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512GB Solid State Disks on the Way

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the and-eventually-they'll-be-affordable dept.

Viper95 writes "Samsung has announced that it has developed the world's first 64Gb(8GB) NAND flash memory chip using a 30nm production process, which opens the door for companies to produce memory cards with upto 128GB capacity"

39 of 186 comments (clear)

  1. Cost? by Jeff+DeMaagd · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Capabilities aren't very important if they aren't affordable. So maybe some government contractors can afford those things now, I don't think it would be that interesting to the consumer until SSDs get to a tenth of the cost.

    1. Re:Cost? by NickCatal · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Well, defense department would love these. Store a lot of data in places where there is constant vibrations and heat issues (Iraq) without worrying about damaging the disks.

      --
      -nick
    2. Re:Cost? by JackMeyhoff · · Score: 3, Interesting

      They already use http://www.bitmicro.com/

      --
      http://www.rense.com/general79/wdx1.htm
    3. Re:Cost? by eebra82 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      News flash! We all know that cutting-edge hardware is in almost all cases too expensive. It takes time to adopt new hardware regardless of how practical it is. Once vendors acknowledge the need for such disks and once Samsung receives a boat load of orders, things will look different, but until then, it's expensive to produce because it's being done in small quantities.

      I guess that the next generation of iPods will completely remove the hard drive capable devices from their line-up.

      --
      Full Tilt
    4. Re:Cost? by CarpetShark · · Score: 2, Funny

      Store a lot of data in places where there is constant vibrations and heat issues (Iraq)


      Yes, you could certainly say that there are some bad vibs in Iraq.
    5. Re:Cost? by jlarocco · · Score: 3, Funny

      Not only that, these drives are easy to lose and misplace. Incompetently losing massive amounts of data has never been so easy!

      --
      Maybe not
  2. Four times the memory in three days by AlpineR · · Score: 5, Funny

    It's not a dupe. The previous article said that 64 Gb chips could be combined into a 128 GB device. Now they can combine 64 Gb chips into a 512 GB device. A huge advance!

    1. Re:Four times the memory in three days by ILuvRamen · · Score: 2, Interesting

      maybe they created a controller that could read and write from then simultanerously so it's double the read/write speed. I hope so cuz it better be able to beat my sata drives in read write speed otherwise I don't really care how fast the seek time is cuz any file over like 100KB would be slower to open on it than a normal hard drive.
      oh yeah and I agree with the other posts. Call me when it's on its way to my budget, not just store shelves lol.

      --
      Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
    2. Re:Four times the memory in three days by Jeff+DeMaagd · · Score: 2, Interesting

      The seek times of SSDs should make it such that trying to read and write from the storage array at the same time would seem kind of pointless. It also increases the costs. It would probably go the way of FB-DIMM. FB-DIMM is supposed to allow simultaneous reads and writes to different memory cards, but it's too expensive and has other problems limiting its performance. Now, if the controller designer can apply something like that to a hard drive array, then maybe that would be nice. I think it might be possible to do that in software, make it like a software RAID. Maybe JBOD drive concatenation allows this, I don't know.

  3. 512GB? by loshwomp · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You could use the same logic to conclude that 512 terabyte solid-state media is on the way.

    1. Re:512GB? by gEvil+(beta) · · Score: 5, Funny

      You could use the same logic to conclude that 512 terabyte solid-state media is on the way.

      Have you considered getting a job as a futurist? At this point I can guarantee that your track record will be better than many of the ones actually out there.

      --
      This guy's the limit!
  4. There are times...... by aneeshm · · Score: 5, Funny

    ......when I think that porn, or some equivalent thereof, has been responsible for all human progress throughout history.

    1. Re:There are times...... by stranger_to_himself · · Score: 4, Funny

      Maybe human beings are just porn's way of making more porn.

    2. Re:There are times...... by iminplaya · · Score: 5, Funny

      War also provides a big push. Now imagine how fast progress would be with more military porn.

      Hey, sailor...

