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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 PDA boots in about 30 seconds, and it doesn't have a harddrive. Booting isn't just loading stuff from a drive, it's hundreds of tests like
- hardware changes
- hardware initialization (e.g. loading firmware)
- searching for drivers
- applications acquiring and releasing resources and checking for stuff like library versions, user names etc.
That's why BIOS initialization often takes time, and yet it works even if the system has no drives.
The only way this would work is hibernating, but hardware would still need to be initialized.
I don't know where you got your info, but 'modern' flash has horrible life-expectancy in terms or write-cycles.
Explanation:
Most flash vendors have moved to MLC (Multi-Level Cell) flash. It's cheaper and denser, but the bit-error rate goes up because you have more bits per cell. The typical life expectancy for MLC is somewhere in the range of 10,000 writes using single-bit error correction. This is compared to 'older' SLC flash which has a write endurance of 100,000 to 300,000 writes.
Now, most vendors making media out of flash take varying degrees of a combination of two approaches (in addition to standard wear-leveling approaches). The first approach is to assume that the majority of the users will only ever store audio or video data so the occasional uncorrectable error won't have much impact as long as it doesn't corrupt the filesystem. The second approach is to use more advanced error correcting algorithms to compensate for the higher bit-error rate.
Using more advanced algorithms, it's possible to get more than 300,000 writes out of a MLC flash-block before the errors become uncorrectable.
P.S. I may be wrong, but I believe flash can have some really odd error conditions. For example, it's possible to disturb a bit in a block just by reading it. I believe it's also possible to disturb a bit in a different block on the same matrix when writing. That's why some form of error correction is always required with NAND flash.