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

And again...

[SharpFang]

...how does it compare to capacity equivalent in SD cards plus RAID/reader glue logic piece of hardware?

Re:This is not a drive... its an array

[vidarh]

The key being "any cost". I talked to them at one point, and was quoted a price for one of their devices that was about as much as my company pays in hardware lease, bandwidth and power for hosting 4 racks worth of high end servers for a year...

ReadyBoost, et al

[inKubus]

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.

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 /media/usbdisk), umount the device (ie., sudo umount /media/usbdisk);
3) sudo mkswap /dev/sda1 (assuming /dev/sda1 is the correct device for the connected usb device)
4) sudo swapon -p 32767 /dev/sda1

"cat /proc/swaps" to check if everything is ok; on my laptop I get the following output:

Filename Type Size Used Priority /dev/hda4 partition 2353512 116 -1 (standard HD swap partition) /dev/sda1 partition 1981928 123900 32767 ("ReadyBoost"-style pen drive)

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 /dev/sda1", assuming /dev/sda1 is the correct device.

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.

Quick Erase?

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

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...

EVE Online uses the TMS RamSan

[LakeSolon]

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.

New! Improved!

[JohnnyBigodes]

Now available with a terabyte-sized pricetag!

monster

[eleitl]

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.

2500 watss of power?

[NuMessiah]

From the "Tera-RamSan Details" page:

"Requires 2,500 watts of power."

Huh?

bb4now,
PMC