      --
      What?
    3. Re:There are times...... by Original+Replica · · Score: 2, Funny

      Now imagine how fast progress would be with more military porn.

      Porn and War are the two major competing drivers of all progress. It kinda brings new light to the phrase "Make Love not War."

      --
      We are all just people.
    4. Re:There are times...... by owlnation · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Maybe human beings are just porn's way of making more porn.
      The great thing about slashdot is that there really are some incredibly smart and funny people (two things that usually go together) here. Take the above quote for example, it is both funny and deeply profound. It is an Hall of Fame quote. Thank you, it made my day.
  5. I bet the HD makers are going to be pissed! by schnikies79 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It's no so easy to use the 1,000,000=1mb with this system. Unless they do it anyway.

    --
    Gone!
    1. Re:I bet the HD makers are going to be pissed! by pslam · · Score: 5, Insightful

      On that subject, whenever the 2^n or 10^n units thing gets brought up, some smart arse always says "it's so illogical to have binary based sizes like that, it's so confusing and the media doesn't work in binary anyway."

      This is just history re-writing bullshit that someone spouts to get mod points and continue another meme.

      There was a time when hard disks were all based on megabytes, and megabytes were always 2^20 = 1048576 bytes. NOBODY EVER GOT CONFUSED. History re-writers say otherwise, obviously. Where did it all change? Well, for hard disk manufacturers, it was a blatantly cheap trick to save 5-10% costs, and whenever anyone complained they could just to that viral history re-write meme about how binary based units were always confusing. Hell, they even convinced SI. SI have absolutely no authority or experience with determining computer units, and the "solution" they came up with is even more confusing and ugly. How do you tell if MeB or MiB is 2^20 or 10^6? Muppets.

      Then came flash cards. Here's a thing a lot of people don't know: flash actually DOES come in binary sizes. That's how it's manufactured. Another thing a lot of people don't know: flash actually gets WORSE for write endurance as its density goes up. It's actually got much worse over time. To begin with, low density flash cards did not suffer much from write endurance problems - to the extent that when you got an 8MB flash card it was basically just writing straight through.

      Densities went up, and you started to need a lot of spares, more error correction, and wear leveling. The result was that after formatting, you ended up with about 5-10% of your flash used up. Quite handily close to the decimal-based size. So manufacturers (and I believe SanDisk were the first to do this) silently started selling 64MB cards as 64,000,000 bytes of data instead of 67,108,864. No asterisks, no notes on the bottom of the packaging - nothing. It's fair enough, but done in a fucking deceptive manner.

      I remember getting bug reports about our MP3 players (years back now) misreporting SanDisk flash cards as 61MB instead of 64MB. In the end (sigh) we put in a hack to spot deceptive cards and switch units to powers of 10.

      So before anyone else spouts how the units are confusing - they weren't until manufacturers tried their damned hardest to make sure they were.

      Next, people will complain about how SDRAM, caches and even registers are in silly powers of 2...

    2. Re:I bet the HD makers are going to be pissed! by norton_I · · Score: 4, Interesting

      The IBM winchester line of drives from the 70s were always labels in units of 1 MB = 10^6. It is just completely false that hard drives have always been labeled using binary prefixes. Digging around, it appears that early PC/workstation drives in the early 80s were mixed. Some used 2^20, some used 10^6. In the late 80s, consumer hard drives made by Seagate, WD, etc. all converged on 2^N for a few years, before switching to 10^6 in the early 90s.

      Bandwidth is always measured in 1 MB/s = 10^6 bytes/s, or 1 Mb/s = 10^6 bits/s. Should 1 MB take 1.04 seconds to transfer of 1 MB/s data link? This includes all forms of Ethernet, SCSI, ATA, PCI, and any other protocol I have looked up. If 1 MB/s does not equal 1 MB per 1 s, someone should be shot, that is just not OK.

      mega = 10^6 in all other fields. Including other computer terms -- 1 MHz, 1 MFLOP, 1 megapixel, etc.

      computer RAM is the only thing that has consistently been labeled using binary approximations to the SI units. And as long as I can remember (computing magazines in the 80s) people have acknowledged that 1 MB = 2^20 is an *approximation* and that mega=10^6.

