector and write to it, the wear over large numbers of writes will be uniform over all sectors.

Its more likely that some cells may remain untouched, which other cells may get written or changed much more frequently.

That's why if you happen to hit a cell that already has data, you relocate the existing data and write to it anyway. Even though you are using more write cycles, as long as you don't max the capacity the disk will wear out evenly and you won't use up all of the write cycles anytime soon. Assuming a 40GB disk with a poor 10,000 write cycle limit, that would be 400,000GB of data to write before the disk completely fails. That means over one year (365 days) you'd have to write 1095GB of data a day to kill a disk that had the most optimal wear-leveling algorithm. If the algorithm required an average of 2 writes per every 1 write of actual data due to moving around data, then you'd still have to write more than 500GB to kill the disk in a year. The truth is most people don't immediately max the disk until a good year later if at all. Even then, they would only write in the 10s of GBs unless they totally stripped out their ram capacity.

So it's safe to say that the write cycles are nearly unlimited for useful purposes as long as we attempt to do some kind of uniform distribution across all the cells. Most tech only has a max life span of around 10 years so the write cycles for even poor flash cells is pretty much unlimited for it's useful lifespan. In a laptop or portable device, I'm willing to bet your battery will give you problems before any other hardware. Battery recharge cycles are usually around 500 cycles, yet nobody complains about batteries like they do about flash write cycles.

Re:Warranty?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hard disk manufacturers do this because disks are bound to have bad sectors as they come out of manufacturing, so the drive can remap these on the fly. It has little to do with disk sector longevity when the sectors are bad out of the box.

Re:Warranty?

[Anonymous Coward]

Virus scans read, they don't write.

Defragmenting would essentially be a thing of the past. You don't need to move the bits together to ensure that the drive head can read the file's parts sequentially, since there's no head, and data is accessed 'immediately'.

Re:Warranty?

[syousef]

The trouble is unless some kind of special technology is used to redistribute the writes across the entire disk, you'll get the same bytes being written to 1000 times a day in a cache situation. 1350/1000 = 1.35 years which is not so good.

Re:Warranty?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure the companies spending tens of millions of dollars on research, who stand to make hundreds of millions if the technology works, have thought about this.

If a sector does happen to reach a remaining lifetime significantly lower than other sectors, a way would exist to find a file or three elsewhere on the drive that have been updated once or twice in the drive lifetime, and move them into the depleted area. Voila. The area you were worried about (which had a measly 5,000 writes left) now holds explorer.exe, which has been updated 12 times in the past 2 years.

Re:Warranty?

[LS]

Come now, that's like asking whether the designers of an electric car will leave in the gas tank. Of course the controller would have the capability for distributing writes. Why wouldn't it?

Re:Warranty?

[Bobby Mahoney]

I know this music...

Re:Warranty?

[Anonymous Coward]

Lifetime of the drive is proportional to the ratio of storage capacity to write volume. Higher write volume? Get a bigger drive. Problem solved.

Re:Warranty?

[HardCase]

It's not special technology - it's existing technology. That's what happens in a USB thumb drive and it's what will happen in an SSD. We thought of the problem several years ago and made it go away. Distribution of data is not the problem in SSDs. Form factor and driver loading is the problem. But since those are proprietary issues, they're not going to be discussed here by anybody who knows anything.

Re:Warranty?

[MarsDefenseMinister]

logfs. It's a log structured filesystem. Perfect for flash.

Re:Warranty?

[Solra Bizna]

If you have enough RAM you never touch swap. Heck, on my Windtunnel G4 I once disabled it. (Things were awesome until the one day I actually needed more than 2GB of RAM. On that day, everything exploded...)

-:sigma.SB

Re:Warranty?

[seebs]

I'm not sure.

Some vendors apparently have a wear-leveling system that works by knowing enough about FAT32 to shuffle FAT32 files, but has no concept of how to do anything similar for ntfs, ext2fs, hfs...

Re:Warranty?

[Solra Bizna]

As late as six months ago, my main machine had 6GiB of storage.

160GiB is plenty for some of us.

-:sigma.SB

Re:Warranty?

[Calinous]

Gigabyte had them. They had support for 4GB of RAM I think, and were accessible thru a SATA 150 interface

Re:Warranty?

[Eskarel]

It's not about the issue of capacity to wear out a drive in a year, it's about the fact that no one actually writes that much data. 40GB of HD writes is a fairly big amount, particularly if you have atime disabled in your file system(and a flash system will inevitably have this as the case).

Re:Warranty?

[mok000]

Think of the notorious IBM Deathstars (now Hitachi). Those were even on warranty and many will never buy them again because of the hassle of returning so many.

... but the ones that did survive just keep going and going and going and ....

Re:Warranty?

[Chris_Jefferson]

Will partitioning the media be physical?

No, wear leveling is done at a low enough level that the whole disc is just a giant bag of bits.

Re:Warranty?

[spagetti_code]

yeah, kinda like the 1-5 million hours for the MTBF of current hard drives. With estimated life of 1000 years.

Well, latest Seagates have MTBF of 1.2 million, which I make to be "only" 136 years...

But I take your point - these numbers are probably unreliable.
Noone gets 136 years from an HDD.

However I suspect the SSD numbers may be less unreliable than the HDD ones,
simply because of a lack of moving parts, and that the degradaton
of flash write cycles is pretty well understood. I've actually
tested a set of flash drives to failure (for a work project - we wanted
to check the manufacturers numbers) and
what we got were certainly within - and often far exceeded - manufacturers
stated MTBF.

We also did some MTBF testing of our own equipment. Mostly it was
putting a large number in an oven and taking it through a series
of temperature cycles over a number of days - to simulate day/night/high load/low load
with the devices at full load. After cycles representing years, we counted the
number of failures (very very small) and got an MTBF figure
"in excess of 300,000 hours". Its an inexact science with solid state
electronics - probably more so with HDDs and moving parts.

Re:Warranty?

[drsmithy]

Vista has its "ReadyBoost" feature which AFAIK is pretty much like using a USB flash drive as a kind of specialized swap file.

Readyboost is more akin to another layer of disk/filesystem cache, rather than VM/swap.

Re:Warranty?

[drsmithy]

When I first bought a hard drive it had less capacity than all the RAM on this computer, and it was a big drive. The salesperson laughed at me thinking there was no way to fill it. And I paid more for the drive than I paid for this RAM by a factor of 2 or 3.

I find that difficult to believe. When ?

Re:Warranty?

[petermgreen]

Form factor and driver loading is the problem.
You can easilly buy wiring/form factor adaptors that take a CF card and fit into a laptop drive bay (though admittedly laptops moving to sata will make this harder). You can then install any OS you like (space permitting but you can easilly buy 16 gigabyte CF cards which should be enough for XP and I suspect if you look arround you can buy ones big enough for vista) with no driver issues at all since as far as the motherboard is concerned it is a standard IDE drive.

Re:Warranty?

[nevvamind]

numbers aside, what's the warranty on the "drive" ? The warranty period is what companies think is the "least" performance duration. So no need to worry for a year or two ;)

Re:Warranty?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think you realize how big 1 million really is. It's big. And it's for a bit, that once it does die, gets marked and the data moved.

Re:Warranty?

[FatAlb3rt]

That's a fairly naive thing to say. First of all, the current drives are probably not on the order of 300GB - I believe the Toshiba notebooks are 60GB. So you've taken your "at least two or more years" and dropped it by a factor of 5. 2ndly, what's involved in upgrading a flash drive? The current hard drives in notebooks are easy enough to remove, but I've never replaced one because a) I haven't had one fail and b) reloading a new drive sucks. Lastly, when memory addresses fail, is it graceful or do you lose data silently? If it's the latter, it's every bit as bad as the floating-point bug. If I have to replace my hard drive every couple years, that just might be enough to call it a step backwards.

Re:Warranty?

[TheRaven64]

Let's throw some real numbers into this discussion. I am currently typing this on a MacBook Pro, with a 160GB mechanical hard disk drive and 2GB of RAM. My last reboot was 19 days, 21 hour and 40 minutes ago. Since then, I have written 69.55GB of data to the disk (and read 126.92GB, although that includes playing some DVDs). Let's break these numbers down:

Uptime in seconds: 1,719,600 seconds

Disk writes: 72,928,460.8 kilobytes.

Average write speed: 42KB/s

Time to write the entire disk at this speed: 3,955,945.37 seconds (45.7 days).

Time taken to get through 10,000 write cycles at this rate: 1250 years.

If my hard drive lasts 1250 years, then I will be very happy.

Re:Warranty?

[TheRaven64]

Hard disks are block devices too. If you change one bit on a hard disk, you have to write out the whole block again. In most current drives the block size is 512 bytes, in some newer ones it is 4096 bytes.

Re:Warranty?

[TheRaven64]

In another post, I worked out that my hard drive, over the last 20 days, has seen an average write speed of 42KB/s (a lot of the time it's writing nothing, of course). At this speed, with perfect wear levelling, a flash drive will last 1250 years if it has 10,000 rewrite cycles (for a 160GB disk; I was comparing it to my current hard disk). With one million rewrite cycles, this comes to 125,000 years. Even with highly sub-optimal wear levelling, the flash drive should last a lot longer than any hard disk I've owned.

Re:Warranty?

[TheRaven64]

My last laptop had an 80GB disk, and it was the first hard disk I have not felt was too small by the time I replaced it. My current one has 160GB. I have around 50GB free, and I keep copies of a few video editing projects on this disk that on my previous machine were consigned to an external drive. 160GB is probably going to be big enough for a portable for quite some time. As network bandwidth increases, I'd rather keep important data on a redundant NAS somewhere and only use the local disk as a cache.

Re:Warranty?

[Wiseazz]

I would be curious to see numbers on how many people actually use that feature. I have Vista on my machine at work and every time I pop in my usb drive ReadyBoost always pops up as an option and I ignore it.

Hell, if you have a system capable of running Vista at all, it's probably a decent box anyway.

Re:Warranty?

[ATMD]

Couldn't that problem be at least mitigated by OS-level write caching?

Re:Warranty?

[C_L_Lk]

Probably about the same time as I bought my first hard drive to build my first "home grown" PC - 1995 or thereabouts - before that I never purchased a hard drive as my PC's came "all put together" from other family memebers who had their geek credits long before I did. The system I built that fine spring weekend in 1995 had a 800MB hard drive that I paid the beautiful price of $389 for - the CPU was a 486 dx2 66Mhz that ran me somewhere around $179 including mobo, it had a 4x CD-ROM drive, and 8MB of glorious RAM.

My current desktop PC build (put together 18 mos ago) has 2GB of RAM that ran me somewhere around $130. So - roughly 3 times as much RAM as that first PC had in hard drive space - for roughly 1/3 the price.

As for the solid state hard drives for PC's - especially laptops - there's no reason the drive couldn't include a small NiMH battery, and somewhere around 1GB of standard RAM as part of its controller circuitry - along with its 60, 100, 120, 180, or however many GB of flash RAM storage. It might add $30 or $40 to the price - but it would make for an amazing drive with no worries about write cycles - that RAM could be used as an intelligent write cache for the drive - with the micro-capacity battery included just enough to keep the controller and RAM working for as long as it takes to write that 1GB of cache back to storage. If you figure those writes could be made in 10 seconds, a battery with 4 or 5 minutes of capacity would be plenty. The controller architecture could be smart enough to only write "aged data" from the on-board cache chip. If your drive is "thrashing" due to swap file or whatever - those writes would all be taking place in RAM and the read-backs would come out of there rather than from the flash - only once the blocks of RAM aged a certain amount would they then be written back to the flash RAM on the drive. It could be a "percent time" or a "fixed time" setup - say for example every 500ms the RAM is "aged" and a check is made to see which blocks are the oldest - at that point the oldest 5% of used cache RAM blocks get written back into storage and the cache is "free". If there's no writes at all to the disk, in 10 seconds everything is back on flash and the RAM cache is free. If you have a program swapping in and out constantly because you're too cheap to buy enough system RAM, it's actually swapping to RAM on the drive - slightly slower than memory on your FSB, so there's a small performance hit, but much faster than if it were writing back and forth to Flash, and little to no wear on your flash takes place. If the laptop goes to sleep/standby/hibernation/dead battery/power loss - the small battery in the controller maintains the drive long enough to finish all the writes back. There's other details to be worked out - how to handle writes bigger than the RAM chip on board the controller (pass-through to the drive flash, etc) - but that's for the hardware engineers to figure out - I can't do all their work for them. It's the idea of a large enough RAM cache on board a flash drive to eliminate writing "often written data" that is what should happen here.

And to think - there's almost as much L2 Cache on my CPU now as there was hard drive space my first "IBM PC" computer I ever used (not built) had (4MB of on die L2 cache now, VS a 5MB Corvus drive in my 8088 - circa 1983).

I have faith we will see storage drives with Petabyte capacities around 2020 - from 1983 to 1996 (13yrs) went from 5MB to 5GB - I'm pretty sure by 2009 we'll see 5TB drives as we are already seeing 1TB drives in 2007. 13 years should see us at 1000x today's capacity - 1 petabyte - and we'll be talking about using terabyte flash and having 2 terabytes of RAM in our PC. Hmmm... Microsoft better really add some bloat to the next version of its OS to drive that demand!!!!!!!!!! That's even more than Vista with a service pack will use!

Ok enough going on topic and off topic. I'm all for solid state drives. Less power consumption. Faster access. Quiet. Cool. Extremely impact sho

Re:Warranty?

[ACMENEWSLLC]

>>How long of a warranty will these have? Doesn't flash memory break down after a good number of rewrites?

But it's better than having to park my hard drive heads every time before I shut down. Sometimes I forget, and then that data is corrupt. Maybe one day Hard Drives will park themselves at shutdown.

Reference;
http://groups.google.com/group/net.micro.pc/browse _frm/thread/136aad9133d01bb7/9c5bce4697be4e1f?lnk= st&q=&rnum=8#9c5bce4697be4e1f

(Tone:Sarcastic/Funny)

Re:Warranty?

[musikit]

you are correct. under your disk writing pattern you will not need to worry about this issue. And you maybe in the 80% normal usage pattern. however i feel that both arguments are valid.

under normal usage you will not have a problem.
under high usage you will have to replace a drive once a year.

Re:Warranty?

[troylanes]

#!/usr/bin/perl my $is_fine; my $i = 0; while ($i++ 1000000){ $is_fine = hash($is_fine); } print (($is_fine) ? "Wow! Everything _is_ fine" : "LIAR!!!!!!");

Re:Warranty?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've wanted an SSD for a long time, but flash is still way too expensive. (40GB would cost $320 at $8 per GB)
I hope this development will help lower the price some more.

Assuming we have crappy 10,000 write limits, we could write 40GB to the drive every day for 10,000 days, or 27 years, before failing is an issue. I agree it'd take a long time, but there's a significant chance it'd last more or less than 10K days. *Murphy's law says less.

As the flash begins to fail - your total SSD capacity decreases; you'd be writing multiple times to some parts, per day. (writing 40GB to the remaining 20GB would be two writes) Which would make the remainder fail that much faster.

A bit wouldn't be the smallest unit internally - it'd be some chunk of bits that would have a part of itself dedicated to an error correcting code - when that failed the whole chunk would be marked bad. ...16/32/64 bits failing at a time is a little more noticable.
If we call that internal unit a block of 32 bits (4 bytes) - then 40GB/4=10G blocks or 10 billion total flash failures possible for 40 billion bytes.
That's where the math starts to get painful, but I think it's like calculating interest over time. Just estimating I'd say 25% more or less than 27 years +/- 6.75 years. (but I'm probably FoC here)

Anyway, so long as it had great performance and I didn't have to pay more than $200 for the drive I'd be happy even if it only lasted a decade.

If I ever have the time and money, I think it'd be fun to build my own SSD. (or an external ram cache for a HDD)
With 10% or more of a 10GB SSD cached with RAM, it'd be blazing fast and that small drive's useful life might meet or exceed it's MTBF.

My ideal 10GB SSD would be about $80 for flash (5 - 2GB SD cards @ $16), 1GB of old ram $40, and the additional parts (CPLD, SD slots, pcb, etc) would be roughly $60... $180 total and capable of 100MB/s (burst read & cached).

Re:Warranty?

[fifedrum]

Gigabyte makes a neat device using battery backed up RAM plugged into PCI slot that has a SATA hard drive interface wire hanging out of it. Since the whole thing is plugged into your SATA interface and presented to the OS as a hard drive, it performs like a SATA drive that always has the next bits in cache. i.e. fast and with no fragmentation or write limits.

Very popular to serve mailq queue directories. i.e. tons of reads/writes and ludicrously small seek times, and static so a reboot or a hard-crash doesn't wipe it out. 4 GB is plenty big enough for a mailq or even a whole OS image. And this device with 2 GB chips (8 GB capacity) makes a really good LDAP or other small database drive, or a storage area for larger database indexes... where the real data is stored on slower traditional arrays, and this device merely stores the indexes. Works great if your indexes are easy to rebuild.

Re:Warranty?

[NinjaMidget]

It sounds like you're hardware problems are a result of an ID10T error. Read a book or something.

Re:Warranty?

[operagost]

Sounds similar to to the life span of a hard disk. Do you think you could take a consumer hard disk, max it out every day, and get it to last more than one year?

Re:Warranty?

[Wolfrider]

See:
http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2005/05/31/gigabyte_r amdisk/

Re:Warranty?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah fucktard, and 640K should be enough for anybody.

