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BitMicro Takes Wraps Off 832 GB Flash Drive
Lucas123 writes "BitMicro has unveiled an 832GB NAND flash drive that will begin shipping later this year. The E-Disk Altima drive is expected to have sustained read rates of up to 100MB/sec and up to 20,000 I/O operations per second. The device features a SATA 3.0 G/bps interface. No pricing as of yet."
Unless they came up with some radically cheaper method of producting them this will basically probably require a mortgage to go out and buy.
The cheapest I ever heard of a 2 GB flash drive was about $15, so this is over 400 of those put together or $6000. Even if they had some volume discount, I think anything under $1000 for an 800+GB flash drive is unthinkable... right?
stuff |
What form factor do the current hard drive based iPods use? 1.8"? I can see Apple wanting a smaller version of this for their next gen devices.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
Now Apple has the technology to support flash based player of HD content in a year or two, once the price of this drops. 832 Gigs should be enough for at least 50 HD movies.
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Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
Too bad that it'll probably cost more than my car. :p
no idea of pricing yet, but several major limbs and a contract signed in your own bodily fluid was hinted at.
832GB SSD?! holy cow thats going to be dear.
Now tell me why anybody should want this outside of the media/video industry...
They've already announced a 1.6TB flash drive for launch around mid-2008.
Well, that's an odd number, what's the motivation behind it? I can see that 832 = 512 + 256 + 64 = 2^9 + 2^8 + 2^6, but I still fail to see the logic there.
I think I'm going to need a bigger keychain.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Nice, but will it run Pen Drive Linux?
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
I would expect that a drive like this would be nice for servers (if cost was no consideration) because of the lack of moving parts, and lower heat production. I don't know for sure, but I would bet that these would take a lot less juice than a conventional hard drive. I wouldn't be surprised if they lasted longer, as well (no moving parts no wear down).
That said, I want a laptop with one of these.
On the other hand, you wouldn't want to use the flash drives in a DB server that is write-heavy, and go through drives like Kleenex.
832 gigs should be enough for anyone.
The Porntropolis 832 (tm)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Mmh, I can't remember being able (all financial considerations put aside) to buy a Soyouz, an Arianne V or a Spache Suttle for that matter. Does this mean they don't exist?
The sweet spot right now seems to be around 16 or 32 Mb. You can get an 16 Mb flash drive for about $150, but 32 Mb is more than twice the price.
;)
;)
Can't... resist...
1999 called... they want their flash pricing back.
Or, if you'd like, I'd be willing to sell you some 32Mb flash cards for, shall we say, $100 a piece?
(Sorry.)
Diplomacy is the art of saying, "Nice doggie!" until you can find a rock.
Yes
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
No customers capable of affording it either.
no evidence that they actually have working hardware.
This is a good point and you are right to be cautious. Obviously there will be massive technological challenges to overcome in order to move past the current state of the art, which is loads of flash connected to an SATA interface, to this new paradigm of having shitloads of flash connected to an SATA interface.
I'm not an expert, but I'm thinking perhaps they can start by adding more flash?
Which was their previous high late last year.
http://www.bitmicro.com/press_news_releases_20070911.php
The bit I'm slightly skeptical on is the environmental specs. While -40C and +85C are becoming a more common standard, not many SSD manufacturers can reliably hit past -25C and +75C. This may not seem that big of a deal, but in some industries - which would currently be the only ones spending Close to the $10k (judging by current pricing for extended/extreme versions of these drives) for them initially - this is huge if true.
I didn't want to leave this blank.
Maybe the miltary or JPL would adopt these first, willing to pay $10-20K for a terabyte solid-state non-violatile memory. Its still cheaper to have a company do these for you than to have them custom built.
I swear at least one person has asked this question in every flash-drive related article on /. for the last 5 years. Yes, there is a limited number of writes - usually in the 100,000 to 1 million range depending on the quality of flash used. No, it isn't a problem in any practical terms for common uses. Using wear-levelling a flash drive should work out a great deal more durable than existing hard drive technology.
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
If I can't buy it yet, then it doesn't exist yet.
F-22 Raptor: so expensive that it's practically invisible!