      Mega=10^6 is right. mega=2^20 is wrong. End of story. It happens that it is technically convenient to manufacture and use RAM in powers of 2. No such constraint applies for hard drives, so there is no reason to use the base-2 prefixes. Stupid OSs should be changed to use the SI prefixes when reporting file sizes. RAM should be labeled using the "base-2" prefixes, but they are admittedly somewhat annoying due to lack of familiarity, and since nobody uses base-10 ram, it isn't a big deal.

    3. Re:I bet the HD makers are going to be pissed! by Kjella · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Hell, they even convinced SI. SI have absolutely no authority or experience with determining computer units, and the "solution" they came up with is even more confusing and ugly. How do you tell if MeB or MiB is 2^20 or 10^6? Muppets. I think you're doing a bit of revisionist history yourself. SI was there first. The SI units have always been in powers of ten, and have been used in all other branches of science long before there was a "computer science". It was computer scientists that originally redefined them to be powers of two, and in the computer world it was so for several decades. It was confusing but not more so than "if it ends in -bytes, it's a power of 2". Except the floppy drive which is 1.44 "MB" = 1.44*1000*1024 (1987), or the modem speeds which were reported 1 kbps = 1000 bps (1972) because that's what electrical engineers talked, or Ethernet that ran at 10Mbit/s = 10.000.000 bits/s (1980). This lead to a "bytes is powers of two, bits is powers of ten" which made all sorts of fuck-ups possible.

      Yes, the HDD manufacturers did it because it was a cheap 5-10% savings, but the excuses were plenty and not all bad. It was confusing every time computer science bumped into one of the other sciences and telecommunications in particular, which inevitably used the SI prefixes. However, instead of actually fixing a problem it became only an even greater mess, invalidating pretty much every rule of thumb because the OS would invariably report something else. That's pretty much proof they didn't want to fix anything, just grab some extra profit.

      After that, it was a big mess and with next to no interest in solving it. That's when the people at IEC, not SI, and certainly not pushed by HDD manufacturers, finally said that these units are FUBAR, and the only way to make a long-term solution is to abandon the SI-prefixes and make new and ugly ones, particularly the names. At that point, we're talking 50 years of computer science use against 200 years of other sciences, and with retards messing up the boundary. I think they're ugly as hell, but they're also the only way to go forward from here.
      --
      Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
    4. Re:I bet the HD makers are going to be pissed! by HiThere · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Sorry, but for certain algorithms it's important that you are working in powers of 2, and that was always called Mega (Bits, Bytes, Words, whatever) or, more commonly Kilo-whatever was 2^10 whatevers.

      IO has always been a mixture and compromise. Punched cards could hold 12 * 72 bits (7094 row binary) or 12 * 80 bits (column binary, but don't try to read it with the main card reader). Try to fit THAT into your "powers of 10" scenario!

      For the current set of IO devices, capacity measurement was defined by marketing. I saw arguments about it in the trade journals when it was being fought out over hard disks. AFAIK, companies decided independently the choice that was, to them, most advantageous. It was powers of 10. This was not appreciated by any single customer that I was aware of. Some despised it, some didn't care, nobody was in favor. (Yeah, it was a small sample, but it's one that I was aware of. Most didn't care, and many of those weren't interested in understanding.)

      But block allocations of RAM are done in powers of two, and these are frequently mapped directly to IO devices. So having a mis-match creates problems. Disk files were (possibly) created as an answer to this problem. (7094 drum storage didn't have files. Things were addressed by drum address. If a piece went bad, you had to patch your program to avoid it. UGH! Tape was for persistent data, drum storage was transient...just slightly more persistent than RAM.) Drum addresses were tricky. I never did it myself, but some people improved performance by timing the instructions so that they would have the drum head right before the data they wanted to read or write to limit lagging. (Naturally this was all done in assembler, so you could count out exactly how many miliseconds of execution time you were committing, and if you know the drum rotation speed, and the latency...
      So things tended to be stored in powers of two positions on the drum, unless a piece went bad.