BTW Fucktard, it is GB, not GiB. GiB is a term created by fucktards for fucktards, so why don't you do us a fucking favour and end it all by earning yourself a darwin award or slitting your fucking wrists fucktard.

Re:Warranty?

[Wolfrider]

--Defragging could still be useful, even on flash drives. If all your files are kept sequential, there's no need to skip around looking for the next filepart.

--Won't save HUGE amounts of time, or may not even be very noticeable - but every little bit (pun intended) helps...

Re:Warranty?

[SixDimensionalArray]

Using compactflash to IDE adapters is inexpensive and readily available, but the real solid state drives perform much better, last much longer, and are directly comparable to their mechanical counterparts.

Actually, solid-state hard drives with SCSI and IDE interfaces already exist (BitMicro and Sandisk both have them, Sandisk having bought one of the original SSD vendors M-Systems). There are also some drives with SATA 1.5 GB/s interfaces, but I'm personally waiting for the next generation of drives (which is currently being developed) that has SATA 3.0Gb/s interfaces, and are standard sizes (3.5"). Those are going to be expensive at first, but they'll be amazing!

You can already swap out a 2.5" SATA laptop mechanical drive with a 2.5" SATA solid-state one, for example. They just cost too much (small drives cost a few thousand!).

SixD

Re:Warranty?

[JrOldPhart]

My first hard drive was a Micropolis 1300 20Mb $1200 Employee discount.

I put it on my S-100 system for which I had to write the BIOS in assembler.

That was about 1985

Re:Warranty?

[HardCase]

That's not what I meant. The form factor problem is the one of being able to fit enough chips, passives and PCB into a 1.8" or 2.5" enclosure and still be able to have a decent amount of storage (and not burn up).

In your example, yes, CF will get the job done for now, but flash transfer rates are increasing rapidly, latencies are decreasing rapidly and we should be seeing SSDs by the end of next year that contain purpose-built components designed for high speed, low parasitic loading and low latencies. Even now a 32GB or 64GB SATA SSD is a much more elegant solution than a bunch of CF cards plugged into adapters. And in the case of a notebook, a 64GB drive can easily be the only mass storage device you need.

Re:Warranty?

[Anonymous Coward]

So if we randomly choose a sector and write to it, the wear over large numbers of writes will be uniform over all sectors.

Ahem.

FILE SYSTEMS DO NOT CHOOSE FREAKING RANDOM SECTORS TO WRITE TO.

If you examine the real distribution of writes to a disk with a real filesystem under real usage scenarios, you will find that some sectors are overwritten many orders of magnitude than others. Filesystems have metadata structures. These structures MUST be updated every time files change. Ergo, they get overwritten. A lot.

For example, many filesystems use some form of a bitmap to track which sectors are in use. Every time a sector is allocated or deallocated, the bitmap must be changed. This means the sectors storing the bitmap are overwritten at least once every time any file is created, deleted, or changes length.

So please. Stop with the ignorant analysis which assumes a perfectly random distribution of writes over the disk's sector address range. It's dumb. No real world FS behaves like that.

(There are some filesystems designed to work better with flash. But none of them are likely to be well suited to what you want to do with a personal computer, as the existing flash filesystems are designed for embedded systems.)

Re:Warranty?

[Anonymous Coward]

Time taken to get through 10,000 write cycles at this rate: 1250 years.

WRONG.

You see, the important metric isn't the amount of data you write. It's the number of times any one sector is written to.

For example: UNIX-like operating systems such as MacOS X record the last time a file was accessed. The particular sector storing the access time for a specific file must be written every time that file is accessed. Betcha there's at least one file the OS has accessed 10k times during 1,719,600 seconds of uptime... that's only 1 access per ~172 seconds.

Re:Warranty?

[Anonymous Coward]

Your argument is flawed. Sure, if you have a 50GB disk and you can rewrite it a million times, you have a total write capacity of 50 petabyte, which indeed is a lot longer than a moving parts driven hard-disk's could do in its lifespan. But this is taken into account the distribution of your writes is 100% perfect and in normal usage patterns some bits will be "hit harder" than others (ie. some data *has* to be rewritten by a filesystem). Also, you seem to assume that bits can just be moved around everywhere at the hardware level, so your data ends up in random order on the disk. Think about it, no filesystem nor the hardware could handle putting all those pieces back again (not without a lot of meta-data, which would have to be stored somewhere else).

Granted, I'm not saying that solid state disks are crap, probably with reasonable usage you will get a decent life out of them. And I'm sure eventually that's what we will all be using.

Re:Warranty?

[Anonymous Coward]

Your post raises a good issue, but misses part of the point. Yes the drives are capable of much faster writing than the GP considered, but no one actually comes close to maxing out their hard drive bandwidth on a continuous basis. Even relying heavily on swap files, (and any high use computer should have adequate RAM not too, while computers than don't have plenty of RAM seldom seldom see demanding use), there should be a lot less data than that being written.

However, the concern that a person should draw from this is how does swap file usage affect this. Sectors assigned to virtual memory could get written to far more often than other sectors. What rate? I don't know, but if memory life is a problem, this is where it would show up.

Fortunately, the swap file is just temporary data. If it goes caput, the original data is theoretically still safe and retrievable in other sectors.

Re:Warranty?

[LuSiDe]

True, its too expensive to replace SATA. Nevermind performance compares. Just run your OS on SSD and keep your data seperate. It'll make your computer much faster, won't cost much, yet makes your setup also more flexible. I wanted to run an OS on an USB stick, but alas it was bad supported by my OS so I ended up with a SSD/PATA. Ironically, those have to reside inside the case whereas a USB stick is plugged on the outside. The latter is in some setups more flexible: have a backup copy or 1:1 copy of USB easily available for the server. If one needs replacement its sticking out and in a key (and pressing a button). Even the secretary can do such simple tasks.

Re:Warranty?

[drsmithy]

My current desktop PC build (put together 18 mos ago) has 2GB of RAM that ran me somewhere around $130. So - roughly 3 times as much RAM as that first PC had in hard drive space - for roughly 1/3 the price.

Misinterpretation on my part, I though the OP was saying when he got his first hard disk, his machine's RAM size was larger than it.

Re:Warranty?

[Calinous]

The PCI slot is just for power, there is no communication over the PCI slot. And the battery backup is good for some hours without power. But overall, neat device.

Lifespan?

[ushering05401]

I've been busy lately, so maybe I missed it. Was there some breakthrough that drastically increased the number of read/writes flash drives are rated for? TFA makes no mention of flash lifespans, which were relatively short in high usage environments last time I checked.

Re:Lifespan?

[Mr. Mikey]

I was wondering the same. The last time I checked, a Flash memory cell was good for about 10^6 read/write cycles. I've heard of schemes that distribute the memory load (so that no one cell gets continually re-written), but I would like to see this issue explicitly addressed when it comes to a flash drive substitute for a hard drive.

Re:Lifespan?

[smallfries]

There are different grades of flash chip, with varying amounts of write cycles. The problem with the kind of flash that you get in a usb keyring is not that flash is limited in the number of writes, but that cheap low-end flash is. The kind of solid state storage in a drive can take millions of write cycles, which combined with a file-system that spreads the writes evenly across he chip will give a decent lifespan.

Cost is still a major issue though. The article only has one number in it, that densities will go up to 160Gb. Do you think they'll take a cheque for that, or you do you have to spread and touch your toes in person?

Re:Lifespan?

[Anonymous Coward]

Anandtech recently reviewed a 32GB SSD drive from Mtron, and compared it with a Raptor HDD.
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=30 64&p=6

TLDR: *big* improvement in game loading times, merely ok performance in file copying, encoding, compression. It's also silent, and saves a lot of power. $1500 though. . . should get much cheaper in the next few years.

Re:Lifespan?

[ArchieBunker]

The same statement can be made for todays mechanical storage devices. Everything mechanical has a finite number of operations until it fails. In theory that number should last longer than the time it takes to make the capacity obsolete.

Re:Lifespan?

[sayfawa]

Cost is still a major issue though. The article only has one number in it, that densities will go up to 160Gb. Do you think they'll take a cheque for that, or you do you have to spread and touch your toes in person?

Considering the level of technophilia around here I bet that second proposition sounds reasonable to some in exchange for a 160GB flash drive. I myself would maybe even engage in a little 2nd base action for that kind of payoff.

Re:Lifespan?

[Lindsay Lohan]

Was there some breakthrough that drastically increased the number of read/writes flash drives are rated for

About four years ago I found a PCI card that had 256megs of memory on it, and a battery that let it last 48 hours with no power to the computer.

Innodb log files! Yes, put the log files on it and watch the performance go up. It was a neat hack but for $800 a card it wasn't all that practical. The performance was nice, but it wasn't worth the additional investment per machine for the card.

A number of months ago someone blogged about some solid state cards he was looking at. At around the same time I noticed and commented on "IDE" solid state drives coming to market.

Dinner on Tuesday night with Kevin Burton pushed this into my mind again. What was he looking at going with for his data center?

Solid state drives.

This is smart thinking, it makes a lot of sense.

The performance gain for using solid state hard drives for any database, not only MySQL, is a "no argument". Buying performance like this does require some cost analysis. You balance performance with cost. Not everyone buys fiber channel even if it buys performance.

The performance gain does not outweigh the cost.

Capacity though is a requirement. By capacity I mean the ability to put X amount of CPU in a given space.

Data center capacity is not a growing concern, it is an active concern.

Data centers need power, a lot of power. Their capacity is constrained by available power.

Green technology is common sense. Hard drives have moving parts that generate heat, eat electric, and have high failure rates.

Green technology means capacity because data centers can pack in more hardware.

Tom's Hardware gave a price of $25 per gig almost a year ago. Tom was reviewing a 32 gig drive at the time (which... at 64 I don't need a hard drive in my laptop... I keep my mp3 on my iPod not my laptop).

Today we are looking at about $19 a gig, with 128gig drives coming to market.

This is a premium, when you consider SATA half terabyte disks are at $100 (which works out to 19 cents a gig!).

How much of a price tag do you put on capacity?

Re:Lifespan?

[MushMouth]

If you know Japanese or Korean you can get the 32G mtron drives for less than $1000

Re:Lifespan?

[MushMouth]

They aren't very good for log files, the write throughput is very slow compared to even a single spindle, and terrible when compared to any sort of striping.

Re:Lifespan?

[depierce]

How about backing the non-volatile w/ volatile? Not 1:1 necessarily, but 1:2 or 1:3, plus a capacitor and electronics to get the cache onto the non-vol when the power drops. This would effectively negate the max writes problem...and they've probably already implemented like that. Or just shoving data forward in a loop per cell to ensure cells share writes equally, which is probably closer to what they are doing. Great, now I'll have to go read up on them.

Re:Lifespan?

[Anonymous Coward]

"The performance gain for using solid state hard drives for any database, not only MySQL, is a "no argument". Buying performance like this does require some cost analysis. You balance performance with cost. Not everyone buys fiber channel even if it buys performance." - by Lindsay Lohan (847467) on Thursday August 23, @08:28PM (#20338141)

That's true - I wrote the article for that who's ideas & principals were featured alongside one from Mr. John Enck of "Windows IT Pro Magazine" (where he is a technical editor) for EEC Systems (now SuperSpeed.com) when I was improving another of their products, SuperCache, by up to 40% redesigning its parameterization algorithms & configuration via an add on program (whose code was in Delphi, but later ported to C++ & is today integrated into the product itself, not an addon any longer)...

The article I wrote dealt with using a software RAMDISK of theirs called "SuperDisk", which mirrors data back to a backing HDD @ periodic intervals via its driver, & the article I wrote's ideas took them to a finalist position @ Microsoft Tech Ed 2000/2001 iirc, as a finalist in the HARDEST category there was there:

BOOSTING SQLSERVER PERFORMANCE (used on, iirc, SQLServer 6.5 & below, @ that time in those days) & dealt in placing its logging &/or tables devices onto a RAMDRIVE (which nowadays is basically done in SQLServer itself using its OWN "memory mgt." & running its device in RAM afaik)...

The technique, works.

APK

P.S.=> I own a SOLID-STATE RamDisk by CENATEK, called the "rocketdrive", & I use it this way for 'home use':

CENATEK ROCKET DRIVE SSD I have is 4gb max size, BUT, can be striped with 4 others like it into 1 huge 16gb one!

It's PCI 2.2 (132mb/sec) + PC133 SDRAM & has a backing powersupply (which I run thru an APC UPS for stability/uptime/security, though I don't place any critical data on it)...

I am STILL using it to this day, almost 5 years later! No moving parts to wear out...

HOWEVER? Let's see a Flash RAM last that long, lol...

E.G./I.E.->

Mine's running strong & doing TONS of repeating writes in a constant stream, by housing my:

----

1.) The first 1gb partition, NON NTFS COMPRESSED, has Pagefile.sys on it on an NTFS 4096k sector formatted (to match memory transfer sizes used on disk cache, reads, & read ahead for maxing speed).

2.) The second 1gb partition, NOW NTFS COMPRESSED & using 4096kb sector formatting to match memory read + read ahead mechanisms @ the filesystem driver level (& EVEN BLOCK DEVICE DISK DRIVER LEVEL if I wanted by using SuperCache on it as well)

The 2nd partition, & what I use it for, is for webpage caching, temp ops, logging, & housing my %comspec% cmd.exe... & it works in that setup, for better performance.

----

(Many bennies to this 2 part approach above alone, read on)

HOW? Well, look @ the datatypes I have on it largely:

MOSTLY TEXT BASED DATA, & on a COMPRESSED DISK!

THUS, it gets WAY over 2:1 compression even & by FAR with that kind of data!

Oh, not done, yet... Also, I gain in speed, YET AGAIN, also because smaller files on disk exist this way as well!

(Due to compression via NTFS filesystem drivers is why (& today's speed of RAM & CPU's way, WAY even offsets the decompression in memory speed, & on disk writes too, only complimenting its read speeds & access speeds more))...

By the gain here, it's NOT only doubling in storage on the Ramdrive/SSD, but because the files are tinier in NTFS compressed form, they READ UP FASTER because they are smaller first of all!

(Also again complimenting the 4096k sector formatted gain you get on READS, because they read up like that into RAM, & I also use that on pagefile.sys, it is read in those increments & speed of access/seek that is 0ms & into the nano-second spee

Re:Lifespan?

[Anonymous Coward]

"They aren't very good for log files, the write throughput is very slow compared to even a single spindle, and terrible when compared to any sort of striping." - by MushMouth (5650) on Thursday August 23, @09:02PM (#20338443) Well, with the one I use which is PCI 2.2 bus based & uses PC-133 SDRAM?

(& yes, faster ones like the Gigabyte IRAM (SATA 150 bus & DDR2 RAM), & the upcoming DDRDrive X1 (PCI-x based bus & DDR RAM exist in these 2 units vs. mine, since mine is older)??

You can stripe/span them into 1 huge 16gb unit, since each board on the CENATEK "RocketDrive" I use max out @ 4gb RAM per board...

Writes aren't any slower than on a std. HDD with the type I use!

AND, in fact, I would say that, overall, they are faster since the files are found many orders of magnitude faster than they will be on std. mechanical HDD's...

Moving logs (as I do onto a partition on my SSD, 2nd one, NTFS compressed making the files smaller & faster to readup from it no less) onto it with other things (temp ops, logging, webpage caching) helps speed in ANOTHER way:

It removes the burden on my MAIN C:\ drive, by removing paging operations from it (1st partition on my SSD is for pagefile.sys @ 1gb uncompressed NTFS, & using 4096kb formatted sectors, since this matches the read + read ahead mechanisms of the filesystem driver & in the size of chunks it reads them in with paging too) AND, as you mentioned?

Moving logging, webpage caching, & resetting my systemwide + user level %Temp% & %Tmp% environment variables to it for temp ops??

My main program & OS bearing disk no longer deals with contentions from paging, temp ops, logging, or webpage caches interfering with program & data loadspeeds... making them, faster!

Using NTFS compression on the 1gb partition for temp ops, logging, & webpage caches also literally more than DOUBLES its capacity as well because much of this data is TEXT BASED, & compresses far better than 2:1 ratios even, & the files are tinier to read up from disk, getting into memory faster too!

Also, by moving temp ops, & webpage caching ESPECIALLY to another drive, I avoid fragmentation & clutter they might cause on my main disk as well... increasing speed all the more.

APK

P.S.=> You MIGHT be tempted to say, "NTFS COMPRESSION SLOWS IT DOWN ON WRITES" & it does, this is true... especially for logging! However, today's CPU's & RAM are SO FAST? This is offset imo @ least, by the gains I make using it, noted above (for logging? I can MORE THAN DOUBLE what I can store there, AND access it 1000's of times faster than on std. mechanical disks too)... apk

Not a moment too soon.

[Bombula]

I've been looking forward to mainstream solid state drives for a long time. Especially in laptops, since the lack of moving parts presumably means no moving parts and therefore lower power consumption, longer battery life, better durability, and so on. It seems surprising that it's taken this long.

Re:Not a moment too soon.

[drfreak]

SSDs have been available for a while, but not for the typical consumer. They are available more for enterprise tasks such as decreasing the delay for a SQL server to hit it's disks for data.

This excites me, because this technology will be more affordable for the small-medium business file/database/web servers.

Re:Not a moment too soon.

