Slashdot Mirror
TB-Sized Solid State Drives Announced
prostoalex writes "Several companies have announced solid state hard drives in excess of one terrabyte in size. ComputerWorld describes one from BitMicro that's just 3.5". Their flash drive will support up to 4 Gbps data transfer rate. From the article: 'SSDs access data in microseconds, instead of the millliseconds that traditional hard drives use to retrieve data. The BitMicro E-Disk Altima 4Gb FC delivers more than 55,000 I/O operations per second (IOPS) and has a sustained data transfer rate over 230MB/sec. By comparison, a fast hard drive for example will run at around 300 IOPS.'" Ah, the speed of tech. Seems like only last month we were talking about 500GB drives.
The Texas Memory Systems datasheet claims 24 GB/second of random sustainable data bandwidth which is much higher than the Fusion IO card but it looks like they are serializing this possibly across multiple drives. They also claim higher (3.2 million) operations per second.
The BitMicro drive is groin grabbingly amazing in size but claims only 55k operations per second & sustained data transfer rate over 230MB/sec.
So what I would wager is that PCIe might provide more throughput than SATA but don't quote me on that. I'm interested to see where this goes & also curious to see whether we continue dumping drives on channels like the Texas Memory solution or if it just goes back to a server with a ton of PCIe slots on it and hot pluggable card swapping for 'drives.'
Worth revisiting is the fact that Fusion IO claims to be releasing the cards for sale next month. As we all know, sometimes it's just a case of who gets to market first that wins in the technology world.
My work here is dung.
The TMS link is for a 9U rack of non-volatile DDRRAM, consuming 2.5KW and weighing up to 720lbs, so not quite suitable for the desktop.
The BitMicro article goes on to say that the maximum capacity in a standard 3.5"x1" format is 640GB, so requiring around 2.5" for the full 1TB.
This is Slashdot, so we don't expect facts in the summary to be correct. However, this is still amazing progress.
Any sufficiently advanced bug is indistinguishable from a feature.
Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Washington Mutual, and Chase all annouced there new "PC Home Equity Loans". Averaging at 5.8% APR(OAC) you can take out a home equity loan for the purpose of purchasing a 1TB SSD.
So basically, -1 troll/offtopic is really slashdots way of saying "I hate that you thought of something before me."
The linked to press release for TMS systems are not a single drive. They are a half rack sized array. Dont try and put one in your desktop anytime soon.
:-)
Their systems have been in use for years by folks who need speed at any cost.
Now, the BitMicro drives... those look interesting. I wonder if I can slot them into my StorageTek 6140
One terrabyte is a heck of a lot brown stuff. I wonder if I risk data loss if it gets infected by earth worms? I hear they are nasty little fuckers...
...how does it compare to capacity equivalent in SD cards plus RAID/reader glue logic piece of hardware?
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Once that happens, PCs will really start to get useful!
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
But for now the cost isn't worth the performance differential. With enough ram, generally you aren't hitting the hard drive too often except for a few tasks. With 64 bit computing, you get to have even more useful ram. When the price of solid state drives is competitive with hard disks, I'll pay attention.
These could be used with some sort of intelligent prefetch (ala ReadyBoost) with good results. I know they use them currently in high-performance systems to swap out table indexes and the like. Since the indexes are relatively small files--but there are many of them--seek time becomes the bottleneck, rather than throughput.
/media/usbdisk), umount the device (ie., sudo umount /media/usbdisk); /dev/sda1 (assuming /dev/sda1 is the correct device for the connected usb device) /dev/sda1
/proc/swaps" to check if everything is ok; on my laptop I get the following output:
/dev/hda4 partition 2353512 116 -1 (standard HD swap partition) /dev/sda1 partition 1981928 123900 32767 ("ReadyBoost"-style pen drive)
/dev/sda1", assuming /dev/sda1 is the correct device.
I've heard about doing this in Linux by mounting a USB key and using it as extra swap. Here's how in Ubuntu (from http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=395435:
1) Plug the USB drive in your USB connector;
2) If Ubuntu automount the device (usually in
3) sudo mkswap
4) sudo swapon -p 32767
"cat
Filename Type Size Used Priority
Quite obviously, performance is not the same as with real additional ram; however, I feel REAL gain in speed while using eclipse+tomcat+mysql for development on my laptop (which is equipped with just 512MB ram).