      Disks, when they first appeared, were slower than drums, but more capacious. (They were still too expensive and unreliable to use for persistent storage.) But the habit of mapping things out in powers of two transferred from drums storage to disk storage. When files were introduced (not sure about when that was) the habit transferred. This wasn't all blind habit, lots of the I/O techniques that had been developed were dependent upon powers of two. So programmers though of capacity in powers of two. This didn't make any sense to accountants, managers, etc. When computer equipment started being sold by the Megabyte it made sense to the manufacturers to claim powers of 10 Megabytes for stroage, as they could claim larger sizes. (This wasn't as significant for Kilobytes, as 1024 is pretty close to 1000.) It not only made sense to the manufacturers, it also made sense to the accountants who were approving the orders. And when the managers started specifying the equipment...well, everything switched over into being measured by powers of 10.

      No conspiracy. Just system dynamics. And programmers still think of storage in powers of 2, because that's what they work in. (This is less true when you work in higher level langauges, but if you don't take advantage of the powers of two that the algorithms are friendly with, it will cost you in performance, even if you don't realize it.)

      --

      I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
  6. What about IOPS? by KrackHouse · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Does anybody know how well flash SSDs perform in RAID arrays? 15kRPM SAS drives are horrendously expensive so if I could plug a couple small flash drives into my RAID card (RAID 0) I'd be a happy camper. Can't find benchmarks anywhere and flash drives have horrible write speeds which means they have terrible OLTP performance.

    --
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    http://houndwire.com
    1. Re:What about IOPS? by pslam · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Does anybody know how well flash SSDs perform in RAID arrays? 15kRPM SAS drives are horrendously expensive so if I could plug a couple small flash drives into my RAID card (RAID 0) I'd be a happy camper. Can't find benchmarks anywhere and flash drives have horrible write speeds which means they have terrible OLTP performance.

      Individual flash chips have terrible write performance, mostly due to the slow block erase time. However, you always use multiple chips in high capacity storage devices (anything larger than an MP3 player), and you can start doing fancy tricks with interleaving, or just plain have way more buffer memory to hide the erase time. If you really want to crank out even higher performance, then you stick multiple NAND interfaces of the controller chip and drive it all in parallel.

      If you stack about 4-8 chips in a device, you start getting stream throughput comparable to a 15k drive. Also bear in mind that the chips we're talking about here are already stacked 4-8 internally anyway! The limiting factor will probably end up being the NAND flash bus (or number of busses) connecting the controller to the flash chips.

  7. Re:number of writes still limited? by maxume · · Score: 5, Informative

    There are ~31.5 million seconds in a year. If you assume that the write speed is 1 GB/s and that you were writing constantly, you would generate ~62 thousand writes to each bit. Roll the write speed back to a still unlikely ~100 MB/s(still writing constantly) and you generate about 6 thousand writes to each bit in a year.

    Throw in the fact that the controllers for these chips spread writes around and you can be certain that the endurance is not a problem.

    --
    Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
  8. Re:number of writes still limited? by sholden · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It's already so high as to be meaningless, it will outlast mechanical failure of a traditional hard drive for example.

  9. Debunking SSD life cycle issues by G4from128k · · Score: 5, Informative

    This has been discussed before. Modern flash drives use wear leveling to avoid writing to well-worn blocks and to move unchanging files from unworn blocks so they can be used more. Yes, it adds complexity and yes it slightly delays the write process. But it's invisible to the CPU and OS and takes far less time that it would to move the heads of the standard mechanical HD. An SSD is free to organize blocks in any order in the address space because there is virtually no penalty for fragmentation.

    I think you will find that even in very heavy use applications (e.g. working with HD video or using the SSD for virtual memory) that the lifespan of these drives be longer than a decade (and longer than mechanical HDs). Moreover, they will fail gracefully as blocks become tags as worn.

