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BitMicro Takes Wraps Off 832 GB Flash Drive

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the will-only-cost-an-arm-a-leg-and-your-firstborn dept.

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."

29 of 241 comments (clear)

  1. Mortgage? by mudetroit · · Score: 5, Informative

    Unless they came up with some radically cheaper method of producting them this will basically probably require a mortgage to go out and buy.

    1. Re:Mortgage? by maxwell+demon · · Score: 3, Funny

      Well, maybe I'm not up to date, but I always thought first-borns run on food, just like anyone else.

      --
      The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
    2. Re:Mortgage? by Linker3000 · · Score: 4, Funny

      Poors Law?

      --
      AT&ROFLMAO
  2. cost estimate by 192939495969798999 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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 |
    1. Re:cost estimate by PrescriptionWarning · · Score: 3, Funny

      the same could be said of a 800 GB hard drive years ago. i'll explain in mathematical terms: as time, thats our X axis, increases, the Y value decreases. If you guessed Y to be the cost, give yourself a chimichanga. If you guessed Y to be anything else including, but not limited to, goat milk, give yourself a wedgie.

    2. Re:cost estimate by TeknoDragon · · Score: 3, Informative

      more likely they will be using anything from 4gb - 64gb chips (Samsung announced 25/10/07)

      If they are shooting for video editing only that price would be right, but the enthusiast & business market will IMO want something under $2000. TFA suggests business application.

    3. Re:cost estimate by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

      zOMG that means cars should be like $5.99 now since they were hella expensive back in the day, right?

      lrn2economics

    4. Re:cost estimate by PrescriptionWarning · · Score: 4, Funny

      the curve of time to car value is far different from the curve of technology value over time. For example, a car is considered an antique after a certain period of time, in which its value goes up (if properly maintained and restored)!

      try selling a nintendo or an old watch calculator made in the 80s in 10 years, I doubt you'll get more than a 5-10 bucks. The point is, the car analogy has yet again made someone look like an idiot :P

    5. Re:cost estimate by ACMENEWSLLC · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I don't know if BitMicro is among these, but there are manufactures that have figured out how to mass produce very large USB drives at a fraction of todays costs. There have been articles in Google news, and patents are pending on various methods.

      I think we discussed this on /. not long ago?

    6. Re:cost estimate by phoenix321 · · Score: 4, Informative

      "There is a lot more computing in this world than what can be found in data centers and offices, young Padawan."

      Really, there is. Computers that fly, sail, drive or are employed in low power, low heat, low noise, high vibration, high dust, high heat, low heat environments. Be creative: That starts with laptops in the space shuttle and surely doesn't end with onboard systems of surveillance planes. All Gigabyte-intensive operations where you do not have an unlimited power socket in the wall and/or have other considerations about weight and shock tolerances.

      And all of these applications have powers with large checkbooks behind them, who will write off 5000USD as merely half a percent price increase for much better reliability and power consumption.

  3. hmm. by apodyopsis · · Score: 3, Funny

    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...

    1. Re:hmm. by MyLongNickName · · Score: 5, Funny

      Now tell me why anybody should want this outside of the media/video industry...

      We've found Bill Gates' Slashdot user account.

      --
      See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
    2. Re:hmm. by easyTree · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Now tell me why anybody should want this outside of the media/video industry...
      To lower power consumption/size/weight of laptops?
      --
      Requiem for the American Dream
    3. Re:hmm. by sc7007 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Now tell me why anybody should want this outside of the media/video industry... I work in the seismic data processing industry (oil and gas exploration). We regularly (almost every project) deliver datasets to clients that are on the orders of 1-5 TB. Many of our milestone QC datasets for clients are 500-750 GB. Putting these on a flash drive or portable hard drive is much faster than a bunch of 3592E tapes, plus easier and quicker for the client to access. Flash drives certainly have the advantage over USB hard disks of being faster to write to (usually). If these were cheap enough, and they will be at some point, I could see these being commonly used. On the other hand, maybe just a solid state portable disk drive, which these are just a variant of, will be cheaper (time and money).
  4. I want one by jollyreaper · · Score: 4, Funny

    I think I'm going to need a bigger keychain.

    --
    Kwisatz Haderach
    Sell the spice to CHOAM
    This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
  5. Re:832? by MyLongNickName · · Score: 5, Funny

    Well, that's an odd number

    No. It is even.

    --
    See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
  6. Re:832? by Rickz0rz · · Score: 5, Informative

    832 = 64 * 13 Perhaps they are using 13 64mB modules.

  7. Re:Sweet by Firehed · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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?
  8. the marketing dept has picked a name for it: by circletimessquare · · Score: 4, Funny

    The Porntropolis 832 (tm)

    --
    intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
  9. Re:nothing to see here... by Not_Wiggins · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.
  10. Re:832? by mr_mischief · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The thing is, 13's not exactly a power of two. To access 13 modules, you'd need the same 4 control lines as 16 modules. Perhaps it's actually 16 * 64 and three are specifically for redundancy and wear leveling?

  11. Re:nothing to see here... by Slashcrap · · Score: 3, Funny

    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?

  12. Re:I thought flash went bad over time by LighterShadeOfBlack · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.
  13. Re:Sorry by modecx · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.
  14. Re:832? by easyTree · · Score: 3, Funny

    what is a millibyte?
    It's what you'll be getting from my pet mPede shortly =)
    --
    Requiem for the American Dream
  15. USB power, that's not the question. by Tatarize · · Score: 5, Funny

    But, can it blend?

    --

    It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
  16. If you need to ask the price ... by Skapare · · Score: 3, Insightful

    ... 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
  17. Re:Sorry by UbuntuDupe · · Score: 4, Funny

    You can't buy a house with your credit and income. Do no houses exist?

    --
    Apology to Ubuntu forum.
  18. Re:Yawn by lazyforker · · Score: 3, Informative

    The drive you linked to is 3.5" and 1.6TB; whereas the drive in TFA is 2.5" and 832GB. I assume they're aiming for a different market with this product. In fact the 2.5" might be ideal as a storage device for an HD video camera. Small, light, low power consumption, less susceptible to shocks etc. Or if you have a high performance laptop with which you perform video editing and want to avoid carrying bags of external FW drives, cables, PSUs, spare batteries etc etc this would be pretty cool to have *in* the laptop.