To turn it off, type:
"swapoff
Obviously you are going to be write limited due to the physical limitations of the flash disk, but reads will be very fast. ReadyBoost will keep a table of files that get read a lot, but written infrequently and then cache them on the flash device. It would probably be possible to do this at the disk driver level in linux with a fast database like BDB, keep a table of the last 1000 files read, if there's a write, remove them from the table. Then move those files up to the flash drive as a disk cache... there may be something like this already, like the Google Prefetch project that's in the works.
Cool! Amazing Toys.
Finally! One terrabyte! I was hoping to get more than mere giggabytes (or, even worse, meggabytes) for SSD. I still remember the epic moment when SSD reached killobytes, after years struggling with just some bbytes.
A big improvement from the predicted "State-Sized Solid TB Drives".
AFAIK all of these SSDs have a limited number of writes that can be performed before they start having bad "sectors" (dunno the flash memory name equivalent of a sector off the top of my head). I don't see any information on those sites, but I'd be interested in knowing - how long until they start to fail? At what rate will it fail (in other words, how long to go from say, 500GB to 0GB)? These drives are great, but if you drop that kind of coin and then they fail in a year... that would suck.
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
The big feature here is the included Infiniband support. Without digging real far in to the specs if this array supports RDMA it would make a very nice shared memory array for a grid type implementation.
Dude, one terrabyte! I must not be paying attention... when did they pass one lunabyte and one venerabyte?
Is it really a good idea to make a hard drive the size of mycobacterium tuberculosis? I'm just sure I'd lose it before I figured out how to plug it in.
With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter. -- William Lloyd
I'm glad news of solid-state drives is getting more common. Disk seek times have been the number one cause of annoying delays on my desktop systems for several years now, and I certainly don't have exotic hardware. Perhaps I can ditch my plan for a Solaris box in the garage and diskless clients and just wait a year or two for >100GB $400 solid-state disks.
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News
Many of the predecessors to these models were aimed at military applications and contained a really cool feature - instant erase. They could erase themselves very quickly (seconds) to a level believed to be reasonably secure from recovery.
I would like to see that feature incorporated into these consumer level drives. You never know when you might need to ditch that terabyte of pr0n in a hurry...
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
How much?
This would be a whole lot nicer than my current stack of SCSI 15k drives, and I'll bet they put out a lot less heat too!
-Billco, Fnarg.com
As has been mentioned already, TMS sells a solution that fills a rack. The article is about something to fill a drive bay.
We've had a few EVE-Online stories lately, so I thought it might be interesting to some to point out that one of the users of the TMS setup is CCP Games, the makers of EVE Online. In fact if you click on 'success stories' in right sidebar of the first link in the summary you'll see a short article about CCP's first install of the TMS RamSan a while back.
When can I drop one of these into my laptop?
Yeah, these look pretty nice, but you can't beat those old tube drives for that warm, acoustic sound.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
You really can't afford it.
So, it's a giant ram disk with either flash or hard drive backup. http://www.superssd.com/faq.htm
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Now available with a terabyte-sized pricetag!
A Tera-Byte and a Tera-ble price
{feel free to groan}
A goal is a dream with a deadline
Apparently this works on Windows XP too: http://www.windowsxlive.net/?p=1337
RamSan-400
The starting capacity of a RamSan-400 (32GB) is $35,000. It includes:
-32GB DDRRAM storage
-one dual-ported 4Gb Fibre Channel controller
-hot swappable RAID 3 hard disk drives
-hot swappable and redundant power supplies
-redundant battery and fans
-IBM Chipkill in memory (redundant RAM)
-1 year return to factory warranty
Each additional 4Gb FC controller is $3,000 (up to 4 in each chassis).
The RamSan-400 can upgrade in 32GB increments for $18,000 (up to 128GB).