[bcmm]

I've been looking forward to mainstream solid state drives for a long time. Especially in laptops, since the lack of moving parts presumably means no moving parts and therefore lower power consumption, longer battery life, better durability, and so on. It seems surprising that it's taken this long.

This is probably the most worthless non-Goatse-related post I have ever read on Slashdot.

Re:Not a moment too soon.

[Anonymous Coward]

the lack of moving parts presumably means no moving parts

Unless you ask George Bush...

Re:Not a moment too soon.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, no. The fans are moving parts, unfortunately; they still can get clogged up with dust. The dvd drive is also moving, and thus it would probably be the first to break (besides the LCD) if you were to drop it.

why wait for 2008

[Anonymous Coward]

I prefer my news in the here and now. Like, here and now, I just let a voluminous, airy, nose hair curling ass bomb fly. It is virtually driving me out of my office at this point. A smattering of sulfur combined with an exquisite fecal odor, oh my.

Wearing out with writes?

[Safiire Arrowny]

I was under the impression that writing to a flash drive will eventually wear out the chip.

They have special file systems drivers like squashfs etc that try to spread writes out evenly so as not to write to the same areas too often on embedded devices. Or in the case of embedded devices like the Linksys WRT54G they go out of their way to limit writing to the flash by mirroring the filesystem into a ramdrive with symlinks.

This must be a different technology that can deal with a lot of writing I'm guessing?

Re:Wearing out with writes?

[Safiire Arrowny]

It's a little hard to avoid being redundant when there's no posts yet while I'm typing mine out.

Re:Wearing out with writes?

[ushering05401]

I'll join you in being O.T. The FP and my post both went up at 8:06 on exactly the same subject.

Kinda annoying, but the mods are actually helping the conversation along by lowering our scores. I hate rereading the same thing over and over throughout a thread.

Re:Wearing out with writes?

[Anonymous Coward]

A variant of your post has cropped up, *multiple times*, in every single story on every site ever that deals with solid state drives. Hence, redundant.

I wonder what Flash capacity growth

[rolfwind]

is projected out in the future? Normal hard drive capacity growth has certainly seemed to level off lately and perhaps is stagnating (so it seems to me). Yes, flash has grown astronomically the past few years, but is it sustainable to the point of meeting and exceeding conventional drives?

If we had the rate of growth in conventional drives that we had a few years back, we would almost certainly be looking at multi-TB drives right now.

Re:I wonder what Flash capacity growth

[sayfawa]

I suspect that the levelling off of consumer drives is due to there being not enough demand by average consumers. I myself am a bit of a file hog, but a 500GB drive would still hold all my dvd rips and music. Now I'm sure that's average or less for folks around here, but I bet most people are satisfied with the wimpy 80-160GB drives that come with their computer.

On the other hand, flash storage is at that point where it's almost enough for a lot of people but not quite, so the companies are probably working even harder now to get it past the tipping point. I read somewhere that Samsung has stated they will double flash sizes every year for the foreseeable future.

Re:I wonder what Flash capacity growth

[timeOday]

I'm not sure flash drives need to meet and exceed conventional drives in capacity (maybe that's why conventional drives have slowed in growth)? I like to use virtual machines for development, but never had the right medium to work on them, exchange them between developers, etc. They're just to big to swap easily by network, external hard drives are too big and fragile, etc. But now I see 16 GB usb flash drives are available, and only $130 to boot! I'm going to try installing a VM on one and buy a few more if it works well. 16 GB is PLENTY for installing a linux development environment, and I think for XP, too. Vista, I don't know.

Re:I wonder what Flash capacity growth

[EagleEye101]

At least right now, for desktop use at least, I would try to put all my apps on one of these things and still try to store most of my data on one of those big mechanical drives. Besides, unless im storing movies or uncompressed music I don't really need anything bigger than 40-80 gigs.

Re:I wonder what Flash capacity growth

[rolfwind]

Indeed, you are correct there.

I would be happy with a "mere" 60-100GB flash drive for my notebook and have a Firewire Conventional drive to back things on.

But still, more space is more space. I'm sure in the future it could be used - 3d movies perhaps? Who knows.

In terms of conventional files, drives are big enough for almost any conventional file type - pictures, music, movies even (almost - I'd say 10TB on that). But the hunger will always be there.

Re:I wonder what Flash capacity growth

[Anonymous Coward]

I am still getting by on a crappy old Verbatim 128MB USB key ... it works for 99.9% of the quick file swapping I need to do, etc.

I've been thinking of replacing it with a 2GB or 4GB drive, but in the back of my mind I keeping thinking "just wait a little longer ... soon you'll be able to buy a 16GB or 32GB USB key that holds a whole freaking VMware image"

Re:I wonder what Flash capacity growth

[Anonymous Coward]

Flash storage grows roughly according to Moore's law, and is expected to grow for another 8-10 doublings (64-256TB laptop drives) before it gets really hard to go any further. After that expansion in 3 dimensions via stacked chip (already offers 160G SD card capability), Holographic crystal (256EB in a 1cm cube), or other new techniques is likely to become the preferred path to continue expanding available capacity.

Re:I wonder what Flash capacity growth

[Urza9814]

I dunno about drive growth stagnation. First of all, I seem to recall seeing several stories over the past few weeks/months about new records being set for drive size. And have you been looking at drive prices lately? You can get a 500GB drive today for what a 200GB would have cost only a year or two ago.

Re:I wonder what Flash capacity growth

[Emetophobe]

You are correct, flash memory capacity is growing faster than hard drive capacity. My guess is that this is due to the fact that flash technology is still relatively new where as hard drives have been around since the 50s. Hard drive technology is "old tech" where as flash memory (specifically NAND flash) has just recently come into the spotlight.

I did some quick google searching and found articles dated 2005 announcing that flash storage had reached the 2GB mark and hard drives had reached the 500GB mark. Two years later, flash drives are now at the 64GB mark (32x increase from 2005) and hard drives are now at the 1TB mark (2x increase from 2005). I doubt flash drives will be able to stick to that large of a growth in capacity for very long though, they will probably slow down to hard drive growth levels within a couple of years (unless some ground breaking technology comes along).

I'm no where near an expert on the subject though, so I could be wrong.

Re:I wonder what Flash capacity growth

[gl4ss]

you can get 1 tb drives now. but it's cheaper to buy couple of smaller drives.. thats how it's been always with the highest capacity drives.

but... as others said, you don't need that much for an usable system, for the program files. faster access time might well be worth it, and then a regular drive for storing all the videos, images and such.

laptop drives are at 300gb too. i view that as a quite nice improvement over couple of years backs 30giggers.

so no.. they won't replace them, but there is a market for them(already some laptops have ssd's, so, why wouldn't seagate want a part of that pie?).

32gb ssd over here is ~420euros. for that price you could buy two normal 750 gigabyte seagates.

Re:I wonder what Flash capacity growth

[LordSnooty]

Two years later, flash drives are now at the 64GB mark 32x increase from 2005 and hard drives are now at the 1TB mark 2x increase from 2005 .

But, as a poster above pointed out, how much of that is due to physical limits being reached on HD technology, and how much is down to not enough consumers having a need for 0.5 or 1TB devices. 1TB is a lot of information and is surely only appealing to serial p2pers or movie makers. If sales of the massive HDs are not impressive, I wouldn't expect them to continue to increase the capacity. 64GB on flash however is much more appealing to the 'average' consumer and so I would expect take-up to be stronger.

Re:I wonder what Flash capacity growth

[Gat0r30y]

But still, more space is more space. I'm sure in the future it could be used - 3d movies perhaps? Who knows.
3d pr0n?

Yes, But what is the best File system ?

[EEPROMS]

The headache now is that most file systems are optimised for mechanical based storage media so wont this also mean we will have to look at changing to new file systems ?

Re:Yes, But what is the best File system ?

[osu-neko]

No. Why would it? If you're using a RAM-based medium, any block is read with essentially identical speed. So if you're using a mechanism that's optimized for mechanical storage, or using one that just allocates blocks sequentially, or one that allocates them completely randomly, or one that tries as hard as possible to *slow down* reads from hard disks, it all makes no difference. From a RAM-based system, they'll all work equally well.

Re:Yes, But what is the best File system ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Current filesystems and (more importantly) IO-schedulers may be optimized for mechanical storage, but I don't think it will affect performance that bad on flash. In Soviet Russia it^W^W^W^W The other way around would be much more serious.

IO-schedulers (at least on Linux) can be swapped, so that won't be a problem.

Re:Yes, But what is the best File system ?

[CastrTroy]

or one that tries as hard as possible to *slow down* reads from hard disks

I wonder if anybody has written a filesystem like this before? Seems to me like it would be an interesting (yet useless) problem to solve. I guess it would just be the reverse of trying to make a fast file system.

Re:Yes, But what is the best File system ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Two adavantages that I can think of are:
  1) the order of OS io operations would be in the same order as they are issued by programs. There is no benefit to reordering io to minimize head movement since the seek time is 0.
  2) the io scheduler would be trivial reducing CPU overhead a little bit.

Both of which could help in some real-time applications.

Re:Yes, But what is the best File system ?

[the Plums in us]

Flash based memory is limited in the number of writes it has. It might very well be possible to develop a filesystem that takes this into account.

Re:Yes, But what is the best File system ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Filesystems created specifically for use on Flash storage already exist -- JFFS2 and come to mind. However, they were build for embedded devices and don't scale well.

Re:Yes, But what is the best File system ?

[sssssss27]

This is already handled by the drive itself.

Re:Yes, But what is the best File system ?

[Kjella]

Possibly, but I think the differences will be a lot smaller than before. With hard disks, it is an endless fight to keep things in sequence because sequential reads are so much faster. With flash drives, it really doesn't matter. I suppose there's still some differences in how to store the directories and such, but that probably matters less too.

Re:Yes, But what is the best File system ?

[Eivind]

True. So the only change that is needed, for speed, is to remove any code which tries to do stuff like allocate a file continously and/or keep the filesystem unfragmented. For a RAM-based disk it makes no difference whatsoever if the file is fragmented or not, so there's no point having code trying to avoid that.

This should lead to reduction of code, simplification and a tiny speed-boost. (since "allocate continously, avoid fragmentation" in certain situations is sligthly more work than simply "allocate however the hell you please")

This benefit may be eaten up by extra work to do wear-leveling, unless the drive fixes that automagically internally (which most do)

Re:Yes, But what is the best File system ?

[Emetophobe]

Most decent flash drives come with onboard chips that handle things like wear levelling. These onboard chips also supposedly mimic a regular ATA hard drive so you can continue to use any ol' file system and it will look like a regular hard drive (not sure if this is a good or bad thing).

For flash drives that don't have an onboard chip to handle wear levelling, you'd want to use a filesystem like JFFS2 (assuming you use Linux).

Re:Yes, But what is the best File system ?

[billsf]

It can get trickier. The arrangement of chips varies by size and vendor. The controller used and how the chips are connected affect this too. There is a very friendly computer shop that lets me try everything and return if it doesn't work as advertised. I picked up two 2G sticks for about EUR 10,-- each that use a Psion controller and are arranged in 16k blocks. (A four GB stick, with the same Taiwan brand, at EUR 39,-- turned out to be very slow. You have to test them. Except for quick tweaks, its not wise to make excessive writes. It must (in this case) write 16k no matter how small the file. (symlinks are hell) I simply allocate the same space on a HD and do 'dd if=/dev/sdN... of=/dev/da1s2a bs=16k' and that will run 396M in about 22s on BSD and surprisingly much faster with Linux. I use them as boot loaders with the kernel and userland. I slice them because ext2fs has different requirements. Reading is not normally a problem with current sticks. That block size parameter is quite important. I get 30MB/s on BSD (ufs2) and a surprising 90MB/s on Linux. (ext2fs). This is _much_ faster than the claimed rates for msdosfs/ntfs they advertise. (12MB/s write, something I've never seen msdosfs/ntfs do.) Bottom line is I can have upto a dozen or more systems on two sticks.

The lower cost units tend to be better, perhaps only because they are smaller or compliant to my filesystems. It may be worth noting I colour code the usb sockets to avoid mistakes. It is really easy to mess up, so always having a copy on a real hd is very comforting. Since the sticks are ROM and written once per development cycle, they will never wear out electricly. (The USB sockets will go much faster.) I think we all know what happens if you use dos. This is my experience and these things are developing rapidly. They are as fast as ordinary SCSI drives (they are SCSI drives) and indeed somewhat more stable. Expect a hot product from Seagate. :)

Re:Yes, But what is the best File system ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple developed a new filesystem for non-disks for the Newton (files were called "soup" or something like that)

They were again years ahead of their time...

Re:Yes, But what is the best File system ?

[kliment]

why of course
Mel, the Real Programmer allegedly wrote one as told in this tale.
Though it was used as a timer, not just to slow things down, but to slow things down by a specific amount.

Re:Yes, But what is the best File system ?

[Yoozer]

I'm reasonably certain that the Commodore 64 used it for both their tape- and disk-drives.

Thank goodness for loader music.

Re:Yes, But what is the best File system ?

[Sloppy]

For a RAM-based disk it makes no difference whatsoever if the file is fragmented or not

Careful. It doesn't make much difference. It'll still have an effect on the number of extents, for example, and therefore increase the size (and traversal time) of some data structures. Not a big deal, but it's something.

Re:Yes, But what is the best File system ?

[bbn]

So you are saying java is stupid for having several implementations of the java.util.Map interface? They are all the same, since there is no seek time, right?

Of course there will be new file systems for zero-seek hardware, that will be optimized for this environment.

Re:Yes, But what is the best File system ?

[Eivind]

True. But the extra delay from going trough a list of, say, 100 extents should be completely trivial compared to the current cost: seek-time. But you're rigth, the cost of fragmentation ain't zero. It's just a tiny fraction of the *current* cost of fragmentation.

Re:Yes, But what is the best File system ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I go with NTFS, formatted to the 4096 byte level, with reason:

I use NTFS, mainly because of security & ACL access permissions it has built into it for security & secondly, because of its compression abilities (solid, stable, & it works) & it's a reasonably well-done reliable journalling filesystem also...

Anyhow, on NTFS, I go with 4096 byte sectors, because that size matches how the pagefile.sys is read/written, in the exact size it uses, first of all, & this helps the filesystem layer read & read ahead mechanisms as well, since they too are done @ 4kb size increments.

(This is done on my CENATEK "RocketDrive", & it has 2gb onboard, of a possible 4gb total, which can be spanned/striped into a 16gb single unit with 4 of these boards)

Partition #1 (uncompressed NTFS):

I place my pagefile.sys there!

(That's so my main C: drive is not burdened with paging operations getting the way of of program & data loads on reads, & not causing fragmentation on my main C: drive as well, by pagefile growth & contractions @ bootup, on writes).

Partition #2 (compressed NTFS):

Here, I put onto the SSD I use, these things (nothing I cannot live without if it goes down, but I use its backing powersupply + an APC UPS ontop of that for reliability... but, it's SPEED I am really after @ home @ least):

A.) Webbrowser cache

B.) %temp%/%tmp% ops (OS & apps)

C.) Logging (event logs & app logs)

That goes onto the 1gb partition #2 here, & compressed, so I get SMALLER files on disk, which are read up into RAM faster (since smaller) & this is great for reads/reaccesses (more speed)... this helps on browsers reloading cached data & also temp data in part.

Also, the files defrag in SECONDS, vs. say, an HDD of equal size, so this benefits me in that it helps the filesystem & disk drivers pick up files faster AND it compliments the read/read-ahead mechanisms of the filesystem, cache, & memory mgt. of the OS too because of the 4kb sector formatted size I utilize.

Lastly, I gain because my main disk is not burdened with those tasks, just like paging, which create contentions in head movements on my main C: disk, & I do NOT clutter my disks with temp files, webpage caches, or logs, adding to fragmentation of it.

On writes & NTFS Compression:

Yes - I do take SOME "speed penalty" on WRITES (because of the use of compression, but today's RAM & CPU speeds help offset this), but my getting tinier files for reads & thus, more speed makes up for it, as well as using 4096 byte sector formats (matching read/read-ahead mechanisms of the filesystem driver & memory mgt. for paging too)...

BUT, the best part of my use of NTFS Compression is that MOST of the data I store on my SSD is TEXT TYPE (html files, temp ops, logs) & it compresses to FAR BETTER than 2:1 ratios, allowing for tons of storage @ HIGH SPEED (0ms access-seeks, 1000's of times faster than std. mechanical disks).

APK

P.S.=> Is there better filesystems than NTFS? Sure, quite possibly, especially depending on WHAT you wish to do...

E.G.-> ZFS which is upcoming for MacOS X server sounds great (single storage pool, no disk mgt. needed) & if you lookup "IRON FILESYSTEMS" online, you can see theory into ideas for filesystems of the future (built in CRC32 checks @ FILESYSTEMS LEVEL, for reliability & more)... apk

Countdown to new iPod version...

[Kemanorel]

With sizes up to 160 GB (according to TFA), any guesses on how long until the announcement of a new iPod design using these? If they can get to be price compatible, I know it would make me think about an upgrade from my 3G iPod.

Re:Countdown to new iPod version...

[bomanbot]

I think the 160 GB refers to the hybrid disks Seagate also has in their lineup (which are also mentioned in TFA). Would be more logical too because even with todays cheap flash prices, a 160 GB flash drive would still be relatively pricey.

Re:Countdown to new iPod version...

