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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"

11 of 186 comments (clear)

  1. 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!

  2. 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!
  3. 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 iminplaya · · Score: 5, Funny

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

      Hey, sailor...

      --
      What?
  4. 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.

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    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...

  5. 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
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
  8. 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?

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    Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!