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
Cut him some slack. Maybe he just wears extremely tiny shoes.
Taking too long
It still has the 'problem' of limited writes, but the problem has been greatly reduced by load-leveling techniques and general improvements to the technology.
Often it is a combination of factors like having backup space (Sell a 120gig HD as a 100gig HD) and load leveling which makes sure that you aren't always writing to the same memory location.
So while it is still an issue, it has largely been addressed. I wouldn't use it on anything that is write-heavy, but for most situations you won't notice much of a difference.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
Does it come with a free copy of Duke Nukem Forever preinstalled?
They are probably using 16 modules, but 192 GB is reserved for that damned U3 partition.
Yeah, I'm still waiting for a Linux or OS X U3 removal tool, because I don't do Windows.
More music, fewer hits
I'm sorry, are you from the past?
They simply raided two of their 416GB drives :)
No sig for you!!
But, can it blend?
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
"Moore's Law." Live it. Breathe it. Love it.
art is science made clear. -cocteau
Maybe this is what is meant:
8.5mm height / 64 GB,
832 GB * 8.5mm / 64 GB =
13 * 8.5mm = 110.5mm = 11.05cm = roughly as tall as a shoebox?
I think every new SSD development is fantastic news, be it a success or a flop. It's a bit early to break out the champagne, but affordable SSDs are rapidly approaching, and these stories are welcome good news heralding the upcoming storage revolution. Some of these SSD technologies are destined to be dead ends, but it's important to know what doesn't work as well as what does, and I'm glad these companies are burning money (not my money, haha) to bring us these marvels. The $1000+ SSD that only big corporations, the military, or enthousiasts can afford is infinitely better than the SSD that doesn't exist at all. It's coming!
Here's my thought. You're already putting a ton of expensive stuff into this device, so why not divide the space into two or four internal channels and use RAID 0 on them?
That way you'd get 200 - 400 MB/sec, halfway to or completely saturating your SATA bus. You don't get any real penalties, as you only get write-faults on the flash, and you've already included hardware to handle that. Besides, fitting 4B into 80B or 1B into 20B still gives you the same ratio, so it's not even going to wreck havok on wear leveling as far as I can tell with my very simple line of thought.
Definately wouldn't be doubling price or even close to it.
Alright, maybe, just maybe, on a windy day when the moon is aligned properly with jupiter, you might get a 50% increase in seek speed, so you'll go from 0.1 ms to 0.15 ms.
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
So if I use one of these to record the nightly news every day in UNcompressed high definition, it will wear out in just over 273 years in the worst case, or last nearly 2738 years in the best case. It's more likely to be stolen as primitive relic in that time frame :-)
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
... then you can't afford it, yet. Wait a couple years and pick them up in the discount bin at Walmart.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
The one common issue of concern to most media designers is write endurance. Media write integrity
of a flash device now greatly exceeds that of a magnetic disk drive; however this comparison is rarely
acknowledged.
Data is stored on a flash device by the injection and depletion of a charge on a floating gate. Each time
a write or erase operation occurs, there is an infinitesimal breakdown of the oxide layer on the floating
gate that holds the data bit charge. This phenomenon doesn't occur in a read operation. This slow
breakdown eventually degrades the cell where it does not allow an exchange of a charge and can no
longer be erased or written to. In early years of flash technology "Write Endurance" was limited to
only a few thousand cycles but over the years semiconductor manufacturers have improved this
technology where typical limits of a flash cell endurance now vary between 300,000 and 2 million
erase/write cycles depending on the technology.
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
You can't buy a house with your credit and income. Do no houses exist?
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
is SO going in my Eee.
There is simply too much glass..
Doesn't that mean you can burn out the flash memory in about two minutes because of the limited number of write cycles?
...
Ok, I'm kidding. Wear leveling. But it was just too obvious of a /. thing to not post it. At least I didn't make an In Soviet Russia joke. Right?
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
That this will not be as big as a house. Fact.