[Kemanorel]

Good point. I missed that part. I blame the vicodin.

Re:Countdown to new iPod version...

[TheRaven64]

iPod updates are long overdue. You can buy 16GB USB flash drives for under £100, but the 8GB iPod nano still costs £170 (education price). When they get to 32GB flash-based ones, I will replace my 3G iPod; the hard drive failed a little while ago, and I don't want to replace it with another one with a mechanical drive.

Re:Countdown to new iPod version...

[Gat0r30y]

Good point, however, the release is actually pointing to fully Flash based drive at 160G for the enterprise space.

Lifetime

[EmbeddedJanitor]

... well the correct technical term is endurance. That's typically 10k for MLC NAND flash or 100k for SLC NAND flash. Most devices will be using MLC because it is far cheaper.

Most of these systems will be using wear levelling to prevent the certain flash regions being happered too hard. Any system that does not use wear levelling will break down pretty quickly.

About Time

[NosTROLLdamus]

FUCK YEAH SEAGATE!

Noise

[ddoctor]

Nobody mentioned the noise! SSD's are silent.

I can't wait for ssd's. Every hard drive I've owned has been noisy and they drive me nuts.

As for durability... hrmm... maybe in its current state, flash doesn't last that long. But, the potential has got to be better than a constantly-spinning platter of disks. I've never had a RAM stick, or flash card die on me, but I've lost many hard drives.

Also, I think there may be greater potential for memory density. Spinning platters inevitably have wasted space, forming a cylinder in a rectangular prism.

I'd be interested to see the effect of SSD's on prices of normal hard drives. Normal HDD prices have been plummetting rapidly over the last couple of years - I wonder if the lure of flash will push them down further.

I think with capacity being so important, price/MB will be a big determining factor in getting flash into enterprise storage. I think the desktop, and (obviously) laptop markets will lap it up first.

Re:Noise

[antdude]

To me, the fans are the loud ones. I don't mind the HDD noises.

Re:Noise

[shawb]

If you think about it, the article mentions lower power usage as one of the benefits of solid state storage. Lower power usage means less heat, therefore less fans or lower RPMs on existing fans for adequate cooling.

Fan noise is one of the largest sources of sound in most commercial computing applications. In silent computing applications such as sound recording, however, those have been reduced to the point where often times the hard drive is one of the larger components. I have heard of setups where a smallish flash drive is used to bootstrap a computer that then saves data on a remote server, but then bandwidth and latency can become the limiting factors. Attempting to build a box around a hard drive will cut the noise levels, but the box generally insulates against heat at least as well as against noise. Trying to isolate the hard drive sounds can lead to overheating problems and the associated shortened life expectancy and therefore potential for data loss.

But for the average slashdotter, yes, the sound of the fans far outweighs any hard drive noise.

Re:Noise

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, once you get on the quiet pc wagon, though... I agree - BUT when you get [near-]silent fans, THEN you suddenly realise how bloody noisy HDDs are. You can get soundproofing "jackets" for them, but I'm always suspicious they'll lead to overheating and reduce the lifespan of the drive.

Re:Noise

[Anonymous Coward]

> To me, the fans are the loud ones. I don't mind the HDD noises.

Preach, brother.

If your HDD isn't louder than your fans, your data's at risk. The only drives I've killed, and most of the drives I've seen die, were in boxes that were poorly-ventilated in the name of being beautifully quiet... quiet, that is, except for the screams of the users.

Re:Noise

[Jeff DeMaagd]

Unless you are exceptionally sensitive to noise, I really don't hear you. People think I'm nuts when I complain about machine noise and I just don't have a problem with any current notebook hard disk drive. I also don't have any problems with Seagate's fluid bearing desktop drives. I even have four of them in my HTPC and I just don't hear them.

I really don't remember my last hard drive failure.

Re:Noise

[Jeff DeMaagd]

If your HDD isn't louder than your fans, your data's at risk. The only drives I've killed, and most of the drives I've seen die, were in boxes that were poorly-ventilated in the name of being beautifully quiet... quiet, that is, except for the screams of the users.

I think you have that stated wrong. If your fans are quieter than your hard drives, then maybe your data is at risk due to overheating, meaning that if your hard drive is louder than your fans, then your data is at risk.

That's probably true when stated properly. Even my quietest system, I hear a very gentle flow of air but not the drives.

Re:Noise

[evilviper]

I can't wait for ssd's. Every hard drive I've owned has been noisy and they drive me nuts.

Drives have gotten much quieter over the years. Today, the vast majority of the noise is due to the high speed of the read arm/voice coil, and that can be extremely effectively eliminated by aggressive use of the acoustic noise management setting nearly every hard drive supports. Under Linux, just run hdparm -M128.

Under Windows, sit around your computer and let the noise from the hard drive be a reminder of the consequences of your choice.

Re:Noise

[ivan256]

It's not that the fans are quieter in my machine....

The hard drive noise is just significantly higher pitched, and thus (to me) far more annoying. The problem can be mitigated slightly with slower drives, but that defeats the purpose, doesn't it?

Maybe I just need to wait until I'm old enough to no longer hear the high pitched noises my machines make.

Re:Noise

[XavidX]

Ah yes the noise.. Now if you combine that with a liquid cooled system you have complete silence.

That would ROCK.

I would actually consider having a media center pc in my living room.

Re:Noise

[rikkus-x]

http://hdparm-win32.dyndns.org/hdparm/

Re:Noise

[Gat0r30y]

But the fans are to cool down the hard drives. Also, flash should use less power, which is what really matters for the bottom line in enterprise space right now.

Re:Noise

[antdude]

Even if I don't use the HDD a lot, under heavy load like gaming or compiling, the CPU fans spin up. Those are loud!

Re:Noise

[Kafka_Canada]

Or you could develop a taste for listening to very loud heavy metal in an enclosed space...

How will this affect hardware architecture?

[Associate]

Am I safe in assuming SATA transfer rates are sufficient to handle a SSD?
Will it move choke points elsewhere on the system?
I'd like to know what other practical benefits such would have other than lower power consumption and durability.

Re:How will this affect hardware architecture?

[Courageous]

Am I safe in assuming SATA transfer rates are sufficient to handle a SSD?

Yes. SSD transfer rates aren't spectacular. It's there random access times that are spectacular.

C//

Re:How will this affect hardware architecture?

[Kjella]

Am I safe in assuming SATA transfer rates are sufficient to handle a SSD?
Will it move choke points elsewhere on the system?
I'd like to know what other practical benefits such would have other than lower power consumption and durability.

1. Yes, at least so far the fastest I've seen is 90MB/sec sustained read with a 150MB/s SATA interface and if that became a problem they could move to a SATA2 interface and get up to 300GB/sec (NB: Since flash don't have cache, there's no point in going to SATA2 unless the flash can actually handle it).
2. As far as I can tell, not yet.
3. Primarily responsiveness. I have many annoying applications that block for IO access. With faster random access, those apps should lag a lot less when you're using your disk for a lot of things at once (e.g. bittorrent, playing a movie etc.)

Re:How will this affect hardware architecture?

[Emetophobe]

There are only a few solid state drives that match or exceed current hard drive performance, and only by a small margin. So I wouldn't worry about saturating a SATA link for a very long time... And I'm talking about SATA I, not SATA II bandwidth...

The main benefit of solid state drives are lower power consumption, less or no noise and faster access times. Bandwidth throughput still could use some improvements in my opinion...

Re:How will this affect hardware architecture?

[Anonymous Coward]

"The main benefit of solid state drives are lower power consumption, less or no noise and faster access times. Bandwidth throughput still could use some improvements in my opinion" - by Emetophobe (878584) on Friday August 24, @03:50AM (#20340945) Some good news for you then!

Look up the DDRDrive X1: It is based on PCI-x + DDR memory (mucho bandwidth amigo)...

(The DDRDrive operating on PCI-x (PCI Express) has much more bandwidth than PCI 2.2 (132mb/sec) & even SATA I (150mb/sec & the Gigabyte IRAM SSD operates on SATA I, & it uses DDR2 RAM iirc, thus... it's a possible solution for you that exists, currently, no less))...

APK

P.S.=> However: The DDRDrive still in the "prototype" stage, so you are aware of its status!

I think it's what you're looking for, especially in terms of bus bandwidth (and in memory bandwidth as well, since it uses DDR RAM, vs. PC-133 SDRAM like I use in the SSD I have in the CENATEK "RocketDrive" which operates on PCI 2.2 bus (132mb/sec) + PC-133 SDRAM & the PCI Express bus the DDRDrive X1 will have just BLOWS BOTH the CENATEK RocketDrive & GIGABYTE IRAM clear AWAY in terms of bandwidth/throughput)

Limit on writes...

[CannonballHead]

It's not all that bad. If I remember correctly, most flash memory can take 100,000-300,000.. according to wikipedia:

"while high endurance Flash storage is often marketed with endurance of 1-5 million write cycles"

I did a small research project (informational) on flash stuff recently for school, I believe solid state hard drives back in June or so were said to have about 2 million writes.

2 million writes per sector. You can always move the information around, and algorithms are being written to do that.

But, with all that, seems like hybrid drives would be the way to go right now.. after all, there's no limit on READING from solid state drives, just writing.

Re:Limit on writes...

[MtHuurne]

According to this article, it would take decades before the write limits are reached on today's SSDs.

Re:Limit on writes...

[DoctaWatson]

Question:

What happens when a SSD hits its write limit? Is there catastrophic data loss, or does the ability to write just cease to function while keeping the already written data intact?

Re:Limit on writes...

[jhol13]

The article completely misses an important fact: most of the files on the disk never change.

Suppose I have a 100GB disk and 99GB is full of non-changing data. Then the changing data can only use 1G reaching the 100k-2M write cycles couple of orders magnitude faster than the article claims.

Yes, my calculation is certainly "worst case" (you should never fill disk over 90% full), but it shows that the article is wrong (it claims worst case).

However, the conclusion is correct: you need not worry about the wear.

Re:Limit on writes...

[MtHuurne]

The ability to write to a particular block ceases to function. Already written data stays in place and writing to other blocks will still work. However, if the wear leveling works well, you'd see many other blocks reach their limits relatively soon after, so it would be time to buy a new disk and copy over the data.

Re:Limit on writes...

[MtHuurne]

Good point.

The drive firmware could compensate for this though: if it has some spare blocks (not mapped into the externally reported sector range) it can relocate "stable" data to a "volatile" block in an attempt to equalize the wear levels. I'm not sure if the current firmware does this.

Re:Limit on writes...

[Jugalator]

The problem for me, even as a quite advanced user, is that these numbers say nothing to me. How quickly would an OS that swaps to drive now and then consume write cycles? How big difference if using an OS vs Photoshop vs an advanced and demanding computer game? I mean, I have no idea at all how quickly a computer would consume "1 million write cycles" because I have no idea how many write cycles is being used "normally" (I bet this also depends a lot on how you use the computer, or even which OS you have installed). It's not exactly something one would have had to care about before...?

Re:Limit on writes...

[pslam]

But, with all that, seems like hybrid drives would be the way to go right now.. after all, there's no limit on READING from solid state drives, just writing.

Actually, there is a limit on reading. It's called "read disturbance". It's a tiny effect on the more expensive SLC flash variants, but an enormous problem on MLC flash. MLC uses a hilariously scary technique of storing multiple bits per cell - multiple voltage levels, roughly speaking. It only takes a very small amount of current flowing through the same block to cause a disturbance that shifts a couple of electrons here and there and eventually changes the level of a cell.

On MLC, that happens at a frightening rate - something like 10-100k reads within the same block will cause it to grow an error. It's even common on the higher density SLC around at the moment, though I don't have a figure readily available (it's up in the millions, but that's not negligable for reads). That's easily detected and recovered using ECC, but the side-effect is you have to rewrite it. So in order to read a block... sometimes you have to write! This means that continuous reads of flash DO in fact wear it out. Again, the huge figures on read-disturbance aren't as good as they seem, beceause reads aren't wear leveled like writes are. You can re-read the same few blocks 10k times in a very short space of time and there's nothing the controller can do about it other than caching.

In fact, for SSD, I would assume they'd use the cheapest = highest density flash available to them. I would hate to think they use MLC, because that technology is a bunch of trash for general purpose usage as far as I'm concerned. But even SLC these days is starting to behave very much like video tape.

Everyone seems to be assuming that flash densities will go up and they'll overtake disk drives. What will actually happen is the endurance will drop through the floor as the densities increase. I wonder if there's a proof out there which shows that ECC can more than compensate for the loss of endurance vs density. If it doesn't, then flash has a brick wall it'll never go past.

Not that faster

[Via_Patrino]

The speed of sequential access is about the same for HD and flash.

Flash is better for random access which is not very important for end-user, that's why end user doesn't care about SCSI, since for them HD is just storage as it supposed to be.

Kernels/filesystems/application aren't just prepared to use the "power" of flash. What's the point of having flash as a disk cache if RAM already does that?
I don't see where the "most used" algorithm of flash disks is different from those used for RAM, so you happen to have a lot data cached twice for no purpose.

RAM is way faster than Flash and 64bits processors give a big limit (32GB) of RAM/processor. Flash is cheaper but, as said, much slower, flash disks will be as commom as buying a 36GB 15k HD to use as cache of your 750GB 7.2k

Re:Not that faster

[ben there...]

Flash is better for random access which is not very important for end-user, that's why end user doesn't care about SCSI, since for them HD is just storage as it supposed to be. It should result in a more responsive system with lower latency. Quick seek times would mean that generating thumbnails for a directory or any type of indexing of small files should be fast. Jumping to the next mp3 or video in a playlist should be quicker. Actually, the only time most users care about sequential access is when dealing with large files such as video files, when converting or copying them. Even then, if the large files are fragmented, seek time is still important.

Re:Not that faster

[bataras]

wha? a flash drive is not flash cache. it -replaces- the drive. And as for sequential vs random access not being important to the end user I totally disagree. I am -always- waiting for my computer to do stuff where it's sitting there, the disk light is thrashing and the CPU usage is hovering around 20%. Guess what? when you're waiting 1 minute for your computer to do something, it's using only 20% of the CPU and the disk is going nuts, you my friend are a victim of random access/disk seek time (and some IO time). A huge amount of that goes away with SSD.

Re:Not that faster

[Via_Patrino]

That will only work if you already have all those data on your flash drive. Flash drives for end-users are like 16GB today, will people use that for their primary drives? I don't know you have read the FTA but the advertised 160GB HD is a regular HD with a regular flash drive as cache.

Otherwise any of those enhancements could only and probably are already done preemptively by application, like your file explorer keeping a thumbnails file and your media player pre-fetching your playlist. Which work the same way for either flash or HD

Your OS/filesystem is smart enough to allocate big files on a continuous space, you'd only have fragmentation problems with that kind of files if your HD is almost full. Where the problem is the size of the HD and the solution isn't flash disks because they're much smaller.

Re:Not that faster

[Via_Patrino]

"Solid state drives" is a cool name to be the solution of all the problems, but when you put numbers in place that's much less than promissed.

As said sequential speed is the same, random access is like 10x faster. But a regular user don't access that much files RANDOMLY in very short (70ms) timeframe because most usage patterns for storage/retrieval are likely, filesystem/OS is smart enough to keep files of the same directory physically close and most used files are already at RAM, which is 1000x faster for random access than flash drives.

Your problems are probably enhanced by little RAM or a small and fragmented HD.

Flash disks are not the holy grail, if you suffer from slow start hibernate instead of shutdown.

Re:Not that faster

[timeOday]

I see no reason why flash shouldn't destroy hard drives in sequential access, too. Just put in 8 or 16 controllers and hash the block addresses across all of them.

Re:Not that faster

[ben there...]

That will only work if you already have all those data on your flash drive. Flash drives for end-users are like 16GB today, will people use that for their primary drives? I don't know you have read the FTA but the advertised 160GB HD is a regular HD with a regular flash drive as cache. I hadn't read the article yet, but assumed they were not talking about hybrid drives, which have been around a while. Old news. The article is talking about both pure SSDs and also mentions their existing hybrid drives. It doesn't make clear whether the 160 GB drive is an SSD, but I think that's safe to assume they are talking about a 160 GB SSD, considering the article's title.

Otherwise any of those enhancements could only and probably are already done preemptively by application, like your file explorer keeping a thumbnails file and your media player pre-fetching your playlist. Which work the same way for either flash or HD I was referring to the generation of thumbnails, or even the indexing of a directory, displaying dates, filesizes, dimensions, etc. All of that would be faster. Of course thumbnails are cached. Most media players do not pre-fetch the next file.

Your OS/filesystem is smart enough to allocate big files on a continuous space, you'd only have fragmentation problems with that kind of files if your HD is almost full. Where the problem is the size of the HD and the solution isn't flash disks because they're much smaller. As long as I've owned a computer, my hard drive has always been almost full. At 1.3 TB, it is always almost full. What's the point in having the space if it is not used? Heh.

Re:Not that faster

[Via_Patrino]

Oh, the article title "Seagate to offer solid-state drives in 2008". What about the text "are available in capacities up to 160GB". Did you see? "are" not "will be".

I'm no OS expert but I believe dates/filesizes are kept at the directory index, even if don't they could be kept by the application (file manager) cache, as well the dimensions. If your application doesn't do that it's an application problem. For jumping playlist, don't know about your media player, but doubt you could measure the 7ms difference anyway.

