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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.'"
640gb ought to be enough for anybody.
Who, what, when, where, why?
Price would seem to be a pretty important detail...
What's the MTBF?
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I could imagine using this as an OS drive. No sooner do you let your finger off the power button than the login screen appears.
The game.
(drool!)
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Its fast, but not as fast as I would have hopped with parallel access. They better get the speed up or the cost down to hit it big. Right now I'd take either direction, as they both have decent applications. Good progress though, time will tell.
I hope this means that laptops and large capacate media players with extremely long battery life are not too far away.
I think people expect too much from SSDs. The hard drive is far from the dominant power consumption component in a notebook. The CPU, chipset, GPU and display panel each consume more power than a notebook hard drive does. If you follow a modified version of Amdahl's law (not a law, but whatever), you want to fix the biggest problem first, and that is either the display or CPU. An LED backlit display can save some power, and running a lower power rating CPU saves power too. Compared to that, the savings of swapping HDD for SSD is negligible. On a standard notebook, I think you might add 15 minutes to battery life, which is still far from "extremely long battery life".
In media players, doubling in capacity every year is a reasonable expectation.
According to the article, they are looking at pricing to be 30 dollars a gig. That is pretty pricey.
That means their low-end 80GB drive will be around $2400+ or so US dollars depending on tax, shipping, retail prices etc.
should its battery fall out
The fuck?
by egg troll (515396)
Oh, carry on.
By which he means, set up a completely unrealistic benchmark which shows his flash drive in the best possible light, and a traditional drive in the worst possible light.
I still want one of these, but that benchmark is nothing to be proud of.
Combination - fun iPhone puzzling
Damn expensive, $19,200 for 640GB......... I want it but cant afford it.. Josh
Just because it works, Doesn't make it right. - JTM
considering that large quad-socket boards have space for 8 Dimms per CPU we're looking at 128GB+ per machine and soon to increase. 640Gb isnt that much bigger. Since it's on the memory bus and not a PCI-* bus, its going to be faster than these drives, and it's more expensive right now. By the time they're at $30/GB ram will be alot less than that. The automatic persistence (without scheduling to back the memory to disk, like RAM would need) is the only advantage, so you're putting a high price on that ability - a database with constant accesses that need to go to permanent non-loss storage with a power out.
If you really have such an environment, I would think that fixing your HA setup would be a priority first - duplicating your servers so they can take eachother's jobs over and providing redundant power. I dont even want to know how many xactions/second a properly memory-stored database can do (once you get rid of the filesystem and driver layers, which this thing would require), Im sure many many more. While disk wont take as many xactions/sec, you can always back dirty ram to disk in huge chunks (1 meg blocks or more) to avoid having to need 100K IOops.
I just dont see any advantage properly tuning your server and process environment couldnt achieve with commodity unspecialized cheap easy to replace parts and a few brains.
It's the return of the HardCard!!!! I remember having one of these with my old PC/XT. It was a 20 MB HardCard that fit into an ISA slot. The first ever hard drive i had running Windows 3.0 with DOS 3.3 on it.
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"And may your days be long upon the earth."
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.
That's a standard feature these days. I want to know how many times I can overwrite the entire disk with /dev/random. If I did a "dd if=/dev/random of=/ioMemory size=[size of ioDrive]" how many times could I execute that command before the thing goes tits up?
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From TFA:
My grandmother used anecdotal evidence all the time, and she lived to be 120 years old.
They are going to sell it at $30/per GB. Now lets do the math: 649GB * $30 = $19470....
With that amount of money I buy a Mac Pro with 8 Cores and a 1Tb Raid or a 1TB San.... I think Solid State has to grow cheaper before we consumers can jump the gun at it... but, like hard drives back when they made the jump to GB, it will be awesome to see SolidState HD in systems, better then the clunky magnetic disks we currently use...
Even for a corporation telling them a 649Gb Solution is going to cost them $20K they will flip you for it.
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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.
If your looking to run a blast/darwin query on 50k files to find the closest match to an unknown dna sequence Either you need to recode a bunch of software to use sql, or you snag a piece of hardware that gives database level performance. 80gigs at $2400.00 is a bloody bargain.
The device is also 10x faster in bandwidth than a normal drive which is comparable to a san, but not such a power hog.
So really the tradeoff rocks for small files. It doesn't have a controller interface latency so its really quick. It should mask a good chunk of hard drive based lag.
Storm
For a lot of these questions, you can look at the FAQ here
Certainly they are using wear leveling. They are probably (information is thin) also over allocating storage, such that 10-15% can fail before impacting the advertised free space on the device. In reality you will see your full 640GB of storage, which you could write 61PB of data to the very first sector on the disk over and over and never experience any issues. Before the last 'extra' block is used up, you'll get an alert and replace the device.
I hate to nitpick but the TFR uses MB/s not Mb/s, remember there is 8x DIFFERENCE between the two, otherwise 800Mb/s sounds a lot less impressive (its pretty much the same as current raid-0 (ish)