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Samsung Announces Fastest 64-GB SSD

Posted by kdawson on from the want-to-see-it-again dept.

XueCast writes "The new solid-state drive from Samsung can write data at 100 MB/s and read at 120 MB/s. This handily outperforms other SSDs now on the market, which typically feature only 50-80 MB/s read/write rates. Samsung's SSD will come in two form factors, 1.8" and 2.5", and will be running on the SATA II standard. It will only consume 50% of the power of current SSDs. There is no information yet about price."

145 comments

  1. Re:FP! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    You must be using one of those fancy-dancy fast SSD things this article is talkin about!

  2. TP! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Toilet Paper?

    Damn speed filter... I don't want to Slow down, cowboy :(

  3. Re:SP! by underpenguin · · Score: 1

    Insightful indeed. I wonder how these SSDs with ridiculous speed will work as swap areas / extended memory. (?)

  4. I/O limited distros more popular? by Crankymonky · · Score: 1, Informative

    A few machines in the past have had SSD's and the manufacturer did nothing to limit the Input and output of the operating system, therefore limiting the longevity of the drive. With Asus' eeePC just launched, I'm not sure what they've done as they do use a SSD. Does anyone expect we will see a rise in both development and popularity of Linux distributions that will limit input and output access to the drives by some means? Does anyone think Microsoft would do anything to this extent within the near future? On the linux front, as far as I know, only live CDs and their frugal installs (that support saving to a save file) and maybe (probably?) Asus eeePC's OS have options to limit the input and output of a drive, by default.

    1. Re:I/O limited distros more popular? by HateBreeder · · Score: 4, Informative

      Thanks to algorithms that spread written data across the chip, MTBF's of SSD are much higher than those of regular HDDs with similar usuage patterns.

      Furthermore, A simple buffering scheme sounds likely to solve most of the problems you're talking about (Assuming it's constantly many small writes done by the OS... for say, log file keeping or file access-time updating).

      --
      Sigs are for the weak.
    2. Re:I/O limited distros more popular? by quitte · · Score: 3, Interesting

      distributors are definately in the process of getting io down. So is Linus himself. quote from http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/8/5/171 : "change relatime updates to be performed once per day." It's not only the livetime of flash memory that benefits from this. also power consumption and noise goes down for hdds. and overall io performance benefits fromsuch improvements,too. About the swap: just keep it big enough so the Kernel can free the ram of some unused data, but not a lot bigger. Twice the size of the ram is nonsense these days.. if you run out of buffers and cache you don't have enough ram. if you have enough ram swap is hardly used.

    3. Re:I/O limited distros more popular? by DoofusOfDeath · · Score: 2, Informative

      Thanks to algorithms that spread written data across the chip, MTBF's of SSD are much higher than those of regular HDDs with similar usuage patterns.

      MTBF doesn't mean what most people think it means, and is less useful than most people treat it.

    4. Re:I/O limited distros more popular? by Taagehornet · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Does anyone around here know of any numbers backing up the claimed high values for MTBF? I'm not unwilling to accept that the values are indeed high, but I'm looking for something closer to reality than the Wikipedia article arriving at an expected lifetime of 26,600 years.

      The flash memory modules I've encountered have guaranteed a minimum of 100.000 write cycles per data memory byte before failure (NDAs prohibit me from listing the specific devices, but I suspect that this number is nothing out of the ordinary).

      With a page size of 1024 bytes, a 64GB drive would hold 64 million pages. If we assume that all updates require a full page erase-write, but that a clever algorithm distributes updates evenly, this leaves us with a guaranteed life-time of 6.4 * 10^12 (6,400,000,000,000) updates before memory failures start rolling in.

      That's without doubt more than sufficient for desktop usage, but let's for a moment assume that you're able to max out the drive, writing at the rated speed of 100MB/s. With a page size of 1024 bytes, that's 100.000 page updates every second, so failure will set in after 64,000,000 seconds = 2 years.

      Now, assuming that you're able to feed the drive at 100MB/s is probably way off, but on the other hand your wear levelling algorithm will probably be far from perfect.

    5. Re:I/O limited distros more popular? by itlurksbeneath · · Score: 1

      Your assumptions include an empty disk with one block of data having free reign of all 64 million pages. I doubt it would be that favorable in real life.

      Consider that no matter how "clever" the algorithm is, after you junk up the drive with videos, pictures, a copy of WoW and Doom III, it's going to be half full, so that clever algorithm only has half the space to work with, accelerating the time to failure.

      --
      Have you ever considered piracy? You'd make a wonderful Dread Pirate Roberts.
    6. Re:I/O limited distros more popular? by HateBreeder · · Score: 1

      Well, that's assuming the algorithm is not allowed to move unrelated, already written, data around.

      --
      Sigs are for the weak.
    7. Re:I/O limited distros more popular? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      This is the link you want. Basically, your problem is assuming only 100k writes. 100k writes was typical for 1997; the page I linked to gives a figure of 2M writes, but I would say even that is very conservative these days.

      So the link I gave gave a (conservative) number of 51 years. The point isn't that a flash drive is going to last 51 years. The point is that a modern flash drive is not going to wear out from write exhaustion. Basically flash memory today has reached a point where the number of rewrites allowed is not the limiting factor in its engineering.

    8. Re:I/O limited distros more popular? by zippthorne · · Score: 1

      If it *can* move unrelated already written data, that throughput is either hidden from the 100 MB/s bus speed or subtracts from it. Either way, the data rate is going to be higher than what you expect based on what you send to the disk. This affects the wear rate in new and exciting ways!

      --
      Can you be Even More Awesome?!
    9. Re:I/O limited distros more popular? by HateBreeder · · Score: 1

      This highly depends on the chip architecture.

      You can quite easily design a logic that would allow you to shift one chunk of data and write a new one in the same "write-sequence" that the 100MB/s was derived from.

      --
      Sigs are for the weak.
    10. Re:I/O limited distros more popular? by skelly33 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      "let's for a moment assume that you're able to max out the drive, writing at the rated speed of 100MB/s. With a page size of 1024 bytes, that's 100.000 page updates every second, so failure will set in after 64,000,000 seconds = 2 years."

      2 years seems pretty impressive to me for beating the virtual snot out of your test subject testing in a completely unrealistic scenario. I would be surprised if my car's engine survived 2 years of running non-stop at 7,000 RPM.

    11. Re:I/O limited distros more popular? by Surt · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Samsung claims an mtbf of 2,000,000 hours, which is only ~200 years, not 26,000.
      I've seen some specs listing 300,000 program/erase cycles, minimum, which would boost your 2 years to 6, and note that that's their minimum guarantee, the average lifetimes are expected to be considerably (as much as 10x) higher. Presumably these devices just write off a page if it goes bad.

      --
      "Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
    12. Re:I/O limited distros more popular? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      It doesn't impact performance hugely if the wear-leveling algorithm is designed properly, i.e., only swapping/remapping blocks if the wear is (say) 1000 writes more than the next block in line to be remapped.

      If you are writing to the same logical block over and over, a swap/remap will only happen once every 1000 writes.

      But it all depends on how the algorithm/architecture was designed.

      To the GPP: an algorithm that actually knows what space is used up by your files and fails to wear level using those blocks would be stupid and wrong. Don't expect wear leveling to be that bad.

    13. Re:I/O limited distros more popular? by torkus · · Score: 1

      Why is this the first and most frequent post every time someone mentions SSDs?

      Wear leveling means your SSD will outlast a mechanical drive.

      Moving on to a useful comment. At this speed I'm going to start looking at SSD for our high end machines. If you have to weigh performance, weight, battery life, and cost...and this dramatically wins in 3 out or 4 i'm going to start equipping high-end laptops with these. Heck, i know ULV CPUs are slow but the crappy hard drives have always been hugely limiting. We're looking at ultra-portable laptops that are actually USABLE :)

      Same with desktops for that matter.