Good luck fitting 1.3TB in a flash disk.

Re:Not that faster

[Via_Patrino]

And you'd end up paying the same as you'd pay for a similar amount of RAM which is 1000x faster than flash drives.

We are talking about vaporware anyway since Seagate didn't say the sizes of the promised flash disks, but considering today sizes (16GB) that's a very niche thing.

Re:Not that faster

[Anonymous Coward]

I get it. I've been trolled. Congrats. Now get a life.

Flash + Low-speed HD = Best of Both

[G4from128k]

I wonder to what extent current high capacity HDs owe their high power consumption to the needs of high performance (low access time and high bandwidth). But if a large flash cache (say 4-16 GB) buffers the HD, then the HD mechanism could be redesigned to a much lower spec. I'd bet that a ultraslow 300 RPM platter with a stepper-motor head (versus the 4200 to 7500 rpm platter + voice coil technology currently used) would provide adequate performance (and low power consumption) if flash handled the vast majority of accesses and high speed read-writes. The physical disk mechanism would only need to support a bandwidth of about 2-3 Mbytes/sec (for a sustained read of an HD video stream) and flash would provide the 80-150 MBytes/sec burst bandwidth to compete with current laptop drives. (Hardcore video editors wouldn't use this device, but then they wouldn't use most of the low-power laptops on the market anyway).

Re:Flash + Low-speed HD = Best of Both

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, the 'much lower spec' would be your 4200 rpm. I was contemplating buying a small 10k rpm boot drive the other day; storing /bin, /usr and a few others on a fast, instant-seek flash drive would be pretty awesome if you ask me.

At any rate, what you're proposing wouldn't really work for multi purpose computers.
The biggest problem is that you don't always know what you want to access next; page faults under that system would have a huge performance penalty, because all of your data still has to be buffered into the flash drive first. If you need to access something you haven't buffered yet (easily done if your main storage is 200 gb and your flash drive 50 gb) your CPU is going to sit there idling while your incredibly slow disk seeks for whatever it needs, then reads it to the flash drive, which then in turn gets read to the CPU. Not to mention that your flash drive would die pretty quickly writing that constantly.

The main performance benefit from putting these in laptops today comes from the fact that most laptops are still stuck on 4200 rpm drives anyways. So, putting your most used stuff in a fast access drive (say, /bin or /usr) means you hit your slower storage less often, which means that you're not gonna sit there waiting for your drive to seek anymore.

As a final note, here's an interesting thing I saw a friend do years ago:
At boot up, partition a section of your ram and mount it. It's not so uncommon to have 2gb nowadays, assuming you want to part with oh 512mb of it. Then copy over the aforementioned commonly used libraries and binaries, and watch your system fly. Reading from RAM is practically free, when compared to reading from disk.
Now that I think about it, you might start to run into a problem as your system loads your libraries twice into memory (once when you copied it over, a second time whenever it executes something) and of course, paging to disk more frequently because you just cut your RAM by 25%.

Re:Flash + Low-speed HD = Best of Both

[PingPongBoy]

300 RPM etc.

Insane.

The instant you're out of cache, you want to chuck the whole thing out the window. Fortunately to save power, there's something called power off.

In fact, if the disk isn't spinning constantly, boost its speed to 30,000 RPM or add 10x more platters.

On my laptop, I'm limited to having one hard disk internally, so having a big cache that would store the programs is desirable - and 4Gb or more seems minimal for now thanks to Vista. An external USB drive has been really useful for handling disk intense stuff so I don't have to slow down with the occasional swap.

Well, a big cache and a rotating drive would act as a two-drive system. The rotating drive has to be fast. Besides, the rotating drive would likely have to backup the flash (and perhaps vice versa to a limited amount due to space confines).

Flash/RAM Drives?

[Doc Ruby]

The problem with Flash (~$12:GB) drives as replacements for rotating magnetic hard drives (~$0.18:GB) is that Flash is a lot more expensive, and Flash wears out after relatively few rewrites. RAM (~$35:GB) is even more expensive, but it doesn't wear out and has much faster performance.

For smaller storage (<10GB, for mobiles), what about a Flash drive with a RAM cache? That gets flushed to Flash once every hour or day or so. For that matter, how come we never saw magnetic drives with builtin RAM caches in the GB scale, occasionally written (in parallel) back to the magnetic disc for reliability? We can set up RAMdisks in SW, but that eats main memory and takes extra configuration. Magnetic or Flash drives with big RAM caches would have much higher performance, and HD vendors could diversify in their extremely competitive market.

Re:Flash/RAM Drives?

[Doc Ruby]

Moderation -1
    100% Flamebait

TrollMods have gone completely insane.

Re:Flash/RAM Drives?

[tftp]

how come we never saw magnetic drives with builtin RAM caches in the GB scale

In terms of lazy write, the controller probably wants to write all the cache onto the platters in case of power failure. This takes time, and you can write only so much until the power becomes too low to write.

In terms of read caching, it would require a DDR2 design on the controller board, and those controllers aren't high-tech enough for that. DDR2 is very difficult to connect, requires picky controllers, and consumes a lot of power. Why would anyone do that if the computer already has tons of RAM, and you can add more if you want?

Besides, caching in main RAM is better because the CPU knows what is where and can control caching. A RAM cache is a virtual page away from being physically accessible to your needy process; nanoseconds, in other words. But if you do your caching in the HDD controller then you are doing it after squeezing through the [S]ATA bottleneck, and the controller only has bits and pieces of the information. For example, the main CPU can recognize that you are reading a file, and can pre-read subsequent sectors anticipating your future request. The HDD controller doesn't know what a file is, and so it can only react to events.

Re:Flash/RAM Drives?

[Yehooti]

Don't worry folks. Bubble Memory is just around the corner. Once that hits the consumer market, HD's will quickly become a memory too.

Re:Flash/RAM Drives?

[Angst Badger]

For that matter, how come we never saw magnetic drives with builtin RAM caches in the GB scale, occasionally written (in parallel) back to the magnetic disc for reliability?

Possibly because you weren't looking. For all I know, they still exist, but the vendor we got one from went out of business a few years ago. They sold full-length PCI cards packed with 8GB of SDRAM -- and they had larger models -- that presented a SCSI interface to the system and, with the appropriate driver, could mirror to a magnetic drive. The cost was stratospheric, and our storage needs soon outgrew the available space. We also found that not as much of our processing was I/O-bound as we thought. Other than that, it worked great. Given enough money and a motherboard with a sufficiently large number of PCI slots, it might be the ideal solution for certain niche applications, but the cost and size constraints otherwise make them a poor substitute for magnetic drives in most cases.

That said, it was pretty cool to be able to reformat the "drive" in a few seconds.

Re:Flash/RAM Drives?

[Detritus]

They make large RAM disk systems with built-in backup power that will automatically dump the data in RAM to an internal hard disk in the event of a power failure or other problem. They're just very expensive.

Re:Flash/RAM Drives?

[Doc Ruby]

It occurs to me that a good storage driver could grab RAM from main memory to do this with any HD, or any Flash drive for that matter. A really good storage driver could grab RAM added on PCI-e, so it wouldn't consume main memory. And, taking it to an extreme, that driver could map the PCI-e RAM into main memory.

Maybe the metapoint here is that storage HW is strangely inflexible and compartmentalized.

Re:Flash/RAM Drives?

[evilviper]

For smaller storage (
Worst of both worlds! Yea! Where do I sign up?

For that matter, how come we never saw magnetic drives with builtin RAM caches in the GB scale, occasionally written (in parallel) back to the magnetic disc for reliability?

Because anything more than a few MBs of cache, and a sudden power outage will completely corrupt your partition.

Some kind of hybrid RAM/Flash or RAM/Disk drive is just plain stupid. If you've got GBs of RAM, just use it. With large amounts of RAM, you absolutely MUST have a back-up battery in there, so just make it a bigger one that will last for weeks without power, and entirely forgo the hindrance of slow and bulky Flash/Disks.

You do see large caches, but separate from the drives. With SCSI RAID controllers, it's pretty common to see SIMMS or SODIMM slots that will accept hundreds of MBs of RAM, if not a couple GBs. They, however, have built-in rechargeable batteries, which will keep the RAM refreshed for 2-3 days after a power outage, so it can be flushed to disk when it is next powered-up.

If you want a disk drive, but with GBs of cache for performance, put a few GBs of main memory in your system, and let the operating system take care of it. It will perform much better, and be much more reliable.

Re:Flash/RAM Drives?

[Vulva R. Thompson, P]

Or could it be a very shy but voluptuously stacked and horny blonde slashdotter trying to get your attention for a wild one night stand of anonymous hot steamy sex?

Or not.

Re:Flash/RAM Drives?

[sssssss27]

I thought Linux could already do that. I know about two years ago my dad and I were looking into trimming down the Linux machine we used as a router. We figured we could boot off of a flash drive instead of HDDs. Since the cheap flash drives back then didn't give you a lot of read and writes and most of what the machine was writing/reading was just log files we found out you could mount some RAM as HDD and then when you went to shut it down it would write that data out to the flash card. The only time you would ever actually hit the flash card is on boot and shut down. With an UPS installed you don't have to worry about losing any data either because you should have plenty of time to write it out to the flash card in the event of power failure.

Re:Flash/RAM Drives?

[Eivind]

It's claimed in the article that the gap is narrowing. I don't know if this is true. I suspect it isn't, really. As you point out, flash is still a factor of 100, aproximately, more expensive than rotating platters.

What *is* however happening is that flash is getting to be "cheap enough" that is is attractive for other reasons. Silence. Performance. Physical-size. Ruggedness.

It's more like, if you can get a flash-disc of acceptable size for say a laptop for $300, it may be worth it if that compares to a $100 conventional drive with 5 times the capacity. Networks mean you can today store most of your data somewhere else (on magnetic platters) and so a 32GB flash-disk may be sufficient. (rather than the 160GB magnetic one say)

The cache-thing is already done -- by the OS. Unless you spesifically ask the OS to sync the file, it will return success to your application writing data before even initiating disk-io. If you write repeatedly to the same location, quite likely only the last write will ever hit the platters at all.

Internal ram-cache would be a win -- if it could be made dependable enough that you could consider stuff there "written" and not worry that it'd go lost say by powerloss. Perhaps the drive could have a small internal battery sufficient to write the ram to flash in the event of power-failure, I suspect that'd make it costly though.

Re:Flash/RAM Drives?

[Inverted Intellect]

it was pretty cool to be able to reformat the "drive" in a few seconds.

Indeed it is, I've seen a friend of mine who has a consumer hardware DDR SDRAM-based ramdisk do so. When he first mentioned his idea, reasoning that it would improve his performance by putting his windows swap file on it, I thought it would be be completely unneccessary, and that simply adding more ram would be quite sufficient, as in theory windows doesn't use swap unless ram is full enough that not all of the programs can be stuffed in there.

Turns out I was wrong, as Windows and/or programs written for Windows tend to use swap even if there is quite enough space on ram, and not just because of the 4GB memory limit due to addressing concerns in 32-bit Windows.

While having a drive that can max it's sata/150 connection practically instantly is nice, the ramdisk wins out by having the very low, and equal across all sectors latency distinctive of ram. Too bad the things cost something over a hundred bucks, and that's without the ram, which I don't happen to have lying around.

Re:Flash/RAM Drives?

[skrolle2]

You are only the five billionth reader that points out that "flash drives have limited writes". This is true, but, as five billion other readers have responded already, this is not an issue. The SSD drives that are being sold have have an integrated controller that spreads out the writes evenly over the disk. That way, the expected lifespan of a SSD drive is 10-20 years at least, which is about the same as regular hard drives.

So please stop spreading the myth that SSD drives should somehow be inferior to regular hard drives in this area. The REAL disadvantages of SSD drives is that the sequential read time is lower, maybe a tenth of a regular hard drive. On the other hand, it is possible to improve this, so it will of course not always be so. In all other areas, power consumption, seek time, random reads, heat, and noise, the SSD drives completely outclasses regular hard drives. The only disadvantage that will last is that of cost, but given the superiority of the technology, demand will be crazy, and prices will go down a lot.

This will be pretty similar to how flat screens took over the market from CRT monitors.

Re:Flash/RAM Drives?

[Doc Ruby]

I know that power outage is the problem with RAM. But how often does that actually happen? Why not include a battery for flushing to Flash/disc in the event?

And though of course more main memory, or even CPU cache, can improve performance, that requires much more config than transparent performance improvements on the drive itself. Probably even recoding, which is not a practical option for the vast majority of users. Bundling it into the drive would improve drive performance transparently, therefore for everyone.

Though perhaps it's better to just put huge caches on the controller. Or maybe the best

But really what we're discussing is "solid state drives". So addressing the problem with Flash, their fewer rewrites before wearing out, means a RAM cache on their drives is the way to go. Since RAM costs 50% what Flash costs, a drive costing 150% of a simple drive would have to last only 50% longer to be cost effective. Of course it would last longer than that, and offer higher performance, too. The extra HW for RAM, including battery and powerdown backup, should be at most as expensive as its base HD counterparts.

So for the actual use case we're discussing, Flash+RAM is a good solution.

Re:Flash/RAM Drives?

[Doc Ruby]

I'm talking about bundling it in a single, simple product. So everyone can get the benefit, without extra work configuring, and with the lower prices that a scaled production economy brings.

Re:Flash/RAM Drives?

[Doc Ruby]

For one, all that shuffling to even the wear reduces the performance (and increases the wear).

For another, I proposed a solution, an optimization by cache.

My suggestion addresses a real problem with a real solution. Which incidentally solves the sequential read time problem.

Re:Flash/RAM Drives?

[Doc Ruby]

I think the HD/RAM/battery config is the way to go. Especially for mobile devices, including notebooks, that should only be caching data anyway, for network storage sync ASAP. Which means smaller capacities that need much lower battery.

Eventually "electronic paper" displays that require no power except to change their visible state (much like Flash) will have sold enough units to repay most of their R&D cost, so WUXGA panels cost under $500. By that time, 50GB Flash will probably cost under $200, so 50GB "drive cache" RAM will cost under $200, probably integrated into the controller as main memory partly partitioned into cache by the storage driver (all of which will hibernate to the Flash). The CPU will cost about $200, and the rest of the machine (including the smaller battery) will cost another $200. A $1300 machine, or maybe a $900 one that's got under 10GB storage.

Then they've got to shrink that sucker into your pocket as a "phone" that costs under $500.

Re:Flash/RAM Drives?

[blahplusplus]

"The problem with Flash (~$12:GB) drives as replacements for rotating magnetic hard drives (~$0.18:GB) is that Flash is a lot more expensive, and Flash wears out after relatively few rewrites. RAM (~$35:GB) is even more expensive, but it doesn't wear out and has much faster performance."

You are correct that flash is expensive. But as for the re-writes, I'm sure many of us would not use much of the re-writes, there are ways to get around wearing out a flash drive. Not to mention the fact that the # of writes before wear out will most likely increase at least to some extent.

I know I am a hard drive maniac and lots of the time I simply use that space to STORE things. Things like games and applications are usually write-once and then you forget about them and you don't really do much re-writing.

The biggest worries would be: Heavy big file transfers that fill up the disk, (i.e. DVD ripping) and heavy downloading of other files from the internet that you burn and archive. And big memory heavy application's and windows swap file usage.

Re:Flash/RAM Drives?

[evilviper]

I know that power outage is the problem with RAM. But how often does that actually happen?

With laptops... frequently. And really, even once is too many, considering the extensive data loss and filesystem corruption inherent with a loss of such huge amounts of data.

Why not include a battery for flushing to Flash/disc in the event?

Because it would take a large battery (and a fairly complex controller) when space is already at a premium. If you're going to put a battery on your RAM, get rid of the disk or Flash all together and just go with battery-backed RAM drives.

And though of course more main memory, or even CPU cache, can improve performance, that requires much more config than transparent performance improvements on the drive itself.

No, it doesn't require any configuration at all. Every operating system since MS-DOS transparently handles disk caching to RAM. It gives much faster access since you aren't going out over the ATA buss, can be much faster in writing to disk, since the OS/filesystem can organize the data in RAM better, and is much more reliable, since the OS/filesystem will flush the parts that are important for filesystem integrity immediately, and delay the less important bulk of the data.

Since RAM costs 50% what Flash costs, a drive costing 150% of a simple drive would have to last only 50% longer to be cost effective.

It would have to be equally low-power, and equally as small and light, none of which it is. That's why it's not cost-effective to use 3.5" drives in notebooks, and why it's not cost effective to add RAM and a large battery back-up to existing storage methods.

It's debatable whether the Flash drive would last any longer with a RAM cache, since wear leveling and similar features should already give it a life span long far longer than even the more fervent equipment recycler (like myself) should want to use it.

And going with your numbers, why not get rid of the Flash all together, it will just cost 50% more than your hybrid Flash drive, BUT it will be 33% smaller, AND give users insanely great performance across the entire drive, while using far less power, and allowing it to last indefinitely (what is 200% divided by infinity?) (not including replacing the back-up battery every few years)?

Of course it would last longer than that, and offer higher performance, too.

Increasing main system RAM would give a much bigger performance boost, without requiring any more physical space, nor a back-up battery.

Enlarge your...Warranty.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Now there's the kind of warranty I want to include in my products."

But will your girlfriend believe you?

