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."

Comments

Mortgage?

[mudetroit]

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

Re:Mortgage?

[Linker3000]

Poors Law?

cost estimate

[192939495969798999]

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?

Re:cost estimate

[Anonymous Coward]

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

lrn2economics

Re:cost estimate

[PrescriptionWarning]

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

Re:cost estimate

[ACMENEWSLLC]

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?

Re:cost estimate

[phoenix321]

"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.

Re:hmm.

[MyLongNickName]

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

We've found Bill Gates' Slashdot user account.

Re:hmm.

[easyTree]

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

To lower power consumption/size/weight of laptops?

I want one

[jollyreaper]

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

Re:832?

[MyLongNickName]

Well, that's an odd number

No. It is even.

Re:832?

[Rickz0rz]

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

Re:Sweet

[Firehed]

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.

the marketing dept has picked a name for it:

[circletimessquare]

The Porntropolis 832 (tm)

Re:nothing to see here...

[Not_Wiggins]

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.)

Re:832?

[mr_mischief]

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?

Re:hmm.

[sc7007]

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).

Re:I thought flash went bad over time

[LighterShadeOfBlack]

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.

Re:Sorry

[modecx]

If I can't buy it yet, then it doesn't exist yet.

F-22 Raptor: so expensive that it's practically invisible!

USB power, that's not the question.

[Tatarize]

But, can it blend?

Re:Sorry

[UbuntuDupe]

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