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Hynix 48-GB Flash MCP
Hal_Porter writes to let us know that the third-largest NAND chip maker, Hynix, has announced they have stacked 24 flash chips in a 1.4mm thick multi-chip package. It's not entirely clear from the article whether the resulting 48-GB device is a proof of concept or a product. The article extrapolates to 384 GB of storage in a single package, sometime. Hal_Porter adds: "It's not clear if it's possible to write to them in parallel — if so the device should be pretty damn fast. The usual objection to NAND flash as a hard drive replacement is lifetime. NAND sectors can only be written 100,000 times or so before they wear out, but wear leveling can be done to spread writes evenly over at least each chip. I worked out that the lifetime should be much longer than a typical magnetic hard disk. There's no information on costs yet frankly and it sounds like an expensive proof of concept, but it shows you the sort of device that will take over from small hard disks in the next few years."
... welcome our new 48GB overlords.
Random seek is probably one of the biggest bottlenecks in large databases. There are even databases that optimize reads/writes to be more consecutive on the disk. A drive like that would throw that problem out of the window.
The article does not extrapolate to 384 GB of storage- they extrapolate to 384 Gb of storage which is 48 GB of storage. bits != bytes.
Looks like people are confusing bits and bytes. 48GB does not appear in the article anywhere, so I assume this is obtained by dividing 384Gb by 8.
24 layers x 16Gb package = 384Gb, so the article itself is consistent.
Why is it that you can only write to a NAND gate 100,000 times before it stops working? Is it the material they are using or something with the voltage?
I smoked pot once. But I DID NOT inhale. Will you hire me?
Just think 48 GB of storage space on a Fat32 Filesystem ...
what a waste
Given the low price of RAM these days (1 or 2 gigs being standard) minimising the need for swapping, and availability of tmpfs in the Linux kernel, I'm surprised there are not more flashdrive based linux boxes available these days.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
The problem with the concept of wear leveling is that I hadn't been able to find any specs on such a feature, or whether it actually exists in a product. From what I've heard of it, it would seem that it would only wear-level the free space and often-written files, so writes could still easily hammer some areas more than others, and it gets worse the more you fill up a drive. I'm not sure how it would work the way it's claimed to work, the system would work best if it kept track of the number of writes to a given sector, but that seems like quite a bit of overhead.
The sizes of SSHDs reported recently are kinda like the odd sizes of SCSI drives.
The game.
Even at only 1,000 writes of reliable lifespan, 48 GB could handle 48 TB of writes or over 4,000 hours of continuous writing of compressed HD video (or about 2 years of 40 hr/week writes of a video stream). Checking my average usage of disk I/O finds that I only average about 2 GB of writes per day which would suggest that this device would last me 24,000 days (or 65 years). And if the life is 10,000 or 100,000, then I'd see 10X or 100X that lifespan.
Your mileage may vary, but I'd bet that 99% of users would never keep their computer (especially a laptop that is the more likely application for flash-based drives) for long enough to see the disk fail from wear.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
"The article extrapolates to 384 GB..."
This is one case where I am DEFINITELY not RTFA.
It used to be that there were serious implications if you engaged in flashing, potentially including jail time!
The world has come a long way when any geek can flash thousands of times and not have problems with his hard disk.
KK4SFV
iPod Touch, meet Hynix 48-GB Flash MCP!
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
It is just writing that is limited right? Myself, I'd love to have the space to host all my media, most of which just sits archived on dvd-r. I'd only need to write to the disk once. Seems most people, aside from those who do video production, really only need large amounts of space to serve/store media. Be cool to just keep a 200 gig SATA for regular use and just keep buying these suckers and fillin' them up for all that media. Later, when they're cheap that is.
Commercial products in the high-end flash space are promising 500,000+ writes.
We are not talking about glorified thumb-drive flash memory here, but decent chips with good wear leveling and high quality construction.
Something that should be mentioned when talking about these things is HyperDrive4
http://download.micron.com/pdf/datasheets/flash/na nd/4gb_nand_m40a.pdf
Says 100,000 program/erase cycles right on the first page (though I do note they only 'guarantee' 1k writes for the first block).
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
...would you really want to buy something from a company named Hynix? At worst it sounds like a Unix that smells like ass. At best it sounds like a bunch of stoned Unix devels.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Recently, this whole flash drive business has been popping up in the news, with announcements of a whole gob of commercial solid-state drives based on flash technology and the like. Nonetheless, there is a big void in the flash drive world that, at least at first glance, could be easily filled with trivial technology and off the shelf products but no one seems to be paying any attention.
I'm talking about RAID + flash cards.
Flash cards are everywhere and, although their cost per GB is rather high, a 1GB card is easily affordable (1GB microSD card for less than 10 euros) and prices are dropping constantly. If someone decided to build a RAID card reader, we could easily get a foot in the door. For about 60 euros it would be possible to get something between a slowish but reliable 6GB flash drive or a speedy and snappy 1GB flash drive.
So why exactly didn't anyone thought of this? We already have IDE CF card readers, some models supporting 2 drives, that can be had for about 6 euros. Why not a RAID flash card reader?
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
I clearly am going to need to be set up for group EIGHT access.
I've been running Windows 2000 on a 4GB Kingston Ultimate Compactflash card for the past eight months without a problem.
It has 100,000 write cycles per sector and I reckon about 8000 sectors, so that's 800 million writes for the life time of the card.