Here's a White Paper

[Televiper2000]

I did some poking around the net for information on NAND write cycles. They've already been quoted in the comments here (100,000 to 2,000,000) so I'm just going to post this neat white paper I found on Zeus drives that explains the endurance they get from their SSD Drive. http://www.baydel.com/images/gallery/NAND%20flash% 20resilience.pdf

Re:Here's a White Paper

[Inda]

Thanks for the very informative link.

To summarise:

8 million writes before failure. Failure occurs during write or erase. Stored data does not get corrupted.

64gb would take 20 years to fill if the same byte was overwritten one million times.

I hope the rest of the Slashdot ill-informed take note.

DOLL

[Anonymous Coward]

Any doubT: FreeBSD

Captain obvious to the rescue!

[Bearhouse]

Not trolling, but how the *$à&!! does re-stating both the summary, and the damn obvious, get modded 'interesting'?

Solid state drives have no moving parts? No shit, Sherlock!

Re:Captain obvious to the rescue!

[Bombula]

The simplest technique is the most effective, young grasshopper.

Re:Captain obvious to the rescue!

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree. GP should be modded redundant, not interesting.

Re:Captain obvious to the rescue!

[Bearhouse]

Thanks - did not help my karma, though!

Still, got loads to burn, so 'troll' this as well, you sad fucks!

Re:Flash + Low-speed HD = great idea.

[Kludge]

If they built a small amount of intelligence into the firmware, this would be extremely effective for boot and application start up speeds. That is, have the hard drive cache the most regularly requested pieces of data: the kernel, c libraries, browser executables and libraries, etc. Startups would be much faster due to faster speeds and lower latencies.

Would benefit from user education, OS optimisation

[Bearhouse]

Just for starters...

No need to defrag the drive - indeed, would me harmful (uses scarce 'write' cycles). Is a waste of time, since flash memory is written to in a 'random walk' pattern to spread the damage evenly. That's one the main reason it's so hard to 'undelete' stuff from flash mem.

More careful OS management of swapping & caching.

etc.

Solid state

[iminplaya]

How big would one of these things be if they were made using vacuum tubes?

Re:Solid state

[Anonymous Coward]

Unbeleivably humungous.

Plus most vacuum tube memory would be volatile like RAM. Can't think offhand of any vacuum devices that would be non volatile. Magnetic core memory would be the closest thing from back in those days. Last one I recall was about 6k bytes on a board about 20 by 12 inches or so.

Re:Solid state

[KnightStalker]

Considerably smaller than if it were made with gears and pulleys. What's your point?

Re:Solid state

[fbjon]

It would be awesome. That's the point.

And now the clock is ticking

[lotekppc]

on the accompaning announcement from Apple about the new high-capacity diskless ipods.

Flash+Low-speed HD=Popping the Paradigm Clutch

[Anonymous Coward]

Non-volatile memory would do a lot more than that. I'll leave it to the rest of you to figure it out.

An excelent counterpoint...

[TiggertheMad]

..however, who cares? Suppose you have a partition on your flashdrivwe that is for a swap file, and you thrash on it like crazy. After a couple of months, several drive sectors fail, and you run a chkdsk and repair it, just like any other hard drive.

Any media is going to eventually fail. Your brand spankin new hard drive from seagate or maxtor ships from the factory with defects that existed as a result of the manafacturing process that have been scan and tagged as bad.

I'm just hoping that this means that we can finally freakin get an 'instant on' laptop...

Re:An excelent counterpoint...

[Short Circuit]

To my knowledge, no variety of chkdisk or fsck repairs dead sectors. They read the data out of the surviving sectors in a cluster (or inode), and move it to another area of the drive. Then they mark the old cluster (or inode) as unusable.

That said, with modern drives' sector remapping, if chkdisk finds a bad sector, your drive has had enough sectors fail to use up its spares, and you're going to get nothing but problems from it in the very near future.

Magnetic and flash-based drives are alike in this sense.

Re:An excelent counterpoint...

[Duke Machesne]

I'm just hoping that this means that we can finally freakin get an 'instant on' laptop... It's called an mac. I open it, it comes on...

Flash Swap

[bhmit1]

A more interesting question would be how these things hold up when used for swap.

I suspect the concept of swap will need to be reevaluated with these disks. As you mentioned, random seek-times will improve while write times are disproportionately high, so the ram fs cache we see now may have its priority greatly reduced. It may become more appropriate to put more RAM in a machine than to allocate swap space for many users, which I've seen done in servers years ago (on a government project were cost wasn't the issue it is for others admittedly). For those that still have swap, it will likely be for a space to suspend the OS while hibernating. Considering how low performance goes with heavily used disk swap, and how that's usually attributed to too little ram or a badly behaving application, I'm not worried about this impact on the over-hyped write limit. People will kill the offending apps and buy more ram long before they kill the drive.

Nobody gets it

[thatskinnyguy]

This is obviously an attempt to FINALLY find some hardware fast enough to support Vista!

Expected lifetime calculation

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's explore a worst case scenario:

Let's assume write-speed is 64MB/s, and that the memory is spec'd to one million writes/cell.

If we assume the same standard as plain ol' disks, 512 byte sectors, and fill the disk to the brim, leaving only a single sector free to write to, let's see what happens.

64MB/512 = 131072 (aka 128K) writes/second to that single cell.

1000000 / 131072 ~= 7,629394531

That's the expected lifetime of that cell. Seven point six three seconds.

Don't bullshit me with "will not happen in your lifetime", please.

Re:Expected lifetime calculation

[evanbd]

That's why you don't *do* that. Or, more precisely, why the SSD shouldn't *let* you do that. All it needs to do is keep some hidden spare space (10%? 5%? 1%? I don't know, but it's not huge) and dynamically remap sectors to balance writes. If you have GB of remapping room, even a "full" disk with heavy load would take a long time to wear out.

Re:Expected lifetime calculation

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, you're too stupid to know why your so stupid, even if I explained it to you.

Re:Expected lifetime calculation

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow. Your math is incredibly shitty and your facts are... just plain wrong.

Sounds like you have an agenda.. Or you're a christian.

Re:Expected lifetime calculation

[Televiper2000]

...and at that rate you lose 1 sector. That's assuming the disk manager was written poorly enough to actually do such a strange and unprecedented thing.

Re:Expected lifetime calculation

[Anonymous Coward]

The new 'defragging'-

Having your computer switch around file locations so that any sectors that are running low on writes are filled by files that are rarely, if ever, updated.

I have plenty of files on my computer that haven't been updated for years.. They sure aren't going to run the numbers down any.

Re:Expected lifetime calculation

[mmullings]

The worst part about all of this...you can't rip 'em open and take out the magnets when they die.

Re:Warranty? SWAPPING

[Nom du Keyboard]

If you wrote 40GB worth of data to it every single day (with the circuitry inside a drive to spread writes out over cells evenly), then you would average 1 write per day across each cell.

I may be paging to my swap file multiple times each minute. It might prove hard to level that activity out across the drive as a whole.

Will SSD drives change the design of software?

[MrSteveSD]

As I understand it, solid state drives will have zero seek time (since their is no physical head that has to be moved). In contrast with a HDD you have a mechanical arm that has to whiz about all over the place, sometimes short distances, sometimes longer distances. As a result of this, lots of things are designed to minimize accessing data that's far apart on hard drives, particularly in applications like databases. It sounds like SSD drives with their zero seek times could simplify a lot of software and various design issues.

Re:Will SSD drives change the design of software?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, there won't be a seek time per se - there will still be ras/cas delays, however.

But that's not the big issue. The two things folks will notice will be noise (they are silent) and sustained access time (there is no drop off in performance based on a physical location of data).

CENATEK ROCKETDRIVE, IRAM, & DDRDrive X1

[Anonymous Coward]

"I've been looking forward to mainstream solid state drives for a long time." - by Bombula (670389) on Thursday August 23, @08:09PM (#20337917)

I've had one online here since 2003... you're late man! lol...

CENATEK ROCKET DRIVE I have is 4gb max size, BUT, can be striped with 4 others like it into 1 huge 16gb one!

IT's PCI 2.2 (132mb/sec) + PC133 SDRAM & has a backing powersupply (which I run thru an APC UPS for stability/uptime/security, though I don't place any critical data on it)...

I am STILL using it to this day, almost 5 years later! No moving parts to wear out...

HOWEVER? Let's see a Flash RAM last that long, lol...

E.G./I.E.->

Mine's running strong & doing TONS of repeating writes in a constant stream, by housing my:

1.) The first 1gb partition, NON NTFS COMPRESSED, has Pagefile.sys on it on an NTFS 4096k sector formatted (to match memory transfer sizes used on disk cache, reads, & read ahead for maxing speed).

2.) The second 1gb partition, NOW NTFS COMPRESSED & using 4096kb sector formatting to match memory read + read ahead mechanisms @ the filesystem driver level (& EVEN BLOCK DEVICE DISK DRIVER LEVEL if I wanted by using SuperCache on it as well)

The 2nd partition, & what I use it for, is for webpage caching, temp ops, logging, & housing my %comspec% cmd.exe... & it works in that setup, for better performance.

(Many bennies to this 2 part approach above alone, read on)

HOW? Well, look @ the datatypes I have on it largely:

MOSTLY TEXT BASED DATA, & on a COMPRESSED DISK!

THUS, it gets WAY over 2:1 compression even & by FAR with that kind of data!

Oh, not done, yet...

I gain in speed, YET AGAIN, also because smaller files on disk exist this way as well!

(Due to compression via NTFS filesystem drivers is why (& today's speed of RAM & CPU's way, WAY even offsets the decompression in memory speed, & on disk writes too, only complimenting its read speeds & access speeds more))...

MORE THAN DOUBLING ITS STORAGE RATE really (sure, yes, webpage caching introduces some compressed image data, but still, I gain on the compressible data like text hugely).

(It goes up to 4gb, so you can serve up a website from a 4gb one, FAST reads, 0ms access/seek for example, speed of memory vs. disks 1000's of times slower, play games from it, or movies, or burn them WICKED FAST, from ISO's... man, you NAME it!)

That's "home use stuff, to an extent...

With DB engines (from an article I wrote on this) though?

it was about placing their tables/devices onto them, alongsize pagefiles on another partition & more for TechEd stuff/theories, or using them for smaller DB engines like DBASE/Access/FoxPro OR serving up websites (db driven ones) from it.

ANYHOW - I found out about them, after doing a software one for Windows NT-based systems (NT4/2000/XP/Server 2003)....

That's when I wrote up a review for CENATEK & their RocketDrive (and I got it on a GOOD deal too for doing that article & was featured on their homepage above guys who are fairly famous in this field, & sites article's too, lol)...

The article was based on work I used for a software based/mirror back to backing HDD ware called SuperDisk, by EEC Systems, which took them to the finalist position in the 2000 & 2001 Microsoft Tech Ed, in the toughest category: Boosting SQLServer performance.

(EEC Systems now is a certified Microsoft partner called SuperSpeed.com)

ANYHOW/ANYWAY:

I did that, while I improved the performance of their SuperCache program by up to 40% via an addon ware I got paid for on a contract (whose ideas are now in the mainstream product NOW, via ported code from Delphi, to its C/C++ combination in its driver, & interface, respectively in the current builds).

The article's principals (for databasing alon

Re:Would benefit from user education, OS optimisat

[Reziac]

Given your comment... what does this do to data recovery, when one DOES fail?

Mod Parent Up

[hedwards]

I see some mod thought you were getting a little to interesting. sigh.

Basically, your suggestion might work for a desktop computer, but would be worthless in a laptop.

Laptops are really the market for these sorts of drives, at least for now. In the future as they get better, that may very well change. The resilience and power consumption are much more important than the speed is.

I have heard of people using a setup similar to the one you suggest to speed up the kernel compilation process. Allowing for all of the items to be in ram until they are done with. But it requires a lot of ram, and ram right now is expensive, and at any rate, that wouldn't be very useful for a laptop.

ramsan

[Anonymous Coward]

uh, ramsans...........

CLARIFICATIONS & AMENDMENTS TO MY LAST POST!

[Anonymous Coward]

Some clarifications on my last post, one's you'll like most likely, because they extoll & explain a couple things better + a virtue in hardware I missed:

----
"TODAY, YOU CAN GET BETTER ONES!

(New ones like the Gigabyte IRAM are good, SATA 150 bus based & same bandwidth as that bus, which makes it better than the RocketDrive (PCI 2.2 limited, 132mb/sec transferral rates, vs. SATA1 @ 150gb/sec transferral rates))

The one I want though?

Look this up online -> DDRDrive X1

(PCIExpress people... HUGE more bandwidth memory transfer rates, that BLOW AWAY PCI 2.2, & even SATA1/2 rates)" - APK ----

Oh, NOT ONLY are those newer SSD's faster bus based, but, they also use FASTER RAM THAN MINE DOES (which uses PC-133 SDRAM - the new ones use better like DDR/DDR2 etc.)!

====

AND THIS POINT:

----
"I gain in speed, YET AGAIN, also because smaller files on disk exist this way as well!" - APK
----

By the gain here, it's NOT only doubling in storage on the Ramdrive/SSD, but because the files are tinier in NTFS compressed form, they READ UP FASTER because they are smaller first of all!

(Also again complimenting the 4096k sector formatted gain you get on READS, because they read up like that into RAM, & I also use that on pagefile.sys, it is read in those increments & speed of access/seek that is 0ms & into the nano-second speed of RAM).

Plus, it defrags a 1gb partition in SECONDS... even under use!

Contiguous files in seconds, further speeding it up & QUICKLY!

APK

P.S.=> MORE SPEED... apk

'Disks'?

[skeftomai]

So will harddrives still be called disks when solid state drives are mainstream? Of course people will likely still call them that, but what will they referred to in software (e.g. Disk Manager, Disk Usage Analyzer)?

Re:'Disks'?

[Veinor]

Probably still 'disks'... when was the last time a program actually dumped a memory core?

Re:'Disks'?

[Televiper2000]

I doubt it. The term "disk" will always be used with nostalgia. But, when it comes to selling these things and finally getting implemented into systems you'll most likely see them referred to as "Hard Drive", "Storage Devices", "Flash Drives", "SSD" (everybody loves acronyms!) or some marketing term their still dreaming up. Of course I imagine the successor to Windows Vista being out before SSDs are technically mainstream.

Re:'Disks'?

[UltimateRobotLover]

In the wonderful world of enterprise storage, disks are sometimes called spindles.

Re:'Disks'?

[Kegetys]

People will propably call them SSD Drives

Re:'Disks'?

[DaveP in Ohio]

How about calling them 3SDs (Solid State Storage Device)? Or DS^3?

Disk imaging

[skeftomai]

Would it be possible to image a partition of a solid state drive with an image created from a non-solid-state disk drive?

Re:Disk imaging

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but you need to upgrade to the new version of Norton Ghost which comes with ceramic brake discs to stop the image rotating while you copy it to the stationary SSD.

Re:Disk imaging

[sssssss27]

I imagine the OS won't be able to tell the difference between the two.

Re:Warranty? SWAPPING

[Achoi77]

I may be paging to my swap file multiple times each minute. It might prove hard to level that activity out across the drive as a whole.

perhaps this was a tongue-in-cheek comment... but anyways perhaps this warrants a response for people that may not understand.

ok, so Rule #1: NEVER USE THE FLASH DRIVE FOR PAGING. Use the hard disk drive instead. I can't for the life of me figure out a reasonable answer to completely removing the HDD. Those things are so cheap for so much data density, engineers have taken development of them to an art form. Seriously, paging should be regulated to the 'unreliable' storage medium - that being the HDD of course. What are you afraid of? that moving parts of the HDD are going to fail so consistently - how much abuse are you actually putting your laptop through in the first place?? After all, the only reason why we do paging at all is because we just don't have enough ram. Those things are so close to being disposable memory, and SO much cheaper then flash drives.

IMO I would only use flash drives for only two conditions: critical data that is able to withstand physical abuse of storage medium, and read-data only. So, for the average computer user, that would mostly mean:

• operating system
• applications
• large documents you aren't likely to move around - like your MP3 collection, for example
• documents you've created yourself - photoshop files for designers, Word docs/spreadsheets for the business types, code for developers, things like that.

that way you reduce the number of writes being done on the drive. Got a bigger HD? You can use it to store your temporary crap: movies you downloaded over BT, your copy of the latest game so you can NOCD it, your porn collection (unless it's VERY important, I suppose..). paging on a flash drive is waste of money - why spend so much on reliable flash ram (more reliable than HDD anyway) so you can use it to PAGE?? That's the equivalent of a chip maker deciding that it's a good idea to make a CPU that contains 512Mb of L1 cache. Or, car analogy time: driving on the highway on first gear.

Eventually we'll start seeing smaller drives in laptops that will do nothing but page. Just wait it out and let's see where this goes.

Remember folks, the cost of memory from most expensive to least expensive goes something like this: L1 cache <- L2 cache <- RAM <- HDD. Where does a flash drive fit in? Somewhere between RAM and HDD. Flash isn't the end-all-be-all to memory. We just use flash ram and HDD because we don't have enough ram (and battery life). Which we use because we don't have enough CPU cache (and battery life).

Are hard drives the tape drives of the future?

[Michael Woodhams]

If we go back about 20 years, hard drives were for non-volatile fast-access storage, and tape drives were for backup, bulk data storage, archiving and sometimes data transfer (when there was too much for floppies.)