    --
    Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
  10. Re:number of writes still limited? by LoveMuscle · · Score: 3, Informative

    These devices can already do block relocates.. The MTBF on these drives is on the order of 2 million hours. WAY better than winchester drives and so far out there that I kinda wish people would stop bringing this up.

  11. Re:number of writes still limited? by WryCoder · · Score: 2, Informative
    A few years back, BiTMICRO published an article that arrived at a different conclusion with regard to solid state flash drive endurance in database applications. Although the write endurance rating for BiTMICRO's computations is smaller (1 million cycles), endurance ratings are much higher as a result of wear leveling methods, proprietary RS ECC and other techniques designed to prolong the life of E-Disk solid state drives. Assuming a much smaller endurance rating of 100,000 cycles (typical rating quoted by NAND flash vendors), a bigger volume of writes per day at 3.4TB and no caching nor wear leveling implementations, a 160GB solid state drive is projected to last up to 12.9 years, which is definitely longer than the average replacement cycle of most IT storage devices and equipment.


    In a recent article on write endurance published in STORAGEsearch.com, editor Zsolt Kerekes provided theoretical computations on the longevity of solid state flash drives deployed in enterprise server applications. His test solid state drive had the following specifications: total capacity of 64GB, sustained write speed of 80MBps and a write endurance rating of 2 million cycles. By assuming that data is written in big blocks and there is perfect implementation of wear leveling techniques, Kerekes estimates disk endurance at 1.6 billion seconds, which translates to 50.74 years.

    Debunking Misconceptions in SSD Longevity

  12. iPhone by imputor · · Score: 3, Funny

    So when does the 512GB iPhone come out?

  13. Its never enough for less..... by 3seas · · Score: 3, Informative

    SSD, doesn't that stand for Single Sided Disks, as in floppies... ; may as well...

    anyways, if we had 1000 terabyte solid drives for $10 then you'd hear wining for the yet to be released Googleplex drive for $5...

    Like damn, anyone using up their new 100 gig drives faster than the next size is out for less money?

    To back up very large drives today, it near cheaper in time/labor and costs to just use hot swap drives, where the back up is the removed drive, plugged in and run for 15 minutes a few times a year, if even that. Or a rotation system as was done with tape.

  14. Re:another reason to hate Vista... by eebra82 · · Score: 4, Informative

    What the hell are you talking about? It's the media and other content you need storage for. You can run any operating system on 16 GB if you wish, but whining about how big Vista is makes you look stupid.

    Today's operating systems (OSX, Vista, etc) are not big because the software is bloated with meaninglessness, but because there is not a living soul out there who is considering XP, Vista or OSX but cannot get it because their hard drives are too small. Is it not obvious that developers want to make full use of the current generation of hardware?

    I'm sure Microsoft could strip down Vista to something the size of 300 MB or so if only they wanted to remove drivers, icons and other graphics, sounds, media players, web browsers, etc. On the other hand, that would kind of kill the whole purpose of the operating system.

    --
    Full Tilt
  15. Re:Flash Already Close to Discs by pslam · · Score: 2, Informative

    Slightly optimistic numbers, there. The USB connectors, packaging and controllers are nowhere near $15 (more like $1-$2). Even so, the $8:GB ratio only holds for small numbers. The biggest problem with flash at the moment is scaling.

    Each flash chip needs board space, soldering, and bus routing. So, each chip has 20 or so (depending on bus width) bus lines connecting it. That's just for 8GB. Now for a big drive, we'll need 16 of those. That's 16 chips stuck down on the board, making it a fair large board with a monster amount of bus routing. This is also where electrical engineers stick their hands up and say words like "bus capacitance, surely?" - in other words, it's not going to work for crap without buffers and other stuff stuck in there too.

    So no - it simply does not scale well. Flash is very cheap at small sizes simply because it's so easy to interface it and wire it up. Wiring up 16 of them to one controller is not. This is why big SSDs are so damn expensive.