Everyone is so exciting about the 832GB. Maybe it's just a marketing strategy. It's 832Gigabit, which is equal to 104GigaByte SSD. I think this sound more reasonable. Might cost about $550-$600 when it comes out. (just guessing)
Yeah, but will it run on Vista?
ducks
If you've never been modded as "flamebait" or "troll," you've never tried to argue a minority viewpoint here!
Oh , I thought it was a kitty cat.
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
Well, the electrons are moving.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Like all other new technology devices the "toy" lovers with deep pockets will buy these first just like the iPhone. After a few months and they work out the bugs and increase to 1TB drive and faster speed then I may think about buying one.
GB != Gb
And heck, screw the 832. I want the 1.6 TERABYTE version:
http://www.trustedreviews.com/storage/news/2007/11/22/BritMicro-Announces-1-6TB-3-5in-SSD/p1
Only thing is this one is 3 1/2" so it won't work well for a laptop HD
Pancakes. Oh I blew it.
Do you know if wear-leveling techniques depend on free space? If so, I could see problems with certain usage scenarios.
A cat can't teach a dog to bark.
If, say, 50GB flash drives were sufficiently cheap to produce, the Blu-Ray/HDDVD format war would be over. The winner: USB-movies. That move would have significant advantage. For instance, imagine not having to worry about scratches, heat, or accidentally putting your film through the wash&dry (I, stupidly, did this once, and was quite pleasantly surprised).
Further, imagine being able to fit a large movie collection on a small shelf near the player and being able to carry movies around in your pocket.
Imagine players not bound by the medium: as larger capacities are available, they just plug in like everything else. No need for complicated gearing and lasers and whatnot. Obviously, eventually the transfer rate will be insufficient, but the processing power will probably also need to be upgraded to match newer codecs, so that's not really a problem.
Further, USB is pretty future proof. It's so useful, ubiquitous now and doesn't take up much space really, that legacy ports are likely to be included for decades.
Players already have USB ports, and the drives of 50GB capacity already exist. You can do each of the things I've mentioned individually with either flash or small hard disks, but it just hasn't been put together, and the price of ICs hasn't come down enough for a "thumb-drive" release to be viable.
I often wonder what it would cost to produce a custom read-only "thumb-drive" if you anticipated a production run of the order of a blockbuster DVD release.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Non-rotating machinery is really nice for databases and transaction journalling - this stuff is likely to be significantly cheaper and more reliable than Battery-Backed RAM disks which are the main alternative, or than putting more RAM onto your CPU's motherboard. You could do a multi-tier database that journals to smaller Flash drives and then spools out to rotating disks, but this is big enough that it may be a cleaner solution.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
It cannot. But will it?
What's the advantage of having an 832gb SSD versus a pair of 500gb drives in RAID-0 ? Lower power consumption, yes, but I don't see anyone putting a $6000 SSD in a $600 Dell. Faster seeking, sure, but the 100mb/sec throughput seems rather puny when compared with recent Intel chipsets that can shove over 300mb/sec in RAID-5 with good SATA hard drives. Heck, why not split it out into four 200gb SSDs and RAID them ?
I clearly have a short-sighted view of the industry, because I work with massive amounts of audio/video. My sole focus with storage solutions is maximum throughput. For reliability there's RAID 5/6, and for speed there's Ram. Where do these SSDs sit ? What's their ideal purpose ?
Over a decade ago, hard disks were slow and solid state drives were orders of magnitude faster. I remember fooling around with a 2gb SSD in the mid-90's, when 100mb/sec on a PC was mind-blowing. Mind you, that was a DRAM-based SSD, not flash. It pretty much maxed out the PCI bus. I would expect a modern SSD to push at least 1gb/sec over PCI-E, considering how cheap DDR2 ram can push upwards of 3gb/sec in real-world scenarios. Where is that breakneck product ? Something like a modernized, heavy-duty version of the Gigabyte i-Ram would kick ass in these media-rich times.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
And bring it down to earth, too. As I just replied to somebody else before I saw your post, think about the oil and gas industry. Alaska. Siberia. Offshore platforms. The deserts of Kuwait. And when it comes to checkbooks, same rule applies.
Breakfast served all day!