      --
      You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.
    14. Re:I/O limited distros more popular? by torkus · · Score: 4, Insightful

      How often do you feed a disk (not in a server) at 100MB/sec for any sustained period of time? Heck, how often do you feed a disk 100MB/sec for one minute much less an hour much less 2 years straight.

      I suggest two things:

      1) those so paranoid about drive life return to their handy array of 9.1GB disks in raid 50 and leave the thread

      2) run perfmon (or the linux equiv.) and look at your overall disk writes for an average day, triple it and then calculate the number of years the drive will last and cut it in half for the hell of it. I'd guess the computer and storge of the drive will be long obsolete before the expected lifetime.

      If you need to handle writing 100MB/sec of data at a constant rate for weeks/months/years then you don't need a 1.8" SSD. You need a couple pentabyte san. These drives are *perfect* for normal users, power users, heavy users. I'd gladly put one in each of our developer's PCs for doing coding and builds. Our AV guys would love them too.

      --
      You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.
    15. Re:I/O limited distros more popular? by torkus · · Score: 4, Insightful

      More than 10x higher. No one sustains 10MB/sec of writes 24/7 or even averages that on an individual's computer/laptop.

      The only situation you might find to push that is a dedicated high-use AV workstation in a 24/7 media company. Oh, and never mind that workstation would be using arrayed drives for additional speed and redundancy isntead of a single drive...which would of course increase the expeted overall lifetime.

      --
      You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.
    16. Re:I/O limited distros more popular? by Intron · · Score: 2, Informative

      Where are you getting your numbers? Block erase is 128K or 256K on NAND flash that I've looked at, and erase time is about 1500 usec. The large flash drives measure sequential I/O across multiple chips to get their meaningless performance numbers. Random writes are still painfully slow. The controller keeps an erase count for each block to do load leveling, and when a page gets used too many times it has to swap the whole page with one that isn't used much. The article claims 8GB per chip, which seems high to me. I think they might mean 8Gbit per chip, which would mean 64 chips to do 64GB.

      Since there is an onboard controller with a RAM buffer, it can do a verify on every write. Flash tends to fail at erase or write time which can be recovered with no data loss, so MTBF depends on how many spare blocks you leave.

      --
      Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
    17. Re:I/O limited distros more popular? by Surt · · Score: 1

      My 10x was referring to the expected/average number of successful program/erase cycles. The expected lifetime gets multiplied by that, and then multiplied again if you don't write at maximum bandwidth 24/7.

      --
      "Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
    18. Re:I/O limited distros more popular? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I think I could easily break one of these if I wanted. High bandwidth I/O with big writes is not the way though.

      Consider instead a scenario where you have an SSD that is very close to 100% full (just a few MB empty disk space).

      The data is mainly for rapid data lookups and almost completely static (so a perfect SSD fit in theory and a reason that it is perfectly fine in most cases to operate close to 100% disk space). However, there is a small datablock here that has a some statistical data that updates every second

      5 MB available disk space and you update 512Kbyte once every second.
      You will most likely see that SSD die in a few months.

      Yes, for the general case, this is not a problem, I don't argue with that, but there are indeed usage patterns where you need to be careful.

  5. Good to hear but there are other options by webplay · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This drive doesn't outperform MTRON (http://www.mtron.net/english/). They announced 120 MB/s read, 90 MB/s write drives and they are shipping 100 MB/s read, 80 MB/s write drives already. The SSD-based Fusion IO card (http://www.fusionio.com/) at the claimed 800 MB/s read and 600 MB/s write speed would beat both them handily. Still, it's good to see a major manufacturer up its speeds.

    1. Re:Good to hear but there are other options by pedantic+bore · · Score: 1

      Keep in mind that the FusionIO card is a card, not an SSD. SSD is used to refer to "solid-state drives" (where "solid-state" is slowly becoming synonymous with "flash", but that wasn't always the case...).

      It's pretty clear that the FusionIO card isn't a drive, because there aren't any drive interfaces on the market today that can do 600 MB/s...

      Not that I have anything against FusionIO -- on the contrary, I'd love to have one to play with -- but it's not a drive.

      --
      Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
    2. Re:Good to hear but there are other options by Heddahenrik · · Score: 0

      Ehum... "drive" is a short form of "hard disk drive". An SSD can't really be a drive either because there is no disk in it. But it's an HD-replacement and so it the ioDrive, but the ioDrive has it's own controller included. My point is that if it barks like a fish, then we can call it a fish (at least as long as we're talking about barking). But we should be aware of the differences, of course.

      I strongly think that the PCIe-approach is the right way to go. It's direct, simple and the fastest way.

    3. Re:Good to hear but there are other options by ILuvRamen · · Score: 1

      Even if there is competition, it still costs more than an entire laptop just for the drive. Pretty stupid if you ask me. Btw how come if I google product search it, only PQI and Super Talent have SSD's for sale and they're 64 GB? How could they have produced one already?! Anyway, they're listed for well over $1000 so I can only imagine what Samsung wants for theirs. If you're right, I hope they realize it and drop their price to like $300 lol.

      --
      Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
    4. Re:Good to hear but there are other options by rootofevil · · Score: 2, Insightful

      so then its optical hard disk drive, floppy hard disk drive, zip hard disk drive, etc, etc?

      methinks no.

      --
      turn up the jukebox and tell me a lie
    5. Re:Good to hear but there are other options by Mad+Merlin · · Score: 1

      So, is a RAM drive not a drive then, simply because it doesn't use SATA/IDE/etc?

      I don't see how it matters at all that the FusionIO uses PCIe instead of SATA, you're still going to use it like a regular hard drive (or solid state drive, for that matter).

      If the FusionIO was exactly the same except it connected via SATA instead of PCIe, would you consider it a drive then?

      --
      Game! - Where the stick is mightier than the sword!
    6. Re:Good to hear but there are other options by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I was going to say "tape hard disk drive" but you've already made my point.
      GPP is blithering.

    7. Re:Good to hear but there are other options by outZider · · Score: 1

      Yes, because then I wouldn't need a driver just to use a drive.

      --
      - oZ
      // i am here.
    8. Re:Good to hear but there are other options by superflyguy · · Score: 1

      Actually, you would still need a driver, it would just be a very simple one you already have. The BIOS hardware doesn't magically get data from the hard drive, it magically gets data from flash, and that data includes code that tells it how to read data from the hard drive.

  6. Outperforms? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting
    This handily outperforms other SSDs now on the market,

    Texas Memory Systems http://www.superssd.com/benefits.htm says can saturate Fibre Channel (GBs/sec) and this one caps out at 100s of MB/s. Perhaps not quite so unequivocally outperforms as this statement makes it out to be.

    How about outperforms other flash based SATA SSDs now on the market???? What is surprising is that more of the SSDs don't max out the SATA pipe.

    yeah they are in different price classes but it isn't like SSDs haven't been around for long time now. Inexpensive ones that you can put into your sub $1,000 computer... perhaps that is new. Yet another sensationalized copy in a Slashdot story abstract. Oh so surprising.

    1. Re:Outperforms? by Fyzzler · · Score: 1

      Fibre Channel is (Gb/s) not (GB/s), there is an order of magnitude difference there. Theoretical max speed on a 4 Gb/s FC card would be ~400MB/s. I seriously doubt you ever see that kind of speed on any existing FC gear.

      --
      I have one question. If the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture is not in charge of Gundam, then who is?
  7. YES by shoma-san · · Score: 0

    Now my pron can be safe, fast, and consume less energy.

    I fight global warming and save money on my power bill.

  8. 1 essential fact missing by polar+red · · Score: 4, Interesting

    In what price range are we talking ?

    --
    Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
    1. Re:1 essential fact missing by leuk_he · · Score: 4, Informative

      A small google shows that current generation of 32 GB ssd cost about $599-$1500 (depending on speed)

      the new version has double the capacity, do the math yourself.