RamSan-400 (64GB) - $50,400
RamSan-400 (96GB) - $65,800
RamSan-400 (128GB) - $81,200
RamSan-500
The 1TB base-level system of a RamSan-500 (1TB SLC NAND Flash, 16GB DDR) is $200,000. It includes:
-one dual-ported 4Gb Fibre Channel controller
-hot swappable and redundant power supplies
-redundant battery and fans
-1 year return to factory warranty
The 2TB base-level system of a RamSan-500 (2TB SLC NAND Flash, 32GB DDR) is $300,000. It includes:
-two dual-ported 4Gb Fibre Channel controllers
-hot swappable and redundant power supplies
-redundant battery and fans
-1 year return to factory warranty
The RamSan-500 can upgrade DDR Cache.
-16GB to 32GB is $10,000
-32GB to 64GB is $20,000
Each additional 4Gb FC controller is $3,000 (up to 4 in each chassis).
SmartBox
This only gets interesting when I can get a 1TB SD drive the same physical size and approximate price as a 1TB mechanical (conventional) drive.
Given that the usb sticks' innards nowadays get smaller and smaller it should be possible to take apart two sticks (or more) and solder both into one housing. That way you'd have a single usb stick in one slot, but you could run the contained units as a RAID-0 to increase transfer rate and writing speed.
I want one so I can load it up with all my girl friends phone numbers cause I have so many!
Ya, and I'm rich too so I might get two, one for girls I like and one for girls I used to like! Ya!
Since filesystems are so closely tied to cylinders, tracks, sectors and blocks...how does this play on SSDs? If I'm not mistaken, when allocating new extents, filesystems take into account physical locations to minimize future seek times...is that valid on a SSD?
that if you have to ask what they cost, it means you cant afford one.
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
How about we see some of these large solid state drives actually for sale?
Actually,
1. Even for low level disk access, that hasn't been so since the days of MFM hard drives. Nowadays everything uses LBA (Logical Block Addressing). Meaning that when the computer wants a certain sector it tells the hard drive, quite literally, something like "give me block #13526".
2. As a side effect, this already allows the hard drive to remap around bad sectors. If you read blocks #13525, #13526 and #13527, you might get the middle one from a whole other position than the other two because it was remapped.
Disk defragmenting is based on the assumption that contiguous logically _probably_ means contiguous physically too, but there is no guarantee that it's actually so. _Probably_ the HDD won't remap when there's no need, but again, it wouldn't tell you anyway.
3. For _filesystems_ doubly so. Even the FAT in DOS 1.0 didn't work with tracks and sectors, it worked with block numbers. The translation to cylinder, head and sector was made at a whole other level to actually read or write the data. But the filesystem didn't contain any reference to those.
E.g.: a 1.44 MB hard drive image still works flawlessly when copied to the first 1.44 MB of a CD. (That's how bootable CDs work. They have a floppy image at the start, and it's really booting that.) The FAT contained no references to cylinders and heads, so the exact same image works just as well off a CD.
4. Well, it's not that new a problem. You know those USB memory sticks one can buy? Or connecting a Flash-based MP3 player to your PC and copying files on it? Those tend to be formatted as FAT. So there you go. They don't have to invent anything new for an internal SSD. They already did it on other devices.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tera-
Tera- (symbol: T) is a prefix in the SI system of units denoting 1012, or 1,000,000,000,000 (1 million million).
Confirmed in 1960, it comes from the Greek , meaning monster.[1] It also bears a resemblance to the Greek prefix - meaning four; the coincidence of it signifying the fourth power of 1000 served as a model for the higher-order prefixes peta-, exa-, zetta- and yotta-, all of which are deliberately distorted forms of the Latin or Greek roots for the corresponding powers (fifth to eighth respectively) of 1000.
In computer science tera- can sometimes mean 1,099,511,627,776 (240) instead of 1,000,000,000,000, especially in the term terabyte. To avoid this ambiguity, the binary prefix tebi- has been introduced to signify 240, but this, in common with the other binary prefixes, is not currently in general use.
-- Eugen* Leitl leitl ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://molecu
That'd be an STD rather than an SSD (but still a good place to keep your pron.)