No, a large write once a day is hardly the worst case usage scenario for a flash drive. In fact, it's almost the best case scenario and is unrealistic for a desktop computer's usage pattern.
The worst case is something akin to having just one sector free, which means any write will fill up the drive, and the next write to the same spot will require an erase first. So if you want to destroy your flash, fill it up with data, and then constantly rewrite a small file.
Flash drives certainly have the advantage over USB hard disks of being faster to write to (usually).
What about eSATA HDDs? Not a lot slower than flash drives, and a whole lot cheaper.
I don't know if they do, do eSATA HDDs have moving parts? Aren't they just regular external HDDs? Flash drives don't have moving parts therefore they are rugged, which is something you want in exploration.
FalconShould there be a Law?
The fact is that they don't.
The current SSDs emulate a 'classical' 512-byte block device, just like any hard disk.
This is not the most efficient design, however, doing otherwise would be prohibitively expensive (due to incompatibility with existing software).
In a classical 512-byte block device, there is no distinction between a 'free' block, and a 'busy' block.
Hence, the 'address space' of the SSD is "virtualized", and the amount of the physical memory is greater than the addressable amount. The physical blocks themselves can be greater than 512 bytes as well.
If you repeatedly rewrite the same 512-byte block, the wear-leveling algorithm spreads the writes over a set of physical locations.
In an ideal implementation, this set will be as large as the difference between the physical memory size and the virtual size.
However, this would make efficient implementation difficult, thus the set of 'free blocks' is actually much smaller, and the actual set depends on the address of the block being rewritten.
throw new SuccessException("Sig read successfully");
Thank you, that's good to know.
A cat can't teach a dog to bark.
Moore's Law has nothing to do with storage?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moores_law
Yes I know there are many variations on the original theme, but then, those were not postulated by Moore, were they?
Experience teaches only the teachable. -AH
imagine a beowulf cluster of these!
Some people can...
Sometimes I wish I was one of those people.
A good wear-leveller will swap high-activity sectors with low activity ones every-so-often, so it would still get to wear-level the entire disk.
No, but the flash memory is silicon transistors. That's where Moore's Law applies.
How about 12x64gb and 16x4gb ?
That's 832gb right there. Okay, so that sounds like a botched number right? Not entirely, as mentioned elsewhere they've also announced a 1.6tb disk, they could make this simply by replacing the 4gbs with 64gbs (well that gives just around 1.75tb but you could drop some 64gbs for 4gbs) if they're roughly the same physical size.
I'd guess they're just filling the drive with the most cost effective blocks they can and over time will just scale up the lower capacity blocks to higher capacity blocks to increase drive sizes.
It's speculation and I really don't know much of the way drives like this work or are designed but should my assumptions be correct then this seems a viable explanation - that whilst they could just release a 1.75tb drive now it really would cost too much, 12x64gb and 16x4gb is probably some price sweet point now whilst scaling up to a full 28x64gb may really push the price up to the truly unacceptable levels.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
If these are anything like the drives I priced from BitMicro about a year ago (you have to e-mail for price) then they are probably many (many) thousands of dollars. AFAIK, BitMicro has catered more to the industrial (hard drives for aerospace) realm.
I'm not sure that any drives they may be making now aren't in the same class, a [price] class that would make consumers shit a purple Twinkie, considering in 2005 their U320 155gb drive was supposed to cost north of $75,000 US.
And, what about this? Why are we dancing around this drive when they already make a 1.6 TB model?
Windows has more viruses because linux has more virus coders.
That's why I have a $2000 Dell XPS m1330 sitting next to me with a 64GB SSD drive in it.
/. morons spouting fetid drivel from their warped little brains.
It was SOOOOOOO expensive that I couldn't afford to buy one.
Oh wait.
And if you haven't used a computer with an SSD drive in it, maybe, just maybe, you should do the intelligent thing ans SHUT YOUR PIE-HOLE unless you have actual experience and can comment intelligently.
Typical
You misread my scenario. A wear-leveler will indeed avoid wearing down the same erase unit when the disk is nearly full, but every write will then still trigger an erase. It won't destroy an erase unit as quickly as if you didn't have a wear-leveler, but it's closer to a worst case.