    2. Re:1 essential fact missing by polar+red · · Score: 1

      Wouldn't it cost more than double? But a lot depends on WHEN I guess.

      --
      Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
    3. Re:1 essential fact missing by Kjella · · Score: 1

      the new version has double the capacity, do the math yourself. If you mean to multiply by two, that's not how it works in mooremathics (yes, I just made that up). I've been paying a little attention to the development on memory sticks over 4 doublings from 512MB to 8GB now at the same price point. Every time process tech has evolved to give double capacity, it has doubled and the price stayed the same. So if the last generation cost 600-1500$ for 32GB, I predict this generation will also cost 600-1500$ for 64GB, with 32GBs for half that.
      --
      Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
    4. Re:1 essential fact missing by hatchet · · Score: 1

      This is essentially the same technology as in usb memory sticks. Currently, 8GB chips inside one of those cost around $60 and samsung could easily put 8 of those inside 2.5" drive + multipipeline controller for increased performance. we are then talking about $600 end-user price for 64GB drive... with currently available technology.

    5. Re:1 essential fact missing by fm6 · · Score: 1

      If you have to ask, you can't afford it!

  9. Flash! Ah ahhhh... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Savior of the Universe!

  10. Vaporware by Zebra_X · · Score: 0, Troll

    This is all crap. The supposed 64 GB drives are available from sony, there is reference on dells site as well but no link to buy and no machines that carry them - other than that you can't get them anywhere. The 32 GB drives are still ~ 600 bones. While I don't mind the price, the size is just to small. MTRON says "coming soon".

    Samsungs PR department needs to slow down...

    1. Re:Vaporware by Shikaku · · Score: 3, Informative

      http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=2013240636+1421430848&name=64GB

      And bigger, 128GB:

      http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=2013240636+1421430849&name=128GB

      Yes, the prices are exorbitant. Just wait, patience is a virtue. At least we can actually see and purchase the current status of SSD, and at the rate they are increasing it will phase out hard disks in both capacity and price.

    2. Re:Vaporware by Zebra_X · · Score: 0, Troll

      I was speaking strictly about Samsung, they have been very vocal about announcing "breakthroughs" and not delivering... almost worse than AMD lol.

      Yeah it's good, once there are enough devices out there prices will fall.

  11. Cheap, fast and good. by colonslashslash · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Cheap, fast, good - pick two.

    "write data at 100 MB/s and read at 120 MB/s."

    Hey cool, that's pretty fast.

    "64GB .... will only consume 50% of the power of current SSDs"

    Good, good.

    "There is no information yet about price."

    .... Ah, shit!

    --
    She's built like a steak house, but she handles like a bistro....
    1. Re:Cheap, fast and good. by Pie-rate · · Score: 1

      I'll take cheap and good, kthx.

    2. Re:Cheap, fast and good. by replicant108 · · Score: 1

      Cheap and fast are not good?

    3. Re:Cheap, fast and good. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I think he meant to say: cheap, fast, reliable.

      Or something else more descriptive than good.

    4. Re:Cheap, fast and good. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Okay then, here's an incredibly cheap, incredibly fast data storage device:

      /dev/urandom

      great, isn't it?

    5. Re:Cheap, fast and good. by Laurentiu · · Score: 2, Informative

      Why would you buy a SSD?

      1) Power consumption
      2) Battery life
      3) Power. Consumption.

      I'm looking right now at the data sheet of the latest Seagate SATA hard drive models, that tout a 3 Gb/s data rate (325 MB/s, if you are too lazy to divide by 8), and I haven't even started talking about RAID 0 algorithms yet. Yes, the Samsung SSD is fast - the caveat here is that it is fast when compared with other SSD's. The good news is that this is a relatively new technology, with great potential for improvement IMHO. But if you don't have a laptop and a need for 4-6 hrs/battery, don't. And even if you do, you'd be probably better off just buying a spare battery.

      Kudos to Samsung for pushing the envelope a little further.

      --
      Just /. IT
    6. Re:Cheap, fast and good. by Kjella · · Score: 4, Informative

      I'm looking right now at the data sheet of the latest Seagate SATA hard drive models, that tout a 3 Gb/s data rate (325 MB/s, if you are too lazy to divide by 8), and I haven't even started talking about RAID 0 algorithms yet. Yes, the Samsung SSD is fast - the caveat here is that it is fast when compared with other SSD's. The good news is that this is a relatively new technology, with great potential for improvement IMHO. But if you don't have a laptop and a need for 4-6 hrs/battery, don't. And even if you do, you'd be probably better off just buying a spare battery. LOL, you're looking at the wrong specs. 3GBit/s is the SATA2 interface speed, which by the way also has two bits error correction for every byte so divide by ten for 300MB/s maximum actual throughput. In reality even the fastest WD Raptor 10k SATA drives have a sustained read/write around 80MB/s with minimums around 60MB/s. The MTRON and these Seagate disks are already faster than non-RAID HDDs, in addition to near-instant access time, lower power, lower weight, no noise, shock resistant and in smaller form factors like 1.8" and 2.5" compared to the top-of-the-line 3.5" performance I'm comparing with. Or you can compare to a mobile HDD, but then it certainly gets severely beaten in performance. Oh and RAID0 - take the most unreliable component in the system, make it twice as big, powerhungry, noisy and errorprone...

      In other words, it's more like why are you not buying SSDs:
      1. Price
      2. Price
      3. Price
      --
      Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
    7. Re:Cheap, fast and good. by und0 · · Score: 1

      I would add noise too, a 2.5" HD is pretty quiet, but no noiseless.

    8. Re:Cheap, fast and good. by nmg196 · · Score: 1

      > Seagate SATA hard drive models, that tout a 3 Gb/s data rate (325 MB/s

      Name just one of Seagates drives that can do anywhere NEAR 325MB/s for more than a few milliseconds. I think you must have mis-read the datasheet or something. That simply can't be true. Maybe as burst rate for tiny files which reside entirely in the cache and have previously already been read.

    9. Re:Cheap, fast and good. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      4. Capacity (64GB is getting there, but there are much larger drives available, even in the 1.8" and 2.5" form factors)

    10. Re:Cheap, fast and good. by evilviper · · Score: 1

      3GBit/s is the SATA2 interface speed, which by the way also has two bits error correction for every byte so divide by ten

      Let's see:

      2^10 = 1024
      2^8 = 256

      1024/256 = 4

      10 is the new 4!
      --
      Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
    11. Re:Cheap, fast and good. by Kjella · · Score: 1

      2^10 = 1024
      2^8 = 256

      1024/256 = 4

      10 is the new 4! Congratulations, you've proven that 2 bits have 2^2 = 4 states. It's the answer to a completely different problem than the one presented though. In the SATA interface, 1 byte = 8 bits is stored as 10 bits (8 normal + 2 ecc). The interface can transfer 3Gbit, but you only get 8/10 * 3Gbps = 2.4Gbit/s = 300MB/s of data. So without the units you should end up at 8/10, but since we divide by 8 to convert to bytes the combined effect of error correction and unit conversion is to divide by 10. I can't even begin to follow your logic...
      --
      Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
    12. Re:Cheap, fast and good. by evilviper · · Score: 1

      The interface can transfer 3Gbit, but you only get 8/10 * 3Gbps = 2.4Gbit/s = 300MB/s of data.

      Gah! First time around I didn't notice that "10" was meant to include the conversion from bits to bytes.
      --
      Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
    13. Re:Cheap, fast and good. by Laurentiu · · Score: 1

      Truth is, I couldn't be bothered to look further than the datasheet of that last generation drive. I don't have one in my possession, so I couldn't speak from experience. I see now one test here http://www.techreport.com/articles.x/13440 showing a 105 MB/s sustained data rate on a Barracuda 7200.11 .