Now that flash is reaching the point where we can contemplate using it for the primary non-volatile storage niche, we may see hard drives being displaced into the backup/bulk storage/archiving niches. If so, expect to see increasing emphasis on ways to hot-plug hard drives into your computer, and increasing emphasis on price/GB and decreasing emphasis on performance and possibly per-drive capacity.

We'll really know we've reached this point when hard drives are used as a medium for delivering software.

Re:Are hard drives the tape drives of the future?

[Anarchitect_in_oz]

To bad we have a good write once solid state product.
ZFS pool of slabs of write once storage just replace the oldest one as the data becomes redundant.
Would work for all storage systems fro laptops, cameras and backup systems.

Re:Are hard drives the tape drives of the future?

[skrolle2]

We'll really know we've reached this point when hard drives are used as a medium for delivering software. That will never happen, it is much more likely that you will receive software on flash memory. A 2GB Micro SD is already smaller than my thumbnail, and a lot more resilient than a hard drive with moving parts, and weighs A LOT less. Why would you distribute a chunk of metal when you can distribute a small piece of plastic instead?

Re:Are hard drives the tape drives of the future?

[Vortran]

Excellent insight, but I think the medium is too expensive and 'klunky' for software delivery. I'm afraid the hard disk drive that consumes electricity and has a motor is the 8" floppy disk of the 21st century.

With 2-sided, dual layey DVDs and ever increasing capacity/density in that type of media, I think the mechanical hard disk will just fizzle out. If a need to send 60GB (or more) of code for a software deliverry, sending a few high-density DVDs will be more cost effective.

I do think that you will see the HDD as an archiving medium. I'm already doing that because it seems a good way to store a few terabytes of video and image data offline. My only concern is shelf-life. I'd hate to go plug in my 320GB external drive to look at video and pictures from my trip to Yosemite 5 years from now and get "Read failure: sector not found"

I already have experienced media degradation (read: unreadable CD-ROM) from blue-dye CD-ROMs I burned in 1997/98 and stored correcty never scratched, etc.

So what?

[algae]

They'll just be getting the chips from Samsung or STM, same as everyone else. Seagate's expertise is in making spindles and drive controllers. I'm not saying they only thing they have to add to the technology is their name, but... well actually, that's exactly what I'm saying. I'd much rather buy a SSD (a kind of stupid acronym in itself - there *is* no "disk") from say STM or Samsung or one of the actual manufacturers.

Re:So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

SSD could mean Solid-state Storage Device.

Re:So what?

[Emetophobe]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_state_drive

A Solid State Drive (aka SSD or Solid State Disk) is a data storage device that uses non-volatile or volatile solid-state memory to store persistent data. They are an alternative to conventional hard disk drives, which have moving parts that usually result in slower memory access times.

While not technically disks, the term Solid State Disk may be used because they are typically used as an alternative for disk drives. They are commonly comprised of NAND flash (non-volatile) or SDRAM (volatile).

Recoverability

[Anonymous Coward]

Flash drives are basically goodness by most measures -- more reliable, quiet, less power use, and faster (or at least, the potential to be far faster than mechanical drives).

But a friend's recent experience with liquid spilled on a laptop illustrates an interesting point about recoverability. The laptop went, and I quote, "bzzzt ... POP!". The motherboard was fried, and as it turned out so was the hard drive, probably due to a voltage spike. But a data recovery service was still able to recover the data from the physical platters. I guess with flash drives, those days will be history -- when a flash drive is gone, it's probably gone for good.

Re:Recoverability

[csnydermvpsoft]

I guess with flash drives, those days will be history -- when a flash drive is gone, it's probably gone for good.

Perhaps then, people will finally realize the wisdom of regular backups (or implement them, if they hadn't yet progressed beyond the realization stage).

Here and now

[MikShapi]

Guys, hate to break it to you, but anyone who wants to be running on solid state, is.

3 IDE-CF adapters cost me 8$ including shipment on ebay last week. My game box runs of a 16GB CF card (200$ - new - on ebay, available for months now) with vista (yes, vista on a 22MB/sec CF, though I've gotten it there via ghosting rather than via a regular install), and my living room PC runs XP off a 2GB CF card that cost about 25$ new (again, ebay price, store prices typically a tad higher).

Yes, 20MB/sec is less than the 50-70MB/sec read speed an average harddrive gives, but that is offset by near-zero seek times.

If under windows, make sure you turn off:
* SWAP
* ntfs Access time writes (fs tuning utility, one command from shell, or a reg key)

And if you want to be even more thorough and flash-friendly:
* 8_3 filename writes (in ntfs every file has two filenames one that is backwards-compatible to 8_3 naming. No need to waste CF writes on that)
* Any software that routinely writes stuff to disk.

If you're fanatic, do:
* Event logger
* Indexing

If you want >16GB, you can buy several, then use LVM/dynamic disk/multiple partitions depending on your OS to use that.

I just have the core 16GB (about 8GB occupied) on the game box, and do the rest of the storage (aka keep the Program Files directory) on the RAID5 fileserver over Gigabit LAN, which gives me about 40MB/sec read and write, which is IMHO sufficient. Were I not to rely on that, I'd get another two 16GB cards on a CF-IDE adapter, plonk a RAID0 on them and voilla (assuming you can get windows to make dynamic disks of removable storage, which the CF cards are still recognized as, even when on the IDE bus), which I am by no means certain.
If you're on Linux, no problem there. anything and verything can be raided and LVM'd at will.

A RAID0 of these would cost 400$, give 32GB and give about 40MB/sec performance.

So no need to get overly excited with SSD. They're just an overpriced nicely bundled version of what is already cheaply available, kinda like external harddrives. And they'll keep on being that for a while yet.

Re:Here and now

[KingOfBLASH]

The prices you're quoting are ridiculously expensive though. When 250 GB hard disks are selling for $70 nobody is going to pay $200 per 16GB compact flash card, or $1,250 for a 100GB hard drive. When you start talking about laptops, where CF hard disks would be a big plus, it's still under $100 to get a hard disk that is much bigger than CF available for the price. The only reason you might choose CF over a regular hard disk for a notebook would be in order to lower your power consumption -- but if you were doing an application serious enough for that why wouldn't you just use an embedded system designed for really low consumption? People who just want to be able to work on their powerpoints for more time would be better off just using the extra money to buy a battery.

Bottom line: It's not that you can't use CF for storage, it's just too expensive per GB to do so.

Re:Here and now

[Deagol]

Are there any adapters for laptop-sized IDE drives? I've got an old, crusty ~400MHz laptop with a couple of gigs of drive space that my wife uses for casual browsing. Runs Win98 ok w/ a maxed out 160MB of RAM. Runs firefox well enough, I suppose. If I could beef up the drive space and increase the access times at the same time, that would be a big win, never mind silencing the loud HD the thing has.

Re:Here and now

[LarryRiedel]

Are there any adapters for laptop-sized IDE drives?

Addonics CF-IDE.

Larry

Re:Here and now

[Anonymous Coward]

Bottom line: It's not that you can't use CF for storage, it's just too expensive per GB to do so.

Err.. unless you actually want solid state storage (for the various speed/reliability advantages that everyone's talking about), and you're in a situation where even a "mere" 16GB is more than you need.

I don't think he was arguing that CF is competitive in terms of GB/$, just that it's affordable enough to be a reasonable option in situations where number-of-GB doesn't matter. I wouldn't put my media collection on CF (yet), but boot from it and run the "system" from it? Fuck yeah! Why not?

4GB should be enough for anyone. ;-)

Re:Here and now

[KingOfBLASH]

Which brings us back to the question I asked: why, in that case, wouldn't you choose an embedded system over a normal power hungry computer with cf?

Re:Here and now

[LuSiDe]

3 IDE-CF adapters cost me 8$ including shipment on ebay last week.

A valid argument, but dirtier in the case and worse airflow. I'm sure they'll be more expensive from a more valid source, and you also need a CF card. My SSD/PATA is really slick and small. Perfect for an embedded computer like e.g. firewall, or even RAID system.

If under windows, make sure you turn off: * SWAP * ntfs Access time writes (fs tuning utility, one command from shell, or a reg key)

To lower the number of writes many additional tweaks on OS are recommended. Start in /var. For *BSD there are some sweet howtos available. Search for "USB Flash FreeBSD install howto" or sth similar. Linux is probably similar.

If you want >16GB, you can buy several, then use LVM/dynamic disk/multiple partitions depending on your OS to use that.

I don't want/need 16 GB to run an OS on, thankyouverymuch. I keep data and OS strictly on seperate devices, although I consider exceptions for e.g. /usr/ports, /usr/src, and a few more directories because those tend to have more writes than others. Most people interested in SSD do not need 16 GB either. They just need to put a (custom) OS on the 'disk' and be done with it. It won't do much writes, and will last long. The key term here is 'embedded'. If you thought you were among the target customer base with your RAID-0 (???) game desktop, alas. You're not in the target market segment by a long shot. SSD is not for you (yet). What fascinates me, personally, is the theoretical construction of using flssh as r/o medium and a (SATA) harddisk to write data to hence r/w medium. If a file is written once and then merely accessed, it'd be written to flash medium. Else, it'd be written to the magnetic disk.

So no need to get overly excited with SSD. They're just an overpriced nicely bundled version of what is already cheaply available, kinda like external harddrives. And they'll keep on being that for a while yet.

Yes, the technology is flash plus some additional features, but you failed to understand an external harddrive (ESATA or USB) has additional advantages over an internal one. Ofcourse, it has disadvantages as well. My point is that there is no such thing as the perfect fruit for the cake. You also failed to understand SSD has additional features CF does not have. For example, my SSD/PATA has ECC. Yes, it was more expensive, but it can sustain more writes than the average flash medium. Sound, speed and reliability are other arguments when compared with normal drives. All this stuff is nicely summed up on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_state_drive PS: There are some FS specifically made for flash drives such as JFF2. My Zaurus ran such.

Re:Here and now

[MikShapi]

Depends how you define an embedded system.
Is it anything that comes on mini-itx form-factor or smaller?
Is it arm/mips/other-non-x86-arch?

I want x86 compatibility on my game rig. Guess why.
I also want PCIe16 etc.

For my game rig, I use a mobile-on-desktop motherboard (with PCIe) and a T5600 Core2Duo (similar to an E4600 only with 667MHz FSB instead of an 800 one, and a TDP of 34 Watts rather than 65 Watts. Oh, and look ma, no fan.

For my living room box I use a VIA Eden EN12000 board with a PicoPSU-120.

Embedded enough? :-)

Re:Would benefit from user education, OS optimisat

[Anonymous Coward]

Thats the great part. With hard drives you only know that a sector has gone bad after a read. With flash you know immediately when a write fails. When this happens the sector will be marked bad and the write will be attempted somewhere else. Eventually enough bad sectors will cause the drive to become full, but you never lose any data. Just boot from another disk and make a backup. Reads do not harm the disk in any way, only writes do. Even though flash has a more limited number of write cycles, the fact that it fails more reliably makes it more reliable over all.

Re:Flash/RAM Drives? GET IT STRAIGHT

[JambisJubilee]

First, read this comment

Now I don't want to hear any more of this "flash wears out" FUD.

Solid State "Drive"

[Anonymous Coward]

Drive, eh. We are witnessing another one of those anachronism a la TTY in formation.

It's true - Flash drives spread written data out

[RudeIota]

Flash drives simply don't write the same first bits over and over again. Their firmware is programmed to 'intelligently' spread written data across the entire storage area as fairly as possible.

Between this, massive storage capacity (think: 'dilution') and what will surely be engineering improvements, flash drives should prove to be very reliable.

I for one, welcome out solid state overlords.

Not totally convinced..

[anethema]

Does anyone have a good technique about wear leveling at the lower levels? While I'm sure the engineers at Seagate can solve the problem fine, the examples given here of why wear leveling will work --"transferring 2x the capacity of the drive daily gives you 200 years!"-- is a total bullshit argument. That is assuming filling and emptying the entire drive so all sectors get written to. Don't even need wear leveling then.

Also, at the hardware level, how can the wear leveling controller know if the space is free or not. In a file system the entry is just removed from the FAT. So as far as the drive can tell, this data hasn't been 'erased' and cannot be used for wear leveling ?

Again I'm sure Seagate knows what it is doing, but does anyone have any white papers on the lower levels of how this stuff works? I'm an EE so it wont go over my head :)

Re:Not totally convinced..

[Eivind]

There are many techniques. If you really want details, get a book or hit wikipedia. But to give you a general idea:

Each block has, infact, a bit more storage than the amount exposed. There are error-correcting checksums and stuff, allowing the drive to detect (and sometimes correct) errors, among these are, typically, a counter saying how many times the block has been written to.

If the drive notices that one block has a lot more writes than the average block, it can swap the contents of those two blocks internally, and then make a note of this swap. (just a simple mapping 0x000FE37 isat: 0x00A32B) The host-OS never even notices this, it keeps asking for block 0x000FE37, and keeps getting the same content that was always there, only that content is now *physically* stored somewhere else.

It's a lot as if your office is worn-down and needs to be redone, and management puts you in a different office, but let you keep your old phone-number. People calling for you won't even notice that *physically* you're now somewhere else, all they know is, they dial that number, they reach you.

Every OS with virtual memory does the same thing to RAM (though for a different reason) the logical adresses that the programs see are related to the *physical* (actual) ram-locations by a lookup-table.

It's *really* not a hard problem to solve, and it's been thoroughly solved for literally decades. Thus you really *CAN* assume that the entire drive is (aproximately) evenly used. Which means those calculations aren't bullshit afterall. Even if you just constantly rewrote a single block, what would happen is after a while (say 1000 writes) that block would, internally in the flash, be replaced with another physical block, if you write another 1000 times that'd happen again and so on.

Yes, there's a sligth overhead: Every time you do 1000 writes, the flash needs to do (aproximately) 1003 writes and 3 reads. That is a small overhead though, and it can be reduced by upping the constant from 1000 to 10000 say. (which would result in wear being sligthly less evenly distributed, but nevermind)

Re:Not totally convinced..

[Mr2001]

If the drive notices that one block has a lot more writes than the average block, it can swap the contents of those two blocks internally, and then make a note of this swap. (just a simple mapping 0x000FE37 isat: 0x00A32B) Where is that note stored? Is the wear-leveling metadata itself subject to wear leveling?

Re:Not totally convinced..

[Eivind]

It is stored in one of the extra data-areas I mentioned. And yes, this block is itself subject to wear-levelling.

Allthough, notice, that won't happen that often, even if you do a lot of writes to one block. Because after you do 1000 (or 10000) writes to a single block, that block gets physically moved. Which nessecitates *1* write to the block containing the mapping.

Which means that *that* block would get 1000 writes after 1 *million* writes to a single block. address. An in practice much later, nobody has a usage-pattern that consists of *only* writing repeatedly to a single location. In practice, the mapping-block is exceedingly unlikely to need moving at all. But yeah, it too will be moved if that is indeed nessecary. There are several simple tricks that are used for finding it (the simplest being having a double-indirect mapping where the first tells you where the mapping-block is)

That would offcourse mean that eventually, the block that tells you where the mapping-block is needs to be moved. Except in practice that ain't so. The mapping-block is updated at the soonest after 1000 written blocks. (or 10.000), which mean that *that* block may need to be moved after 1 million written blocks (or 100 million if using 10.000), so the *double* indirect block, the one that says where the mapping-block is, may need to be moved after 1000000000 to 1000000000000 blocks are written. But that won't happen, because the flash is worn out long before. (and besides, it'd take hundreds of years to write that much at the possible speed)

Another possibility would be having a "magic-value" that signifies the block that is mappings, and to scan for it on startup. (thereafter storing it's physical adress in a tiny bit of ram) that solution has the advantage that it extends indefinitely. (which is no advantage in practice but for those that are theoretical purists...) on the other hand this means slower startup, which sometimes matter. Your mileage may vary, as they say.

In any case, this problem is solved.

Re:Not totally convinced..

[Anonymous Coward]

This (plus your later reply) is the single best answer to the "yes, wear levelling, but how?" question I've seen on Slashdot. I'm thoroughly convinced.

Thanks.

PCI-Express Please

[TrickiDicki]

Can we make sure they're connected via PCI-Express rather than PCI please? PCI is just too slow. I used a solid-state disk that plugged into the PCI bus a while ago and didn't get the expected performance improvements. Good ol' RAM-disks worked tho because they weren't limited by PCI.

Re:PCI-Express Please

[Emetophobe]

Solid state drives will be a drop in replacement to regular hard drives, meaning you can just plug them into a PATA or SATA cable (depending on what the drive supports).

Is this news?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice to hear that Seagate is going to bring them out by 2008, but drives like that already exist for many years. This is not a new development.

I use one in a media fileserver, for the boot/OS disk. It is made by TRANSCEND, and looks like a largish 40pin connector. It plugs directly in the PATA connector on the motherboard (see, this board still has a PATA connector, it is that old).
They are (sort of) popular in this kind of applications. Building a solid-state system out of PC standard components.
I have also seen adapters that plug in a PATA connector and accept a flash memory card for storage.

Some of those "Linux router" and "plug and play raid storage server" projects use this kind of device as their boot/OS disk. You can even buy them preloaded with software.

Newton soups and Palm databases

[samalone]

Yes, the Newton used "soups" (essentially simple databases) for data storage instead of a filesystem, but I never had the impression that this was because of flash memory. I believe it had more to do with reducing the size and complexity of applications by having long-term storage use the same data format as heap storage. On the Newton, you didn't have to "format" data when storing it to a soup or "parse" it when reading it. As far as applications were concerned, soups stored associative arrays just like the rest of NewtonScript did.