Right, because when your house gets raided and the police see you erased your hard drive they just turn around and say "well played". 'Obstruction of justice' ringing any bells?
if (time_in_jail(OBSTRUCTION_OF_JUSTICE) < time_in_jail(WHATS_ON_MY_HARD_DRIVE)) wipedrive();
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
From the "Tera-RamSan Details" page:
"Requires 2,500 watts of power."
Huh?
bb4now,
PMC
we-go-we-fly
That's also why I don't have a plasma big screen yet. I'm using an alternative technology there as well.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
??$/gig up to 1.5 tb, plus the cost of a 4G fiber card.
FusionIO is 700 MB/SEC + 87K iops (3x more bandwith, Exceeds SATA 2)
30$/gig up to a 640GB card (19k$)
TMS, its huge and heavy, and blows the doors off either product, and expensive. They have a $150/gb
product that is still pretty fast. 2GB/sec 100K iops (8x more than bitMicro)
Unless the Bitmicro comes in at a price that is below fusionIO ($30/gig) I don't see the point, just buy 3 fusionIO devices in raid-0 and keep your backups recent
Storm
The spinning disk has been with us for a long time. Yes, they were (and are) great mass storage technology, wildly more stable and also wildly faster than tape, but as a technology, its getting a bit dated. I remember IBM 3370 disk packs which had several sets of disks in them, and also engineers who worked at companies that made platters for IBM mainframes --usually 1/8 inch thick, nickel plated copper with a very high polished surface, and usually about 20 inches in diameter. The disks spun on ball bearings, each disk (usually 8 disks in a pack) weighed about 20 pounds, and spun at 1800 RPM. The motor that turned them was usually 1/2 horsepower, and turned a pulley connected to a central shaft (through the middle of the platter). The drive between motor and shaft was a 1/2 inch wide belt (not unlike a fan belt found on late model cars). Occasionally the pack would 'crash' when a belt broke. It was a lot harder for heads to score the nickel surface (much harder than scratching the ferrous coated aluminum on todays hard disks (ok, they have 'pixie dust' on them...sorry). The slowest part of a computer for years has been disk access (even though its wildly faster than tape access ever was). Solid state storage is yet another improvement (getting rid of CRT's was another great thing to get rid of).
Just shove BIGNUM memory cells and the necessary controller circuitry into the device. In principle you could build a single device that has a trillion trillion bytes today.
On the other hand, making very large solid-state drives small enough to fit on your keychain is a challenge.
--
Mod this post +1 insightfultotheblind -2 obvioustothewise
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Skip the ATA interface, and the PCIe. I predict in a few years we'll see DIMM-like slots on our motherboards for terabyte flash memory modules next to our DIMM slots for RAM.
J
Ya, and I'm rich too so I might get two, one for girls I like and one for girls I used to like! Ya! It's because of cocksuckers like you we still use conventional harddrives. -Should a drive-platter suddenly spring loose and fly across the room, you would be the shield between anything worth preserving, and it.
Correct me if I am wrong, but can't USAians avoid tax by buying from out-of-state?
Anyway, although you may need to ignore the tax to get the full £1=$1 ripoff story, the price differences in question are often far more than the tax.
E.g. Adobe CS 3 Design Standard Full from the Adobe online store: UK Price £895 *excluding* tax, US price $1,199 (About £600)...
Anyway, in the past (certainly in the era of that HD drive I quoted) the "VAT inclusive" rule only applied to "retail" shops and consumer goods Anything vaguely resembling business equipment or commercial supplies was advertised without tax, with maybe a little "*excluding VAT" in the small print. The rationale for this is that most businesses can reclaim any VAT that they pay on materials or equipment.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
Or as I believe they are called now, iSeries eServer machines. OS/400 is what's called an SLS architecture. There are no devices in the system nor are there file systems. It's simply one huge 64bit address space. The hardware and software abstraction layers intercept the call from an application or a hardware interface and pipe it to the SLS which just does one reach into the address table. An SSD would be ideal for that architecture. It would be essentially one huge non volatile RAM address space at bus speeds.
http://www-03.ibm.com/servers/enable/site/porting/iseries/overview/overview.html