    I predict that small form factor PCs (e.g laptops, media centers) may all end up using flash fairly soon, but desktops and servers aren't going that way any time soon. The technology isn't quite there, yet.

  16. I already boot from a 4GB memory card. by DamonHD · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Hi,

    I already boot/run my main Internet-facing server (Ubuntu) from a 4GB memory SSD card to minimise power consumption, and I have more than 50% space free, ie it wasn't that hard to do.

    http://www.earth.org.uk/low-power-laptop.html

    I'm not being that clever about it: using efs3 rather than any wear-leveling SSD-friendly fs, and simply minimising spurious write activity, eg by turning down verbosity on logs. And laptop-mode helps a lot of course.

    Now that machine does also have a 160GB HDD for infrequently-accessed bulk data (so the HDD is spun down most of the time and a power-conserving sleep mode), and it would be good to get that data onto SSD too. But a blend, as in many memory/storage systems, gives a good chunk of maximum performance and power savings for reasonable cost.

    Rgds

    Damon

    --
    http://m.earth.org.uk/
  17. Re:another reason to hate Vista... by ColdWetDog · · Score: 5, Funny

    Does everything in the damn world have to be blamed on Vista? Next on Slashdigg: The fires in California - Vista responsible?

    Well, umm. Vista takes up more processor time, runs the computer hotter.

    Computer running hotter means more power used.

    Power generation contributes to global warming.

    Global warming contributes to increased forest fires.

    Therefore, it follows:

    Vista is responsible for the fires in California.

    What could possibly be more logical?

    --
    Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
  18. You're fucking kidding me... by PMBjornerud · · Score: 2, Funny

    It's no so easy to use the 1,000,000=1mb with this system. Unless they do it anyway. Are you telling me that 64Gb is not exactly 64.000.000.000 bits?

    Ugh. And I though that they had seen the light and decided to go in base 10 and count the actual bits.
    --
    I lost my sig.
  19. Nano Nano by shmlco · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Okay, how about a terabyte in a form factor small enough for a thunb drive, that costs one-tenth the price of traditional flash memory, and is a staggering 1000 times more energy efficient.

    Researchers Develop Technology to Make Terabyte Thumb Drives Possible

    Makes a mere 512GB flash chip look a bit sad, doesn't it?

    --
    Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
  20. Forget Flash by Strange+Quark+Star · · Score: 2, Informative
    64 GB flash? Pff... The next big thing is ion memory!

    A thumb drive using [programmable metallization cell memory technology] could store a terabyte of information

    http://www.wired.com/gadgets/miscellaneous/news/2007/10/ion_memory

    --
    There is no sig.
  21. Re:No.. where did you learn this? It's wrong. by pslam · · Score: 2, Interesting

    This is all very well but you are totally wrong. Go download a datasheet of a popular FLASH part. Guess what? The capacity is an exact power of 2.

    I'm not just making this up. NAND is naturally base-2 capacity sized. Yes, there is sparing, but pages are normally 2048 byte (or larger these days) with a few extra bytes per 512 for ECC. The non-ECC areas are still power-of-2 based, and the chip area itself is square and ends up being another power-of-2 pages. End result, a power-of-2. I've been working on this stuff for about 6 years now - I'm not just coming up with it randomly.

  22. unprofessional by PMBjornerud · · Score: 3, Insightful

    No conspiracy. Just system dynamics. And programmers still think of storage in powers of 2, because that's what they work in. (This is less true when you work in higher level langauges, but if you don't take advantage of the powers of two that the algorithms are friendly with, it will cost you in performance, even if you don't realize it.) However, our job as professionals is to know these facts without bothering the end user with it. 2^10 is a nice and useful hack, but not something to show the end user. Computer users are no longer computer experts, and we should not bother them with internal details.

    Disk capacity is reported to my mother in powers of 2. This simply does not make sense.

    Technical details should not trump users. This makes us look like geeks with a binary fetish instead of professionals.
    --
    I lost my sig.