      So performance is still not the big winner with SSD, and as you kindly point out, neither is price per GB. I still believe that power consumption is the bigger win here - and I'm looking at it from the business user's point of view. Given, for instance, one intercontinental flight and the choice between lugging a laptop with a SSD and an extra battery or a normal laptop and 5 spares, which one would you choose? :)

      --
      Just /. IT
  12. Old news by rrohbeck · · Score: 4, Informative

    The announcement was in March, mass production in June and availability in September.

    I haven't seen a price yet but it's going to be at least close to a grand.

    --
    thegodmovie.com - watch it
    1. Re:Old news by gentoofu · · Score: 1

      But different product. According to your March link, that 64GB SSD can only read at 64MB/s and write at 45MB/s.

  13. Double Dupe? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    Is this what you call something that has been duped twice?

    Today, plus...

    Oct 28: http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/28/1337207
    Oct 25: http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/25/149202

    1. Re:Double Dupe? by wellingtonsteve · · Score: 3, Funny

      triple + dupe = trupe?

    2. Re:Double Dupe? by hcdejong · · Score: 3, Funny

      tripe?

    3. Re:Double Dupe? by damaki · · Score: 1

      Yak - dog food!

      --
      Stupidity is the root of all evil.
    4. Re:Double Dupe? by psyph3r · · Score: 1

      I believe this is a 50nm process while those are 30 nm

  14. SSD by Remnant44 · · Score: 5, Funny

    I shall make this SSD my flagship.. and I will call it the Executor.

    1. Re:SSD by flynns · · Score: 1

      and suddenly, I am enlightened.

      thank you.

      --
      'If you're flammable and have legs, you are never blocking a fire exit.'
    2. Re:SSD by Jeff+DeMaagd · · Score: 1

      I think it sounds like one of those diseases you really don't want to get. Like Gwyneth Paltrow.

    3. Re:SSD by Molochi · · Score: 1

      I would pay to come down with a case of Gwyneth Paltrow.

      --
      "The Adobe Updater must update itself before it can check for updates. Would you like to update the Adobe Updater now?"
  15. Major update by zokier · · Score: 1

    I feel that this is major win for ssd, because this is first 'consumer-class' ssd that has actually better (non-random) transfer speeds than average desktop hdd, at least what I have heard

  16. Re:SP! by Panitz · · Score: 1

    I think it would be cheaper, and work better if you just bought more RAM. And if it won't fit in your motherboard, then buy a new one... whatever you spend it will probably cost less than this drive. (for about 12 months anyway)

  17. Can't one achieve such performance & more/w RA by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Fill up available USB slots with USB flash drives and use software RAID 0. With many boards having 6-8 USB slots, that should yield quite decent performance, and being flash drives, should skip RAID0's downside.

  18. If speed doesn't matter to you by holywarrior21c · · Score: 1
    http://www.techeblog.com/index.php/tech-gadget/worlds-largest-capacity-ssd-drive-unveiled
    The largest SSD up to date.

    Adtron has just unveiled a 2.5-inch SSD drive, which is claimed to be the world's largest capacity at 160GB. Just one drawback, this drive will cost $80-$115 per GB. For those who haven't already seen, check out a SSD vs. HDD demonstration after the jump.
    If you are like me who doesn't need power packed laptop, rather light and long lasting battery is what matters the most, SSD is something for you.
    1. Re:If speed doesn't matter to you by holywarrior21c · · Score: 1

      oups. here is 256GB SSD from PQI. I guess all you need to do is stack them. http://laptoplogic.com/news/detail.php?id=2506

  19. DELL and Alienware offers Samsung 64GB SSD... by holywarrior21c · · Score: 2, Informative
    http://www.cio-today.com/story.xhtml?story_id=130008HEVRPI

    They cost $920 when added to a Dell laptop. The 64-GB SSD is available initially on Dell's XPS M1330 ultraportable notebook Relevant Products/Services, and, later this year, on other models in the XPS line, as well as on Latitude corporate notebooks and Dell mobile workstations. For Alienware, users can choose dual 64-GB SSDs in RAID 1 or RAID 0 configuration, or a 64-GB SSD in combination with a magnetic drive for the Area-51 m9750 high-performance gaming notebook. Prices start over $1,000 for the SSD additions. As far as price is concerned. I would rather get this. http://www.engadget.com/2007/08/21/toshibas-320gb-2-5-inch-hard-drive-a-worlds-best-for-laptops/
    And if battery life really concerns you probably getting external battery from electrovaya or batterygeek may eliminate that worries.
  20. Yeah yeah by edelholz · · Score: 1

    Whine as much as you want. I think they're sexy. I want one... bad.

  21. This is how it works by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    1. Get sixteen, 4 GB SDHC, Class 6 or 8 innards

    2. Strap the lot in parallel, giving 64 GB

    3. 6|8 MB/sec/innard x 16 innards begets 100 MB/sec

    4. Profit !!

    Each 4GB innard is $20 currently, so 16 by 20 is 320. Figure $10 for plumbing. 1% margin for OEM (335), 50% markup by distributor (500), and another 50% by retailer (750), and there you have it $750 for 64 GB.

    Thank you !! Come again !!

    1. Re:This is how it works by SharpFang · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Don't get the innards of the cards. Place slots on your board.
      4 USB controllers, 16 readers, 1 PCI controller, support electronics. the device would cost some $30 to produce. Sell it empty, without the cards.
      And provide a good supply of bulk amount of the cards.

      The user can replace a faulty card without scrapping the whole device. They can add or remove cards depending on the needs. They can replace cards with bigger ones when they want more space. They can physically write-protect chosen partitions of the drive.

      If you don't worry about the speed much, you can use USB hubs instead of the controllers. Then the device plugs into USB.

      --
      45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
    2. Re:This is how it works by failedlogic · · Score: 1

      If you're talking about putting SD card readers (or similar) on the motherboard and have the ability for users to replace the cards as they wear out or need increased capacity, I think its an awesome idea.

      I'd love to get a small form factor system. Using SD memory in place of hard drives is a great solution to reducing the space, noise and heat issues. Obviously, I'd like to see speed and size increases and cost decreases. But this is a natural move for the market which will happen over time anyways.

    3. Re:This is how it works by Kjella · · Score: 1

      1. Get sixteen, 4 GB SDHC, Class 6 or 8 innards

      Are they like the cheapest CompactFlash cards with 10000 write cycles, and in general without much in the way of wear levelling? And you want to throw them all in parallel so every write is a write to every card? No, write cycles is not a problem for real SSD disks. It is a problem for cheap hacks, because 10000 cycles are plenty for say a digicam but very poor for a computer. Particularly since you'll use this for the "working files", static huge media files probably go on a different disk.

      --
      Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
    4. Re:This is how it works by skoaldipper · · Score: 1

      All this talk of innards is giving me a hunkering for some menudo soup. Mmmm.

      --
      I hope, when they die, cartoon characters have to answer for their sins.
    5. Re:This is how it works by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      So would that be something like this? http://www.zentek.com/product_sd_md816.htm

      I have to contact them to see how much they ask for the 16 slot model and if it supports SDHC. It's a bit large but still seems interesting.

  22. Another technology catches up with windows by Frozen+Void · · Score: 1

    First they require a GPU accelaration for Vista(Aero), and now you can use much faster swap file(majority use big gigabyte-size pagefile).Windows is pushing the computer technology further ahead.

    1. Re:Another technology catches up with windows by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Well, I use an older "True SSD", called the CENATEK RocketDrive (PCI 2.2 bus, & 2gb PC-133 SDRAM onboard), & for paging (fast seeks is the key gain on it).

      It's also useful for LOGGING!

      E.G.-> From Windows EventLogs (which ARE moveable in the registry), & logging from other apps as well (many apps maintain them).

      I also place my webpage caching from ALL of my webbrowsers on it also (Opera 9.24, FireFox 2.0.0.9, NetScape 9.0.0.3, & IE 7.x).

      The neat part of these last 2 is that I can COMPRESS THE ENTIRE DISK, using NTFS compression (very reliable)... this makes reading the mostly TEXT DATA (highly compressible & thus smaller, & read up from disk faster since the filemass is tinier & today's super-fast CPU's + RAM handle the decompress stage in RAM superfast offsetting the loss during decompress in RAM).

