Slashdot Mirror
640gb PCIe Solid-State Drive Demonstrated
Lisandro writes "TG Daily reports that the company Fusion io has presented a massively fast, massively large solid-state flash hard drive on a PCIe card at the Demofall 07 conference in San Diego. Fusion is promising sustained data rates of 800Mb/sec for reading and 600Mb/sec for writing. The company plans to start releasing the cards at 80 GB and will scale to 320 and 640 GB. '[Fusion io's CTO David Flynn] set the benchmark for the worst case scenario by using small 4K blocks and then streaming eight simultaneous 1 GB reads and writes. In that test, the ioDrive clocked in at 100,000 operations per second. "That would have just thrashed a regular hard drive," said Flynn. The company plans on releasing the first cards in December 2007 and will follow up with higher capacity versions later.'"
My blog
Hitachi are saying that they have solved the overwrite problem (at least mitigated it by a factor of 100)
They appear to want to use normal DRAM memory for the running of the drive but then write it permanently to the NAND flash at shutdown/memory full time.
I would assume this involves charging of a small battery and dumping the data later on.
http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2007/09/26/hitachi-reckons-solid-state
liqbase
Um, we were using large RAM disks (the kind that hooked up to SCSI, had a built in UPS and disk to dump RAM contents) many years ago (8 now?) to speed up databases. That was limited by the SCSI bus, but access time and latency were near zero (which was awesome.)
Of course, large back then meant 4G, and the average hard disk was 9G. This is evolutionary, not revolutionary.
You can tell if flash is bad, if worst comes to worst, by reading after writing. Or reading after erasing, and looking for stuck 1's.
'worn out' flash doesn't spontaneously change state. Bits just get stuck and don't erase correctly.
I don't know how flash drives actually handle this, but it isn't magic or impossible to fix.
Also, the lifetime of modern flash is long enough that it is hardly an issue any more, even for normal desktop use. Maybe you don't want to use it for swap *IF* you swap a lot, but given the cost is in the same ballpark as RAM, you could just buy more RAM.
That being said, a few of the guys there said that they pretty much expect these (at the beginning) to do the best sales for companies that are looking to get really really fast database servers going. NOT for scsi san replacements (it's silly to spend $100,000 for something you could get for 10,000 hard drive space wise). Eventually as the price drops... i know of a handful of people who would EASILY pay 1000$ to get one of these on a gaming rig even if it was only 100 gigs. But that right there is already 1/3rd of the price of what it currently is. (assuming it's around 30$ a gig).
Another thing to keep in mind that came up in the conversations... since these are tiny, think about the cost per server rack... and think of the cost per electricity to run. If you take those into consideration, these are actually less expensive that most people would think! A massive rack of hard drives could cost a lot of money in a co-location ... and a lot of electricity to run it all... But then again, we're talking about savings on servers, not general in home use.
When this gets to about 1/3rd of it's current price, that's when you will see these things become TRUELY mainstream both to the average company and home users (be it rich ones who need the latest and greatest).
Fusioni-io -- Link to their site.
Cosidering that this drive is 640GB, that means you would need to write somehwere in the region of 61 PETABYTES of information.
You'd have to write to the drive at a perfect 800 MB/s for 941 days to hit that mark.
It could last as long as 30 years, at full write speed of 800 MB/s if it can handle 1M writes per cell.
At the end of the day, semiconductors this large and high quality are certainly better than tiny bits of rust on rapidly spinning platters.