Soups were stored in a flat namespace rather than a hierarchical one, largely because the Newton was designed as a single-user device where each application worked with a single data set. The flat namespace and standard data format encouraged data sharing between applications: it was trivially easy to lookup a name in the address book, for example.

The original Palm OS also used "databases" in a flat namespace rather than a filesystem, and for largely the same reasons. Again, I don't think that flash memory had much to do with it. In fact, when Palm OS started supporting external flash memory cards, they used the FAT filesystem (for compatibility with digital cameras and desktop card readers) rather than porting their existing database format.

Re:Flash/RAM Drives? GET IT STRAIGHT

[Doc Ruby]

Except what that analysis conveniently ignores is that shuffling around the static stored content to ensure even wear from the frequently rewritten content really destroys the performance. Especially when defragmenting so single files are stored more within single blocks readable in bursts, rather than fragmented around many blocks and needing to be filtered for the required bits. And all that shuffling further wears the drive.

Now I don't want to hear any of this "Flash is just like RAM/HD" BS. It's a fantasy.

Don't put your swapfile on it

[ninevoltz]

Don't put your swapfile on it, or you will be in for some fun.

Re:Don't put your swapfile on it

[Anonymous Coward]

"Don't put your swapfile on it, or you will be in for some fun." - Not sure what you're referring to, i.e.-> What specific KIND of SSD here that is, but... I use a CENATEK "RocketDrive" PCI 2.2 bus & PC-133 SDRAM!

On the 2nd 1gb partition on my SSD, I put webpage caches from browsers, temp ops (via %environment% variables/SET statements), & logging (such as EventLogs, these CAN be moved via registry hacks) onto that one, & I use NTFS compressed partitions (this helps).

By using NTFS compression, formatted with 4096 byte sectors (to match cache & read/read ahead mechanisms the filesystem driver uses as its size for this)? This acts on text based data on this partition to benefit perfomance in a couple ways:

1.) Since text compresses FAR above even a 2:1 ratio, my data from temp ops, webpage caches (the HTML stuff) & logging stores excellently, and reads up faster from disk (smaller files) & the NTFS compression stage into RAM is offset excellently by today's fast CPU's + RAM as well...

2.) And, like the pagefile.sys benefits extolled below? I avoid the fragmentation & clutter that logging, %temp% ops, & webpage caches create, + they access for reuse 1000's of times faster than they would off std. mechanical HDD's... by far!

3.) I also avoid head movements on my main C: drive this way as well, thus, allowing programs to launch faster since the HDD is not burdened with I/O for head movements for paging, %temp% ops, logging, OR webpage caches!

----

By using NON-NTFS COMPRESSED partitions (for paging) also formatted to 4096 byte sectors (to match read/read-ahead mechanisms in the filesystem PLUS to match how the pagefile.sys is read/wrote)? I get these benefits (for pagefile.sys placement):

A.) I put my pagefile.sys onto its 1st partition, & it works VERY well this way (taking away the burden of I/O from my main C: drive, in doing paging operations & thus, allowing programs to operate faster because no head movements are in the way doing paging!

B.) PLUS, I avoid fragmentation of the pagefile.sys itself, + other files too as it grows (or contracts @ bootups).

----

You may be tempted to state "logging takes a speed hit" & yes, it does using NTFS compression especially... but, this is largely offset by my ability to double or more in storage of log data (due to compression & the fact logs are usually text data which compresses excellently), in the speed of access to the files, AND the fact today's CPU's + RAM are SO FAST, that the compressed writing stage is not as big of a "hit" to performance as it was years ago... vs. today!

APK

P.S.=> Plus, the ns speed (vs. ms, many orders of magnitude slower speeds of access/reaccess of std. mechanical HDD's) of RAM used on SSD's allows for SUCH fast access/reaccess of files on SSD's, it helps a great deal there too... apk

Re:Warranty? SWAPPING

[dwarfking]

Or maybe another option? Why not have a flash-based hard drive as the primary and a CF/SD slot for the paging and temp partition?

Drop in a 4GB CF or SanDisk card that is used for swap and temp that also has wear leveling and some form of SMART to identify failures. Then if this card starts to wear out, you pop it out and replace it with another one.

No need to have a one-disk-does-all storage solution on a machine.

SSD Swap usage - Linux VS Windows

[rnmartinez]

Hi guys, I am a little new to this stuff so bear with me on this one. If I understand the tech correctly, an SSD drive would eliminate the need for swap space under windows right? would the same hold true for Linux? Would an SSD work under the current kernel - I thought it just worked like a hard drive?

Sector Size

[wonkavader]

Bizzare. Seems like for years, the tuning idea is find the biggest sector size you can live with. Benchmark with different sector sizes (going up and up) and find the diminishing return. This because seeks are slow and reads are fast.

I now benefit from SMALLER sector sizes. Reads are slow and seeks are fast. So that means I need to tune my filesystems and databases DOWNWARD to, say, 128 byte blocks. Or 64 bytes blocks? CPU overhead of 10 times the number of reads is probably very little compared to that tedious pull time.

Can somebody with a math bent try to quantify this?

Forensics and data theft

[cyriustek]

This wear leveling controller may help to more evenly distribute the read/writes, so that the drive can last longer, but it is also can be a boon to the folks into forensics or stealing data from "wiped" drives.

Since each write will be allocated to a different section, one does not really know if he is overwriting information that should be declassified. This may make it easier to recover information from the drive. See Forensic Data Recovery from Flash Memory by Marcel Breeuwsma, Martien de Jongh, Coert Klaver, Ronald van der Knijff and Mark Roeloffs.

Re:Would benefit from user education, OS optimisat

[Bearhouse]

Good reply from AC, just to add to that.

1. In my experience, flash memory can sometimes fail totally. This may be due to it being often removable, and accessed in rather non-robust ways, (USB ports, card readers). Hence (presumably) gets nuked by static etc. My attempts at recovering such 'dead' flash devices have not been great, so far. When it's dead, it's dead...even re-format does not work sometimes.
Presumably, internal flash 'disk drive replacements' would be rather more robust.

2. When flash drives first came out, 'classical' data-recovery tools seem to have difficulty recovering from acidental deletes and formats etc., since they seemed (I'm not an expert) to be looking for HDD-like behaviour. I remember reading an interesting paper long ago about the consequences of 'random walk' data storage for recovery... Since then, things have improved, and a lot of tools claim to be/are able to recover data from flash. Of course, I never need these, since I have good backups, ahem.

BTW, I was recently at a client site (for once without my PC and DVDs, CDs, flash drives etc. stuffed with tools) when the sales manager wiped his hard disk. Their in-house IT support was - as usual - no help. I download one of my fav. simple tools,
http://www.snapfiles.com/get/restoration.html
ran it from a USB, copied the undeleted files to a USB HDD and bingo! Another happy customer.

Check it out - if the PC boots (into windoz) it does the job...

RAM market impact

[PingPongBoy]

how big were the chips? How big are the chips now?

Do the math indeed.

I have filled my hard disks and they're always sitting nearly full - that will reduce the number of available bits for rewriting. But I don't rewrite every single file. Some files are updated a lot for a span of weeks, but as my focus is on these files the other files just sit. If there's enough Flash memory, files that I know will almost never require rewriting should be made candidates for shifting around. That would make even more bits available for rewriting. Otherwise if the disk is always near full, it will be the free bits ready for rewriting over and over, and these will wear out.

Look for reviews that test with almost full drives, and speculate a file shifting mechanism may become available.

If the drive is almost empty, even if I swap big time every day, and that would be ultra painful because it seems that if I use more than the available RAM on my Vista, the swapping chews up my computer and makes it so slow that everything crawls - it's like hundreds of Megs are swapped and swapped and swapped for what I don't know - even so, that's about writing 10 times a day, 3650 times a year, which is much much less than 1,000,000. If the disk is an itty bitty 20 Gb, and wear leveling scatters 1 Gb of swap daily, it's an average of 0.1 writes per day for the whole disk and only 36.5 times a year.

I say let me swap on one of these because the rotating disk is a bitch to swap on. But by the time I can get to swap on such a drive, I'll get a computer with more RAM I hope, and I'll try to force that machine to its knees too.

Come to think of it, if the swap if fast, what will happen to the RAM market? Some people don't need gazigabytes and if the hard drive is a cheap RAM alternative, will RAM makers reduce R&D? Also, having less RAM equals having more swap -- good for making you replace your hard drive. The truth of the matter is that I don't need to use so much RAM at any one time. If I'm typing that takes very little memory. However, I manipulate the occasional image on MS Paint and have noticed that on the biggest files more than 1 Gb of RAM is consumed to work on a 100 Mb file. Even this little RAM eater would be ok with swapping to a Flash memory. Having 2 Gb of RAM with such a fast swap would be good enough for most people as long as the swap space expands with technology and is significantly less expensive. We may also hope that more R&D will be spent on Flash to remove the rewrite limit as well as speed up access.

Re:Warranty? SWAPPING

[Nom du Keyboard]

paging on a flash drive is waste of money - why spend so much on reliable flash ram (more reliable than HDD anyway) so you can use it to PAGE??

Two problems here with your idea:

1: Paging is the most disk intensive part of computing, and therefore offers the greatest performance increase in going to an SSD. To just use the SSD for ordinary program storage negates much of the advantage of having a faster drive.

2: The idea of an SSD is to get away from a mechanical drive due to power requirements, its much more fragile nature, and slower speeds. You want to include BOTH.

Re:Would benefit from user education, OS optimisat

[chuck]

When flash fails, it fails to write. You can still read the data.

Fanless media extension box....

[Kjella]

...has anyone managed to build a fanless media extension box that does 1080p decoding (H.264, VC-1, MPEG2) including normal trailers off the web etc., not just HD DVD/Blu-Ray? I've been thinking of putting one together, with a fanless CPU, fanless graphics card and CF drive + network for bulk data access. Anyone made a project like that which works well?

Quit making up bullshit.

[Anonymous Coward]

Every manufacturer's firmware does wear levelling, and none of them know or care about filesystems. Its simply moving frequently written logical addresses around to different physical addresses. There is nothing complex, difficult or magical about it.

Re:Warranty? SWAPPING

[Wolfrider]

--Thayat's some good thinkin' there, Clem. ;-) Makes sense.

--HOWEVER, if people would just put more actual RAM in their boxes, lots of swap space becomes redundant. (If you have 4GB+ RAM and a 64-bit host OS, you can prolly get away with 64-512MB of Swap.)

--Remember that the disk-swapping code was originally written **because of** lack of sufficient RAM... ;-)

working on it!

[Anonymous Coward]

as this drives dont have mobile parts that can be damaged, engineers are currently furiously working on new and effective ways you can break/damage this flash devices.

Why do they call them disks?

[dinomite]

Dad, why do they call them disks?

Re:Would benefit from user education, OS optimisat

[Reziac]

Thanks for the info, and the link. Never hurts to have one more tool in the kit.

I haven't had a flash unit fail yet myself, but I don't use 'em a lot (mainly just my camera's xD card). It does sometimes play dead and pretend it wants reformatting, but I think that's disagreement between itself and XP's notion of a USB1.x driver (old machine). I ignore its complaints, and after a couple more access attempts the problem goes away.

Someone did torture tests a couple years ago and found that most consumer-grade flash units survive everything you can throw at them physically (microwaving, hammering, one even survived having a nail driven through it) but I don't recall if they tested for static shocks -- which are more likely to be encountered in Everyday Life[tm].

The "death without warning" issue is what would bother me the most. My W.D. HDs invariably have given me months of notice (sometimes years) before going totally tits-up; there's ALWAYS time for one final backup. Works-today, Dead-tomorrow is more incentive for backups, yeah, but there's always the backup you didn't quite get to yet....

On the plus side, flash HDs would lend themselves handily to having multiple removable drives -- don't even need to redesign the PC case, just make a unit that fits in a standard 5" drive bay, that could take a dozen or so, the size of current thumb drives, plugged in side by side. That would also help with the size vs cost issue -- a dozen 100GB drives being usually as good a solution as one 1000GB drive, and much safer from a data recovery standpoint, plus you could start with one and add as needed very easily. With an IDE or SATA adapter, it could even be used with an old machine.

Where's The Wear?

[Vortran]

Why do I keep seeing people say not to run sawp on the CF/SSD? Why is there some 'wear leveling' thing? Obvisouly, I'm not understanding something, but in my ignorance I assume that a solid state device, save for heat, should last forever. So if someone would be so kind as to explain..? I'd love to run my swap on SSD if it meant my system would run faster! The biggest bottleneck I currently have is hard drive throughput with mechanical drives.

Re:Where's The Wear?

[MikShapi]

Flash memory has a finite amount of write cycles before it craps out (unlike a harddrive that could, in theory and disregarding eventual mechanical failure, keep going forever). Reads can be done indefinitely.

Here's some stuff to consider:

1. First generation flash had about 10,000 writes per cell (after which that cell would become bad, like a bad sector on a harddrive)

2. I've heard estimates on modern flash ranging from 100K to 1000K.

3. FACT: If you grind flash with an application that writes continuously (say, run a database server off it), your flash will die in days.

4. FACT: If you do browsing/office stuff on a flash card, you're likely to upgrade your computer long before the flash will fail (and assuming you use it for 15 years, by the time it will, insanely higher capacities will be available for near-zero money (like, say, 2GB is available for 20$ today). The caveat is computers with too little memory (say, if you run XP on 256MB of RAM or lower, or vista on 512MB) which resort to swapping very often and do so intensively. Another is if you get infected by some malware that does a lot of writing to disk. These scenarios may land you squarely in [3] above.

5. SSD products coming out have other nice features like write averaging - the card makes sure to use all its memory cells equally rather than just dumping data on the first available cells, so some cells don't wear out quicker and optimizing the card for longer life.

6. CF-to-IDE controllers often don't go past implementing PIO4 or do crappy implementation of UDMA33 modes, giving very sorry (5-10MB/sec) performance bottlenecks. Modern cards are well capable of >20MB/sec (by comparison, an el-cheapo 7200RPM harddrive will write at about 40-50MB/sec on the start of the platter and ~20-30MB/sec at the other end, and read at ~60-70MB/sec on the start and ~40MB/sec at the end, sustained speed (bursty bits of tiny data are often prefetched and are waiting on the RAM cache in the drive, giving you full bus (100, 133, 150 or 300MB/sec) speeds when fetched.

By harddrive standards, Flash is still expensive per GB and relatively slow, but quiet, dense and consumes little power. Suitable for some.

Flash/RAM Drives?-Panels/CRTs

[Anonymous Coward]

"This will be pretty similar to how flat screens took over the market from CRT monitors."

Not for those who give a damn about color accuracy or running at something other than native resolution.

I agree: I wrote the article on that for Tech Ed

[Anonymous Coward]

"Dinner on Tuesday night with Kevin Burton pushed this into my mind again. What was he looking at going with for his data center? Solid state drives. This is smart thinking, it makes a lot of sense. The performance gain for using solid state hard drives for any database, not only MySQL, is a "no argument". Buying performance like this does require some cost analysis. You balance performance with cost. Not everyone buys fiber channel even if it buys performance. The performance gain does not outweigh the cost." - by Lindsay Lohan (847467) on Thursday August 23, @08:28PM (#20338141) Per my subject line, I agree... And, so did a certified Microsoft partner, in EEC Systems (now SuperSpeed.com) in 1996- to current day!

An idea of mine way, WAY back then in 1997 (a decade ago, seems hard to believe now it was that long because it seems like yesterday, lol) took them to a finalist position @ Microsoft Tech Ed 2000 & 2001, & 2002 iirc!

(In the hardest category there - SQLServer Performance Enhancement, & the ideas where to place devices DB engines use into RAM on ramdrives, then a mirroring back to backing HDD software-based device driver driven one, called SuperDisk that SuperSpeed.com produced & retailed of unlimited sizing (to RAM amount present)).

I was doing a contract job for them improving their SuperCache product by up to 40% in performance, & decided to write them on my "theories" (some of which you touch on in fact) as to ramdisks being used to enhance performance... & even got into Windows NT magazine as well back in 1996 for this stuff, which was WAY cool (forerunner of today's .NET magazine) in a review by technical editor John Enck.

See some of HOW I personally use an SSD, @ home (logging as you mention is just one & more things that might interest you as well), are here:

http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=27828 3&threshold=-1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&pid=20342 933

(Enjoy the read!)

APK

P.S.=> I also wrote up an article that CENATEK later featured on the front page of their site, when I evaluated an SSD (the one I bought, & it is still running STRONG TO THIS DAY mind you (let's see a FLASH based disk go 5++ years) in the CENATEK "RocketDrive"), I applied the SAME BASE IDEAS to the SSD from the mirroring unlimited sized software-based RamDisk from EEC ideas mentioned above, but now to hardware based ones (they are great)... better/faster ones exist today, using faster busses than mine (PCI 2.2 132mb/sec max) & faster RAM too (PC-133 SDRAM on mine)...

E.G.-> Gigabyte IRAM SATA I 150mb/sec max, & DDR2 RAM, or hopefully soon (I want one is why I state that), the DDRDrive X1... PCI-x & DDR ram! That last one has WAY larger transfer/burst than even the IRAM... & certainly more than mine does! apk