      All of that adds up to performance gains... due to the above reasoning, but also because I am not burdening my main C:\ disk (which houses my OS & Programs) with I/O for webpage caching, logging, & yes, pagefile.sys paging.

      Lastly, I place my cmd.exe (command interpreter) onto my SSD... thus, its seek/access is fast as well, since it is in RAM basically already (I do NOT allow the OS cache to cache my SSD either - I save the System RAM for that, for caching HDD's stuff instead!)

      It all works!

      APK

      P.S.=> I also do not clutter my disks with pagefile.sys mass, logs, or webpage caches. Each of them has the potential for creating fragmentation of the datafiles my apps create as well, so that is a non-issue on that account also.

      The CENATEK RocketDrive I use is dated though, & faster ones exist (e.g.-> Gigabyte IRAM, which iirc, uses SATA bus (150mb/sec potential vs. PCI 2.2 132mb/sec mine has) & also faster RAM (DDR2 iirc, vs. PC-133 SDRAM)... there was SUPPOSED to be a release of a PCI-Express unit called the DDRDrive X1, but it never happened!

      Too bad. I'd love a PCI-x based RamDrive/SSD... apk

  23. Ho hum by fnj · · Score: 0

    It's more vapor, guys. Send me an email when it has a price. Wake me when the price is 7X a hard disk for the same size. Instant message when it's cheaper than a same size hard disk. Yeah, right. I'll expect that in about 2525.

    1. Re:Ho hum by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Sorry, you've got your year wrong. In the year 2525, evil robots will have taken over the world, and they will face a formidable foe in the form of a cryogenically revived exotic dancer from the 21st century.

      It is unknown at this time whether the robots or the exotic dancer run on an SSD...though, her stacks of silicone may make a good drive.

    2. Re:Ho hum by thanatos_x · · Score: 1

      In reality, it's probably not going to be much over 10 years. Yes, HDDs will have greater capacity than SDDs, but the difference will likely be similar to why we don't use tape drives today. The primary drive in all non-bargin computers will probably be an SSD by 1017, and probably 2014 for all laptops*. Programs, music, documents, etc. will be stored on the SSD, HD movie content will likely mostly be stored on HDDs. Currently 300 GB is enough for almost any user if one excludes video.

      *I was going to add a caveat for the ultra cheap laptops, but they still use flash memory even today, mostly for size, durability and battery life - although the capacity varies between 2-8gb...

      --
      I am not an expert. If I am misled in something, please correct me.
  24. Re:Can't one achieve such performance & more/w by repvik · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Yeah, like that'd help. Do you think your USB-chipset can handle much more than 500mbps concurrent traffic? Doesn't matter how many ports it has, it is unlikely to be close to S-ATA speeds seeing as the USB-chipset is on the regular (1gbps?) PCI-bus...

  25. Yes, but... by amake · · Score: 4, Funny

    ...what does a large google show?

    1. Re:Yes, but... by The+-e**(i*pi) · · Score: 3, Funny

      lots of domain squatters

  26. Re:FP! by The+-e**(i*pi) · · Score: 1

    Isn't it odd how the moderation to this post would make a better post than the post it was moderating.

  27. Fastest? Not by a mile by pedantic+bore · · Score: 1

    I think the folks at STEC might be a bit surprised by these claims. Especially considering that their product has been shipping for months already.

    Of course, they might be quite a bit less expensive than the Zeus SSDs, which are quite pricey...

    For some folks, high performance is the requirement and cost is no object. Those folks get their solid-state drives from folks like STEC, Texas Memory Systems, or (soon) Violin Scalable Memory. I'd love to be able to afford this stuff. Buy maybe Samsung will be able to provide a fraction of their performance at a smaller fraction of the cost.

    --
    Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
  28. $24 times 16 == $384 (price) by Rick+Richardson · · Score: 1

    $24 for 4GB SD card at newegg.
    *16
    ----
    $384

    Upper limit on the price...

  29. Define "drive". Remember the hardcard? by tepples · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Keep in mind that the FusionIO card is a card, not an SSD. Do you remember the days before ATA, when hard disk drives each came with their own controller cards? Do you remember hardcards, or hard disk drives that plugged straight into the ISA slot?
    1. Re:Define "drive". Remember the hardcard? by vio · · Score: 1

      I think maybe the gpp was simply trying to point out that FusionIO is not a "hard drive" by today's definition, ie. I cannot simply (easily?) substitute my current laptop drive with a FusionIO card, so they don't really "compete"...

      But yes, I do remember those days... talk about dating myself :-(

    2. Re:Define "drive". Remember the hardcard? by tepples · · Score: 1

      I think maybe the gpp was simply trying to point out that FusionIO is not a "hard drive" by today's definition, ie. I cannot simply (easily?) substitute my current laptop drive with a FusionIO card, so they don't really "compete"... If the issue is ATX vs. laptop, then solid-state hardcards are also available in ExpressCard form factor.
    3. Re:Define "drive". Remember the hardcard? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I vaguely remember that hardcards were called hardcards. My guess is that this is because they were cards.

      Just because you can have drives on cards (or cards on drives -- anyone else remember when drive electronics were so bulky they needed daughterboards? Golly, I'm old...) doesn't mean that they're the same thing.

    4. Re:Define "drive". Remember the hardcard? by tepples · · Score: 1

      Just because you can have drives on cards (or cards on drives -- anyone else remember when drive electronics were so bulky they needed daughterboards? Golly, I'm old...) doesn't mean that they're the same thing. I define a "drive" as a sector-addressed data storage device. Computer operating systems seem to define a non-network "drive" the same way. The presence or absence of a data cable between the motherboard and the storage device does not matter to the operating system, nor should it matter to the computer's user.
    5. Re:Define "drive". Remember the hardcard? by vio · · Score: 1

      Well, you're a persistent one :-)

      Think "drop-in replacement" for a hard drive, ie. something I can plug into an interface that a hard disk uses, ie. SATA(2) or IDE. No one here was talking about ExpressCard or PCI(e), and neither is Samsung -- that's not the market they're going after with this device!

      Point is, the MTRON SSD device that the ggggp mentioned is indeed relevant (its a 'direct' competitor) but FusionIO is not...

    6. Re:Define "drive". Remember the hardcard? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      But yes, I do remember those days... talk about dating myself :-(

      Some of the best dates I had were with myself, you insensitive clod!

    7. Re:Define "drive". Remember the hardcard? by evilviper · · Score: 1

      Do you remember hardcards, or hard disk drives that plugged straight into the ISA slot?

      I have a 20MB hardcard salvaged from a 286 in my closet, why? Interested? I'll throw in an unopened Tandy CoCo-80 + monitor... I'd even consider letting go of my Qume 109 terminal, in all it's amber glory. And for the first time ever, I'm also offering my 33MHz Compaq 486 Laptop, with 7" 16 color screen and built-in trackball that puts modern track-pads to shame (NOTE: no floppy, CD, modem, USB, or ethernet).
      --
      Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
  30. OUCH! by LaTechTech · · Score: 1

    Fusion-io is targeting a retail price of approximately $30 per Gigabyte for the ioDrive(TM).
    My wallet just told me to go take a hike!
    --
    I want my! I want my! I want my Eee PC!
  31. What speeds? by Chemisor · · Score: 0, Troll

    120 Mbps? Oh, please! My IDE drive can do 60 Mbps, with moving parts, including that huge "read arm" thingy that actually has to move a few inches to read something. Here you have a piece of pure electronics, with no mechanical parts, and it can only double the transfer rate? I say it's pathetic. An SSD ought to have speeds comparable to RAM, in the Gbps range, and until one does, the rest are just useless ripoffs. But, of course, that's just my opinion.

    1. Re:What speeds? by JoelKatz · · Score: 3, Insightful

      First, you mean MBps. We're talking bytes, not bits.

