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.

Comments

Don't Forget Fusion IO's PCIe Card Drive

[eldavojohn]

Ah, the speed of tech. Seems like only last month we were talking about 500GB drives. We also discussed 640GB PCIe cards with sustained data rates of 800Mb/sec for reading, 600Mb/sec for writing and 1,000,000 operations per second.

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.

Re:Don't Forget Fusion IO's PCIe Card Drive

[Gr8Apes]

The Texas Memory Systems RAMSan requires 2500W of power.

For the BitMicro SSD: 230MB/s >> 800 Mb/s card, and 55K IOPS >> 300 IOPS for todays hard drives.

It sounds to me like the BitMicro is a clear winner, especially considering that today's fastest HDs deliver about 300 IOPS and a max of about 40MB/s sustained data transfer. You can RAID the drives to increase performance, but I imagine the same will hold true of the SSDs. The only issue is price. The Texas Memory System is out of the question - it makes an Intel P4 Extreme look like a power miser.

Clarification to the Summary required.

[AmIAnAi]

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.

Re:Clarification to the Summary required.

[dpaton.net]

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.

It's actually 24U, and it consists of (what appear to be) 8 3U racked computers that each manage 128GB of RAM storage for the network, and have a 4 drive hot-swap array for backup.

Source: http://www.texmemsys.com/files/f000225.pdf

It's a Ram Disk.

[camperdave]

a 9U rack of non-volatile DDRRAM

So, it's a giant ram disk with either flash or hard drive backup.

Will I lose data if I lose power to a RamSan?

No. The RamSan-300 and RamSan-400 systems are equipped with redundant batteries and four internal hard disk drives. When external power is lost, the batteries will power the system under full operation for five minutes (this is just in case the power outage is temporary). After five minutes, the system will turn off Input/Output for the system and complete backing up all data that is in memory to the internal hard disk drives. Even if the system is fully loaded with memory, backing up to the internal disks will take no more than 12 minutes to back up. The batteries in the system are N+1 redundant, which means that there is enough battery capacity with just two of the three batteries to power the unit and complete backup after external power fails. The hard disk drives in the system are RAID protected which means that even if a hard disk drive fails, the other disk drives will be able to backup the system in the event of power outage.

No. The RamSan-500 systems are equipped with redundant batteries to power the DDR cache long enough to flush the DDR cache to the Flash memory RAID. Flash memory is inherently non-volatile and does not require power to save data.

http://www.superssd.com/faq.htm

All This For the Modest Price Of..

[nimr0d]

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).