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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 |
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
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.
Why would you waste that much space as part of a disk with effectively zero seek time on HD movies? They don't need that kind of performance - even a 4200RPM standard hard drive would have more than enough throughput (and with tech like accelerometer-based head parking, durability shouldn't be too much of an issue). Use it as an OS disk. Better yet, use it for databases - the seek times would be fantastic for the application, and unless you're constantly updating rows (rather than just inserting new ones), the write cycle limit on flash-based storage is unlikely to become an issue.
It's not as if you need a portable video library anyways. Stick a few on your device and go. Your battery life is by far going to be the limiting factor. Apple would be much better off trying to create a mobile video streaming device than to waste so much flash memory on a portable device.
Sure, in five years then I'll probably have a terabyte of flash memory in my car key that only costs eight bucks. And at that point, this kind of thing would make sense. Right now, that's a TON of flash storage that would carry a huge price that would make it beyond impractical for portables. If you want a mobile HD player, create something with a 720p screen and one of those brand new 500GB laptop drives and stick half a gig of RAM in as a massive buffer.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
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.
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.
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.
Does it come with a free copy of Duke Nukem Forever preinstalled?
But, can it blend?
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
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
What has this got to do with Apple?
You can't buy a house with your credit and income. Do no houses exist?
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
Seems like we've slashdotted the Pen Drive Linux site.
Ok, I'm running my linux (see screenshots, below) from a 2 GB SanDisk Micro Cruzer drive at this time,
on a Gateway 2000 Pentium II. Use these files to kick off the Flash Drive, using loadlin. You have to have a small msdos drive in the computer, or a partition on a larger drive with msdos, put the files there. Documentation is included in the tarball, also, a copy of the Rapidweather Remaster CD is needed also.
Rapidweather's Linux Screenshots.
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)