      Second, your hard drive can sustain 60MB/s on the fastest part of the drive. Its average is probably much less than that (due to different linear speeds on the inside and outside of the platters).

      That speed drops catastrophically in many real-world scenarios. Small random reads, for example, become dominated by seek time and rotational latency and the high transfer rate doesn't help very much. Small random writes are only slightly better.

      It is really not "only double". It has a real-world speed that is about twice a high-end hard drive's theoretical maximum speed.

    2. Re:What speeds? by vadim_t · · Score: 4, Informative

      That 60 MB/s is almost never attainable in practice.

      SATA drives have a seek latency of about 9ms. This means that the drive can perform 111 seeks per second. Assume a very pessimistic scenario of reading a 2KB cluster. Your drive's performance is now about 200KB/s.

      For an expensive and low capacity SCSI drive, you can get 3.3ms, with about 600KB/s worst case scenario.

      This is assuming you're actually reading data you're interested in. Some of that will involve reading filesystem metadata, which from the user's POV isn't what you're actually interested in. For a directory with lots of small files I imagine you could get maybe half of that performance.

      I've seen SSD latency being quoted to be around 0.01ms. The same calculation above gives 195MB/s, assuming reading takes no extra time (which is false)

      From this you can see that a hard disk is highly limited by seek latency, while a SSD is much more limited by read/write speed.

  32. Don't flash drives have limited life? by Joce640k · · Score: 1, Funny

    I think you can only write to flash memory about 1000 times before it "wears out".

    ( Sorry, no thread on flash drives is complete without it... )

    This will be frighteningly expensive. I'd go for a cheaper 16Gb version - big enough for the system partition + swap file.

    --
    No sig today...
    1. Re:Don't flash drives have limited life? by Microlith · · Score: 1

      The average is anywhere from 100,000 to 1,000,000 -ERASES- before a given block goes bad. This doesn't account for the intelligent remapping most flash chips will do if a bad block is encountered.

      Writes are free, and if the controller/driver are smart, they'll spread writes across the whole of the flash before doing any erases. So if you have a 64GB drive and rarely exceed 4GB of usage, you won't encounter any erases for a while.

  33. Price depends on speed... by Joce640k · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Is your $24 card a high speed one?

    --
    No sig today...
    1. Re:Price depends on speed... by JoelKatz · · Score: 2, Informative

      Speed doesn't matter. With 16 low-speed cards, you can make one really high-speed one. It just takes a smart controller.

      In any event, even if they are slow, the speed limit doesn't come from the flash chips themselves. The speed limit comes from the controller.

      This drive has a controller and some flash chips. The cost of the controller is, maybe, $50 tops. The question is -- how much do the flash chips cost? If you can get 4GB flash cards for $24, that means the flash chips inside there must cost at most $24. The means you can sell 64GB of flash chips for $384 without losing your shirt. This even includes the cost of a controller, packaging, and the cost to advertise, stock, and sell the product that we don't need.

      There is no rational reason this drive should sell for more than $500, except that there is only limited supply. As soon as supply ramps up, the price will drop to about this value. I'd guess this will take 3 months or so.

  34. Re:We need a new spec for SSD's by JoelKatz · · Score: 4, Informative

    There is no read limit. The write limit is about 100,000 writes (really erasures) per cell.

    These devices will have wear leveling. That means that if a cell is close to running out of erase cycles, the drive will move data that has not changed in a very long time into that cell. A few cells will be kept as spares in case some cells don't last as long as they are predicted to.

    If you do the math, and figure a typical use scenario as a laptop's primary drive, you get that these drives should outlast mechanical hard drives by many years. For example, a 64GB hard drive with an endurance of 100,000 writes should be able to tolerate about 5 million GB of writes before it fails due to wear.

    How long it will take you to run that out depends on your average write rate. But with a reasonable rate (10MB/s) that works out to about 15 years.

  35. Re:SP! by Peet42 · · Score: 1

    Of course, what you save by this method will be spent in the cost of keeping your motherboard powered up 24/7.

  36. Real SSDs used to be faster than this! by billcopc · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Maybe I've been an elitist geek for too long, but I clearly remember "real" SSDs being a heck of a lot faster than 100mb/sec. Of course, they used actual DRAM instead of flash, and they'd lose everything if your battery ran out. It was essentially a hardware Ramdisk, with the (then-tremendous) benefit that it doesn't depend on the PC's memory controller, so back when the average PC had 16mb ram, you could have a 640mb SSD that pwned everything without breaking a sweat.

    A few years ago there was this bizarre Gigabyte i-Ram gadget that took four DDR dimms of any size and connected by SATA, it was relatively cheap too at ~$125 (sans Ram). If they had made a larger model, say 8 or 16gb, I'd be all over it! There's also this FusionIO company that's kind of spinning its wheels right now, in true dot-com style, but they're at least trying to bring the concept of DRAM-based storage back into the spotlight.

    Even with 15k drives and RAID, there are some things that just take forever on my workstation (random access stuff). Consumer equipment is getting really fast, but the high-end has been stagnating for years. With more and more people taking advantage of quad-core processors, dabbling with audio/video editing and hi-def content, not only do we need larger capacity, but we need massively increased transfer rates to match. What good is a terabyte disk if it takes 10 hours to read/write the whole thing ? Where are my 150mb/sec transfer rates ? Why design high-speed SATA interfaces if the actual drives can't even use a third of its juice ?

    These flash drives serve a purpose, yes, but I think it's safe to say their target market is less concerned about transfer rate and more about battery life and shock-resistance. For the other 98% of the world, we want more speed dammit!

    --
    -Billco, Fnarg.com
    1. Re:Real SSDs used to be faster than this! by Courageous · · Score: 1

      FusionIO is not DRAM. It's Flash.

      C//

  37. Samsung is a ram manufactuer by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I am guessing that the math that you come up with is way off. Samsung wants to kill off HDD esp. since those companies are not moving in this direction. I am guessing that samsung will LITERALLY give it away at 400-600.

    1. Re:Samsung is a ram manufactuer by leuk_he · · Score: 1

      YOu might have missed the fact that i did not come with math, only with facts.

      YOu are attacking math,i did not do. I told you to do yourself.... 8-)

      and 600-1500 is a WIDE range!

  38. Remind me again... by JimboFBX · · Score: 1

    Why do we keep getting Samsung only advertisements for flash products that are remarkably unimpressive? I'm pretty sure there is lots of ho-hum crap being released every day and that stuff obviously isn't newsworthy- why does something NAND related from Samsung suddenly become news? Its not like those densities/specifications aren't already being developed by their competitors...

  39. Re:Can't one achieve such performance & more/w by Joe+The+Dragon · · Score: 1

    With Very High Cpu over hard for the just the USB part then you have to add in the software raid part firewire is better.

  40. Is there a marketting-to-english babelfish? by Moraelin · · Score: 2, Funny

    I just had to go look at the Fusion IO page and their FAQ and... well, let's just say, does anyone have an URL for marketting-bullshit-bingo to English babelfish please?

    By the half of the page I had developped an extreme allergy to the word "leverage". Two sentences out of three were just saying that the lever some (supposedly awesome) proprietary technology. And more importantly, I was none the wiser. There wasn't a single sentence that even said what it _does_. What makes that technology so awesome? What's the MTBF? You know, some actual technical data.

    The more I think about it, the more I doubt that it was actually a Frequently Asked Questions. More likely just something that a marketter thought up, along the lines of:

    Q: Are you awesome?
    A: Yes, we leverage proprietary technologies to be uber-awesome. We leverage Buzzword(TM) and Uninformative Trademark(TM) and Tech-Sounding-Word-We-Made-Up(R) to be so awesome, that you can't even imagine how awesome we are. And we'll leverage that too. Leverage. Leverage. Leverage.

