Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

640gb PCIe Solid-State Drive Demonstrated

Posted by Zonk on from the super-fast-super-small dept.

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.'"

8 of 324 comments (clear)

  1. Oblig. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    640gb ought to be enough for anybody.

    1. Re:Oblig. by ady1 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Its not the size of the harddrive which is amazing. Its the read/write speed.
      Even if you get a 32GB model, you can install windows on it and use the regular SATA2 HDD for movies/music storage. Think of the booting time.

    2. Re:Oblig. by norton_I · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    3. Re:Oblig. by Cantinflas · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

  2. Re:Uhh, Price? by thegnu · · Score: 5, Funny

    I think it's safe to assume you won't be buying one soon.

    --
    Please stop stalking me, bro.
  3. Re:Uhh, Price? by morgan_greywolf · · Score: 5, Informative
    FTFA:

    So how much will these cards cost? Flynn told us that the company is aiming to beat $30 dollars a GB, something that should seem very cheap to large corporations, adding "You can drop ship or Fedex this card and be up and running in a few minutes... you can't do that with a storage area network." So, let's say they get to $29 a GB, a reasonable price for NAND flash-based memory devices. 640*30==$19,200. Sorry, but that doesn't seem to beat an inexpensive SAN in price. I recently priced out a 12TB iSCSI SAN for a little bit more than that, and even 1-2 TB fibre SAN from IBM should be around the same price.

    --
    My blog
  4. Re:Wow by zlogic · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  5. Talking to the company at demo by shdowhawk · · Score: 5, Informative
    Having talked to people at demo, what it pretty much came down to is this... is this a product we should be excited about? Definitely ... is it something that will do well right away? Not at all. The price has to drop before this becomes a really valid and useful tool for the GENERAL PUBLIC / Company. But there are a lot of companies out there willing to pay too much money to get these. Hopefully these big companies buy these up and fund this project as QUICKLY as possible. 7 of these side by side at 320/640 gigs a piece is a SCARY/powerful server.

    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.