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

Very nice

[Bullfish]

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.

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

[Junta]

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 Texas memory product is cramming a bunch of ram in 24U and putting a whopping 25 minutes of battery backup. If you disconnect power for more thon 25 minutes, the only thing left is whatever was committed to 'real' peristant storage. They provide Infiniband and FC ports, so it's more akin to an EMC or Engenio storage controller than a hard drive. 1 TB/24U is actually kind of sad when hard drives can easily yield 3 TB/U nowadays. There is a place for this (ramdisk performance is pretty nifty), but it's not even remotely relevant to anything a normal person would think of when they hear SSD (they picture a drive intended to connect directly to a system some how, not participate in a SAN directly.

The BitMicro drive is groin grabbingly amazing in size but claims only 55k operations per second & sustained data transfer rate over 230MB/sec. And it *actually* is flash based storage, meaning it can fairly be called persistant storage. Of course, the clear hint is there when they talk IOps and only mention FC connection that they are targetting only deep pockets with the product as of this press release or whatever. 55k operations and 230 MB/s is ludicrously insane performance for a single drive relative to current spinning disks. You can fit 144 of these into a 24U space and have a theoretical aggregation that exceeds the ram based system specs. Of course, RAM should be able to trounce it so the limiting factor is a controller setup to push the IOPs and throughput, so both solutions would probably perform comprably.

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.' Well, considering that SATA controllers at best currently use PCI-e as the method to communicate with the chipset, PCI-e slots better be capable of better than SATA... Ok, it's over-simplyfying, a 1x PCIe first gen slot yields about 2.5 Gb/s or so, and a SATA II port is 3.0 Gb/s, so a single lane PCI-e slot would be slower than a SATA port. However commonly PCIe appears in 4/8/16 lane configurations, I assume you meant 880 MB/s, which would point to PCIe 4x slot sort of throughput, which makes sense, it's not unreasonable to expect at least a 4x lane slot to be free, requiring anything more could waste limited hardware resources.