    Q: Does it rock?
    A: Yes, we leverage proprietary technology that really really rocks. We liberate enterprises from legacy architectures, we're scalable, we put enterprise-level SANs in your palm, we solve world hunger, cure aids, and probably filled your bullshit bingo card already. That's how much we rock.

    Q: Will it rock my socks off?
    A: Yes, our awesome leverage proprietary sock-rocking technology. We're that awesome. And did we mention "leveraging" yet? We leverage a lot.

    Not exact quotes, but let's just call it an artist's impression. I haven't heard a more content-free text since someone accidentally sold us 100% tech-illiterate merketers when we thought we wanted a technical workshop.

    Don't get me wrong, I don't doubt that their engineers probably know their shit. But that's what happens when you leave the FAQ writing to a marketer who doesn't know his arse from his elbow, and obviously think that using enough words will hide the fact that there's no information there.

    And just to beat a dead horse some more, what annoys me isn't as much the use of buzzwords, but that they're used to obscure and mis-inform.

    E.g., so they say it's "scalable"? How? Your typical motherboard has only one 4x PCI-Express slot, and on half of them it will be under the heatsink of any high end graphics card. So how _do_ you scale there? Throw the card away and buy a bigger one? How's that more scalable than buying a new hard drive? Even if you had more of those slots on some special motherboard, how's that more scalable than buying more hard drives? No, seriously.

    E.g., the claim to replace an enterprise SAN and all the infrastructure... is omitting why that infrastructure was there in the first place. If anyone just needed more storage on their local machine, it's trivial to add more than 640 GB hard drives locally for a fraction of the cost. A hard drive, even on a card, is not a SAN replacement.

    E.g., video games are hard-drive intensive? No shit? What video games were they playing there? Database Larry Rebuilds The Indexes 3D? Looks to me more like they wrote a list of every single use they could think for a computer, than actually having put some thought into it.

    Etc.

    Again, I'm willing to give their engineers the benefit of the doubt. I can see why such a card would be nice. Just saying that it would be nice if their good work was presented to the world by someone less blatantly clueless.

    --
    A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
  41. Re:We need a new spec for SSD's by QuietLagoon · · Score: 1

    Thanks for the analysis. All I was saying in my original message (that for some reason was marked as a troll?) was that info similar to what you provided should be in the specs for SSDs. The specs that are given are similar to those of regular hard drives when, as your astute analysis shows, SSDs behave quite differently.

  42. And it should be free, too! by DragonHawk · · Score: 1

    An SSD ought to have speeds comparable to RAM, in the Gbps range, and until one does, the rest are just useless ripoffs. But, of course, that's just my opinion^H^H^H^H^H^H^H desire with no basis in what's actually technologically feasible.

    Fixed that for you.

    --

    dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
    I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
    1. Re:And it should be free, too! by BlueTrin · · Score: 1

      An SSD ought to have speeds comparable to RAM, in the Gbps range, and until one does, the rest are just useless ripoffs. But, of course, that's just my opinion^H^H^H^H^H^H^H desire with no basis in what's actually technologically feasible. Fixed that for you. ^H without googling or even reading previous posts because I prefer to assume that I know everything. Fixed that for you. http://www.fusionio.com/
      --
      Don't you know it is now both immoral and criminal to think beyond the next quarterly report?
  43. Only 50% the power of old Super Star Destroyers?? by Tetsujin · · Score: 1

    That's quite a decrease! I betcha next time a Super Star Destroyer takes a little damage to the bridge module, it won't go immediately crashing into the surface of a Death Star!

    Hopefully the firepower hasn't been proportionately decreased as well...

    --
    Bow-ties are cool.
  44. Re:Can't one achieve such performance & more/w by mnmn · · Score: 1

    At that price you can buy a fiberchannel SAN and hire a boy from a third world country to carry it around with you.

    --
    "Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
  45. Re:SP! by aonaran · · Score: 1

    I don't understand you comment.
    The parent post was saying, in response to a post asking how well these would work as swap drives, that it would be cheaper to just buy more RAM than buy one of these to use for swap.
    I don't see how keeping your motherboard powered up all the time makes a difference here, swap, like RAM is not meant to be persistent.
    I agree with the parent post. Why use an expensive solid state drive to simulate RAM when you could just buy a heck of a lot of RAM?

  46. Holy Shit! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I just wet my pants from laughing so hard!

  47. Try adding a subdomain of "msdn" by mounthood · · Score: 1

    I just had to go look at the Fusion IO page and their FAQ and... well, let's just say, does anyone have an URL for marketting-bullshit-bingo to English babelfish please?
    Add "msdn." right before "microsoft.com" and it usually clears up.
    --
    tomorrow who's gonna fuss
  48. Re:SP! by Peet42 · · Score: 1

    You're right; I apologise. I missed a vital post in the thread because it was "collapsed", and read it as saying that it was cheaper to buy extra RAM rather than use one of these drives, but saw no reference to swapfiles. That's the problem with configurable sites - you tend to assume everyone else has the same "view" as you do. @'.'@

  49. Re:Outperforms? - Check your facts, sir! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    You said: "Texas Memory Systems http://www.superssd.com/benefits.htm says can saturate Fibre Channel (GBs/sec) and this one caps out at 100s of MB/s. Perhaps not quite so unequivocally outperforms as this statement makes it out to be."

    FibreChannel speeds are measured in Gigabits, not GigaBytes, of data per second. () Due to the encoding used for 1 through 8 Gb FibreChannel (8b/10b), there is a 20% reduction in useful data transported at a given FibreChannel speed. 1 Gigabit/Second FibreChannel transfers data at 100 Million Bytes per Second (not 100 Megabytes/Second). 2 Gigabit/Second FibreChannel transfers data at 200 Million Bytes per Second. And so on. Not until you get to 10Gb FibreChannel do you see a billion bytes flying by every second (and it uses a different encoding).

    A drive 'capping out' at data transfer rates of 100s of Megabytes per Second would, in fact, be operating at FibreChannel speeds. Depending on the exact FibreChannel speed at which the TI drive is said to achieve "saturation," the new drive could, in fact, be outperforming it if it can achieve 100s of Megabytes per Second.

  50. Re: Car engine lifetimes by billstewart · · Score: 2

    Airplane mechanics actually do keep track of flying hours as a maintenance target, but cars lifetimes usually get counted by miles. However, suppose you do look at times - my experience with Chevy engines has been that they last about 120,000 miles, so at an average speed of 30mph, that would be 4000 hours, or about half a year (other cars should of course run longer :-) While 7000 RPM is obviously not a good speed to run the engine at, running it continuously for long periods of time is likely to be much better for it than realistic operating cycles. Diesels would probably do even better on long continuous use applications.

    --

    Bill Stewart
    New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
  51. Re:We need a new spec for SSD's by JoelKatz · · Score: 1

    Then I agree with you. The flipside to my argument that they will last about 15 years with normal use is that if you run them at full blast with just write, they will only last about 1.5 years. Now I can't think of any reason anyone would write all that data and never read it back, but there certainly could be applications that this type of memory is unsuited for.

    I would like to see the specifications for drives of this type include the cell size, number of erase cycles per cell, the type of wear leveling used, and the forecast write endurance under at least worst case and typical scenarios.

  52. stupid question... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Okay, so why isn't anyone just making a PCIE USB RAID card? 4 ports or so, buy your own cheap USB flash drives,
    raid them together, and you have your own SSD drive for dirt cheap, plus you can upgrade as prices come down
    and capacities go up...

    the prices on the ssd drives seem absurd when you can buy 16+ GB USB flash drives for so cheap. All they're
    giving you is the same chips behind a different interface.

  53. USB drive with multiple cards and striping... by Joce640k · · Score: 1

    USB card readers are about $5. It should be easy to make one with eight SD card slots and a RAID-like controller for $25 (or even a cheaper one for four cards).

    You could than buy eight cards of whatever capacity you need and plug them in - instant high speed flash drive with decent capacity!

    SATA and Firewire versions would be even better.

