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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
...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".
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.
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.
This is not funny anymore.
Extreme Programming - Redundant Array of Inexpensive Developers
This comes up every single time flash drives get mentioned on Slashdot. Go search around and you'll dozens of posts in every article asking and answering this question. The short answer is that with the wear levelling used on all modern flash drives they work out at at least an order of magnitude more reliable than current HDDs despite the write limit.
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
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?
These are RAM drives with a battery backup. They aren't flash drives. RTFA.
SRSLY.
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.
Yes, it would suck, because we all know that standard hard drives with spinning platters, and magnetic read/write heads, almost never break down. :)
My point is, is that if solid state drives had better known failure times, they could be better than the spinning platter types. Spinning platter drives tend to die whenever, for unknown reasons, and they also die if they just get too old. If using solid state drives could solve the first problem, and only have drives die at a known point in the future, when they get too old, then it would probably work out better for most people. If the drive has a lifetime of 5 years, but you know with 99.99% certainty that it won't start to die before that, you can plan to replace it. However, with the spinning platter hard drives, we know they are probably going to die in 5 years, but also that they could die at any point, for no reason at all.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
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.
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.
from the the article : "Competing products include Texas Memory Systems Inc.'s RamSan 500, a flash SSD with a dynamic RAM cache. That drive achieves up to 400,000 IOPS. Dutch company Attorn's HyperDrive 4 is a DRAM-based SSD that runs at 44,000 IOPS. Theoretically, DRAM should be faster than flash, but BitMicro's ASICS have made their flash faster."
The TMS RamSan is flash ssd with dynamic cache.
Attorns Hyperdrive is DRAM.
Bitmicros system is flash.
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
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.
If the people in charge of making SSDs would quit using NAND Flash and move to OUM you wouldn't even need to worry about wear leveling. 10^8 is much better than 10^5 that we generally get now.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
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
Soooo I'm asking a serious question and I get troll? Ok... Anyway, thanks to those of you that gave intelligent responses. I learned somethin'.
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
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.
MTBF: 2 million hours.
Doesn't exactly address your concern, but should give us some idea.
Giggidy Giggidy Giggidy!
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
Lots of supposed answers, for sure, but they tend to be riddled with assumptions, eg. that data is written sequentially, and in large blocks. Filesystems tend to not work that way. I've yet to see an analysis of flash drive lifetime with a real-world UFS (or whatever) filesytem on it.