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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 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.
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.
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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.
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.