    --
    No sig today...
    1. Re:USB drive with multiple cards and striping... by JoelKatz · · Score: 1

      A 1U box with 128 such slots should be quite doable. A 3.5 inch hard drive sized box with 24 such slots should be quite doable. SATA2 would probably be the ideal interface.

      There are really only three pieces that you need. First you need the main controller that talks SATA2 out one end and talks to the flash controllers on the other end. Then you need the interface hardware to connect to so many SD slots. Then you need the software to do the wear leveling and drive emulation.

      Notebook size is a bit trickier. A full-sized SD card is 24mm by 32mm and is 2.1mm thick. A typical notebook drive (2.5 inch) is 100mm by 70mm and 9.5mm thick. You will need some space for the housing and interface electronics and you can't stand the SD cards up (assuming you use full-sized SD cards). One possibility would be to have SD slots on both sides of two long narrow vertical boards that run down the center of the drive (starting at the interface edge). By my quick math, it should be possible to fit 18 cards that way (a 3x3 on each board with the SD cards horizontal and with their contacts towards each other). So 16x4GB is doable, for a 64GB notebook drive.

      Figuring $100 for the controller, software development recovery, and connectors and such, plus 16 4GB SD cards at $30 each, I get $580. I will almost guarantee you that prices will fall to this level within 3 months of the first such device being available for much more than this.

  54. Paging, logging, webpage caches, & %comspec% ! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I use an older "True SSD", called the CENATEK RocketDrive (PCI 2.2 bus, & 2gb PC-133 SDRAM onboard), & for paging (fast seeks is the key gain on it).

    It's also useful for LOGGING!

    E.G.-> From Windows EventLogs (which ARE moveable in the registry), & logging from other apps as well (many apps maintain them).

    I also place my webpage caching from ALL of my webbrowsers on it also (Opera 9.24, FireFox 2.0.0.9, NetScape 9.0.0.3, & IE 7.x).

    The neat part of these last 2 is that I can COMPRESS THE ENTIRE DISK, using NTFS compression (very reliable)... this makes reading the mostly TEXT DATA (highly compressible & thus smaller, & read up from disk faster since the filemass is tinier & today's super-fast CPU's + RAM handle the decompress stage in RAM superfast offsetting the loss during decompress in RAM).

    All of that adds up to performance gains... due to the above reasoning, but also because I am not burdening my main C:\ disk (which houses my OS & Programs) with I/O for webpage caching, logging, & yes, pagefile.sys paging.

    Lastly, I place my cmd.exe (command interpreter) onto my SSD... thus, its seek/access is fast as well, since it is in RAM basically already (I do NOT allow the OS cache to cache my SSD either - I save the System RAM for that, for caching HDD's stuff instead!)

    It all works!

    APK

    P.S.=> I also do not clutter my disks with pagefile.sys mass, logs, or webpage caches. Each of them has the potential for creating fragmentation of the datafiles my apps create as well, so that is a non-issue on that account also.

    The CENATEK RocketDrive I use is dated though, & faster ones exist (e.g.-> Gigabyte IRAM, which iirc, uses SATA bus (150mb/sec potential vs. PCI 2.2 132mb/sec mine has) & also faster RAM (DDR2 iirc, vs. PC-133 SDRAM)... there was SUPPOSED to be a release of a PCI-Express unit called the DDRDrive X1, but it never happened!

    Too bad. I'd love a PCI-x based RamDrive/SSD... apk

  55. True SSD's are better... vs. FLASH RAM ones by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Ok... well, I use an older "True SSD", called the CENATEK RocketDrive (PCI 2.2 bus, & 2gb PC-133 SDRAM onboard), & for paging (fast seeks is the key gain on it).

    It's also useful for LOGGING!

    E.G.-> From Windows EventLogs (which ARE moveable in the registry), & logging from other apps as well (many apps maintain them).

    I also place my webpage caching from ALL of my webbrowsers on it also (Opera 9.24, FireFox 2.0.0.9, NetScape 9.0.0.3, & IE 7.x).

    The neat part of these last 2 is that I can COMPRESS THE ENTIRE DISK, using NTFS compression (very reliable)... this makes reading the mostly TEXT DATA (highly compressible & thus smaller, & read up from disk faster since the filemass is tinier & today's super-fast CPU's + RAM handle the decompress stage in RAM superfast offsetting the loss during decompress in RAM).

    All of that adds up to performance gains... due to the above reasoning, but also because I am not burdening my main C:\ disk (which houses my OS & Programs) with I/O for webpage caching, logging, & yes, pagefile.sys paging.

    Lastly, I place my cmd.exe (command interpreter) onto my SSD... thus, its seek/access is fast as well, since it is in RAM basically already (I do NOT allow the OS cache to cache my SSD either - I save the System RAM for that, for caching HDD's stuff instead!)

    It all works!

    APK

    P.S.=> I also do not clutter my disks with pagefile.sys mass, logs, or webpage caches. Each of them has the potential for creating fragmentation of the datafiles my apps create as well, so that is a non-issue on that account also.

    The CENATEK RocketDrive I use is dated though, & faster ones exist (e.g.-> Gigabyte IRAM, which iirc, uses SATA bus (150mb/sec potential vs. PCI 2.2 132mb/sec mine has) & also faster RAM (DDR2 iirc, vs. PC-133 SDRAM)... there was SUPPOSED to be a release of a PCI-Express unit called the DDRDrive X1, but it never happened!

    Too bad. I'd love a PCI-x based RamDrive/SSD... apk

  56. USB kills CPU, film at 11 by Namlak · · Score: 1

    Hook multiple USB drives up in RAID and there won't be any CPU power left to do the thing you need all that data for!

  57. HyperDrive 4 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    "The CENATEK RocketDrive I use is dated though, & faster ones exist (e.g.-> Gigabyte IRAM, which iirc, uses SATA bus (150mb/sec potential vs. PCI 2.2 132mb/sec mine has) & also faster RAM (DDR2 iirc, vs. PC-133 SDRAM)... there was SUPPOSED to be a release of a PCI-Express unit called the DDRDrive X1, but it never happened!

    Too bad. I'd love a PCI-x based RamDrive/SSD... apk"     - by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 07, @09:43PM (#21276631) Like I said above, check this out:

    HyperDrive 4 Redefines Solid State Storage (The Fastest Hard Disk In The World):

    http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/11/07/hyperdrive_4_redefines_solid_state_storage/

    APK

  58. HyperDrive 4 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    "The CENATEK RocketDrive I use is dated though, & faster ones exist (e.g.-> Gigabyte IRAM, which iirc, uses SATA bus (150mb/sec potential vs. PCI 2.2 132mb/sec mine has) & also faster RAM (DDR2 iirc, vs. PC-133 SDRAM)... there was SUPPOSED to be a release of a PCI-Express unit called the DDRDrive X1, but it never happened!

    Too bad. I'd love a PCI-x based RamDrive/SSD... apk"     - by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 07, @09:43PM (#21276631) Like I said above, check this out:

    HyperDrive 4 Redefines Solid State Storage (The Fastest Hard Disk In The World):

    http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/11/07/hyperdrive_4_redefines_solid_state_storage/

    APK

  59. HyperDrive 4 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    "The CENATEK RocketDrive I use is dated though, & faster ones exist (e.g.-> Gigabyte IRAM, which iirc, uses SATA bus (150mb/sec potential vs. PCI 2.2 132mb/sec mine has) & also faster RAM (DDR2 iirc, vs. PC-133 SDRAM)... there was SUPPOSED to be a release of a PCI-Express unit called the DDRDrive X1, but it never happened!

    Too bad. I'd love a PCI-x based RamDrive/SSD... apk"     - by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 07, @09:43PM (#21276631) Like I said above, check this out:

    HyperDrive 4 Redefines Solid State Storage (The Fastest Hard Disk In The World):

    http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/11/07/hyperdrive_4_redefines_solid_state_storage/

    APK