My Win2k writes about 10,000 times per session, so with three sessions a day it should last 73 years. The card only holds its data for 10 years so it's no problem.
100,000 write cycles is plenty, so long as you buffer the writes and limit their frequency. All you need to do is either put a big honking RAM writeback cache next to the FlashRAM, or enforce writeback caching in the OS. If you can get the write frequency down to about two writes per hour, and do good load leveling, your FlashRAM will last for 5 years, which is about as good as most consumer grade hard disks (and possibly better, since the 'expired' FlashRAM drive could still be perfectly readable). Two writes per hour may sound like a very aggressive goal, but it wouldn't be so hard if you preferred to evict clean pages from cache before dirty pages (which is not so bad, since the read latency of FlashRAM is not nearly as long as that for a spinning platter, so refilling evicted pages is not too expensive).
just a ghost in the machine.
Hynix, has announced they have stacked 24 flash chips in a 1.4mm thick multi-chip package
According to NASA, it may even be possible to stack 48 chips in a 2.8mm package. Scientists also speculate someday we may be able to achieve up to 240 chips in a 14mm thick package.
Has anyone else wondered, with all of this extra data at its command, how is Tron going to defeat the Master Control Program this time?
For anyone interested, 25um thin is VERY impressive for thinning silicon. (and I am a microelectronics package engineer) It's thinner than a sheet of 8x11 paper, and allows the wafer to flex so easily you can literally roll it up like paper. (this is silicon, mind you, which is brittle like glass!)
Wow, and all the graphics were done on a Super Foonly, which had at best a couple of meagbytes.
Whether it might be "ridiculous" or not, for MLC (high capacity) NAND flash, failure rates are such that device lifetime is indeed limited to several thousand (depending on vendor/device) erase/write cycles.
I don't quite know what you mean by "glorified thumb-drive flash memory" or "high quality construction", but the reality of the situation is that the only NAND flash that is available at competitive prices is at the (cheap, dense) corner of the market, and that's where the Hynix 16Gib die referred to in the story linked above is.
I thought we were getting a new RPN graphing calculator. Doh.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
I use a CENATEK "RocketDrive" Solid-State RamDisk that is on a PCI 2.2 bus & uses PC-133 SDRAM! I have owned it since 2003 & it's STILL running strong (let's see a FLASH based one last 5++ years & still work)!
There have been FASTER performing units releasing since then (Gigabyte IRAM, uses SATA 150 bus, & DDR2 RAM, & an even FASTER unit is coming in the DDRDrive X1, which uses PCI-Express bus, & DDR RAM (this is THE ONE to look for imo)).
On mine, I use the 2nd 1gb partition on my SSD for:
====
Webpage Webbrowser caches
Temp ops (via %TEMP% & %TMP% environment variables/SET statements)
Logging (Such as EventLogs from the OS, & inside apps themselves like Windows firewall, or ZoneAlarm for example)
----
* EventLogs CAN be moved via registry hacks onto that one by the by:
SYSTEM LOG:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Servic es\Eventlog\System
APPLICATION LOG:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Servic es\Eventlog\Application
SECURITY LOG:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Servic es\Eventlog\Security
(Check the FILE value in each - then, you will have the actual locations of them AND YOU CAN MOVE THEM!)
====
PLUS - & I use NTFS compressed partitions (this helps, with GOOD reason, read on).
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... you'd be right as rain!
HOWEVER, 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!
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
P.S.=> Anyhow/anyways, how I use mine is much for t
Flash chips have a standard interface: a set of control lines and an 8 or 16 bit address/data bus. In multichip flash packages, each chip is typically mapped to a portion of the address space. This also allows backwards compatibility when the die density eventually doubles. (e.g. I was using some Micron parts where the 4Gb part was a 2x 2Gb MCP. A couple months later and the chip was revised to 1x 4Gb.)
If you want parallel read, you're going to need a whole lotta pins, and corresponding board area. Whereas the point of the MCP is to reduce pin count and board area. MCPs are for highly integrated devices like cellphones and portable media players, where space is at a premium. The throughput of one Flash chip is sufficient for these applications.
...but decent chips with good wear leveling and high quality construction. Pardon my ignorance, but wouldn't the number of writes to any given cell be independent from any wear leveling? That is, unless you're talking about writes to the device as a whole, at which point the point becomes moot because you can decrease the duty cycle arbitrarily by adding more redundant memory.As for write cycles possible, while probably not the most authoritative of resources, wiki says: The endurance of NAND flash is much greater than that of NOR flash (typically 1,000,000 cycles vs. 100,000 cycles). This is because programming and erasure in NOR flash rely on different microscopic processes (hot electron injection and quantum tunneling, respectively), while they are perfectly symmetric in NAND flash (Fowler-Nordheim tunneling). [5] The asymmetric nature of NOR flash programming and erasure increases the rate at which memory cells degrade, over many program/erase cycles.
The superior symmetric programming method of NAND flash has in fact been adopted in many NOR flash designs, so that some modern NOR chips boast endurance comparable to NAND flash. [5] (pp 5-7)
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
I personally think flash memory is going to take over from traditional backup tapes, not hard drives. The problem seems to be writability and that might be a physical problem. If however, we get to build 48GB cartridges they come pretty close to small business backup tapes. Flash drives are very portable like tapes while hard drives are very 'sensitive' to shocks and other external factors.
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