2008, The Year of Solid State Storage

An anonymous reader writes "At CES, SSD drives were a plenty on the show floor. "Some companies said we could see 250GB SSD units by the end of this year, while others predicted it could take up to a couple of years for them to become mainstream. None of the companies promised mainstream adoption, but they promised a bright future and we are inclined to believe them. High capacity drives are going to be expensive due to their very nature of early technology and gradual adoption rate."

Comments

Lets try the other way around, eh

[v1]

High capacity drives are going to be expensive due to their very nature of early technology and gradual adoption rate.

I think they have that backwards. Lets try High capacity drives are going to have a gradual adpotion rate due to their very nature of being expensive due to their being early technology

There, that's better.

I'd have one now ("be an early adpopter") if they weren't so bloddy expensive.

Re:Lets try the other way around, eh

[4solarisinfo]

Price isn't the only factor here. Has anyone seen any real reliability or Environmental numbers on any of these drives yet? I know many government/military programs who would be glad to pay for it, if it could prove to increase availability in certain environments.

Re:Lets try the other way around, eh

[minginqunt]

I remember seeing a curve of cost/gig over time of SSDs vs magnetic media, and it seemed to show that although both were falling, SSDs were falling faster, and were due to overtake their clicky brethren in the 2012-2014 time frame.

Once that happens, I imagine that magnetic drives' usage will tail off sharply, and disappear within a couple of years, because nobody (or at least nobody worth speaking of) wants to use magnetic over solid state anyway. In fact, it might start happening even whilst SSDs have a small price premium.

God knows, I'd be happy to pay a 20% premium to never have to use magnetic hard drives again.

Re:Lets try the other way around, eh

[Geoffrey.landis]

Price isn't the only factor here. Has anyone seen any real reliability or Environmental numbers on any of these drives yet? I know many government/military programs who would be glad to pay for it, if it could prove to increase availability in certain environments.

Well, flash storage certainly is better in the space environment. Conventional hard-disk technology requires a pressurized compartment (the heads stay separted from the disks with a thin film of air). And, of course, any technology with no moving parts is preferable-- mechanical parts have an annoying tendency to freeze up with vacuum thermal cycling.

Spirit and Opportunity are now four years into their 90-day mission on Mars, running on flash storage....

Re:Lets try the other way around, eh

[Lars Clausen]

Just looking at newegg.com, I find the current sweet spot of SSD to be 32GB, at $250. $7/GB, half down from what Wikipedia mentions for "late 2007". The price is not just falling, it's plummeting like a jumbojet with both wings shot off. I love it. Can't wait to get the last mechanical pieces out of my computers.

-Lars

Re:Lets try the other way around, eh

[bunratty]

The cost for a given capacity will depend on the capacity needed. The smaller the capacity, the more advantage flash will have over hard disks. For now, 250 GB of flash is much more expensive than a 250 GB hard disk. On the other hand, you can get 1 GB of flash for under $10. Are there any hard disks at all available for that price? Also given that flash is faster, smaller, and consumes less power than disks, flash will replace disks in devices that need smaller capacities first. That means the usage of drives will decrease gradually from now until the 2012-2014 time frame you mention.

Re:Lets try the other way around, eh

[alexhs]

nobody wants to use magnetic over solid state anyway Oh, but I've heard that magnetic data has a warmth and nuanced feeling that SSD harsh data doesn't have...
Already that magnetic drives weren't all that good to start with...

Re:Lets try the other way around, eh

[mlush]

No, no.
Hard drives are actually vented. There's no pressurized compartment. They run at the same atmosphere as the rest of the machine. The lift of the hard drive heads is the "Bernoulli effect" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernoulli's_equation) see also (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/click_online/5413198.stm).

So when these drives are exposed to hard vacuum (as suggested by the OP) the Bernoulli effect fails and the heads start gouging into the platters.

Re:Lets try the other way around, eh

[BitZtream]

Bulk trasfer speed does not have to be slow. Its not like your hard drive in your PC now reads from one head at a time. It uses multiple heads to achieve higher rates by reading/writing all the platters at one time. The same applies for your RAM. You don't read 32 bits from a single chip in a clock cycle, your stick of ram has several chips on it, they all get strobed at once to return a larger size. Then there is the whole dual channel thing, not only do you do it with each chip on the stick, you do it with 2 sticks on seperate channels so you can now read in twice as much as a single stick.

So with flash memory you don't put in one really big chip to get 250GB, you put in 250 1GB chips working in parallel. Instant 250x increase in throughput using a relatively minor increase in die real estate for the extra controlling circuits. The only reasons USB flash drives are slow now is because A) they are dirt cheap B) no one is using them in a way that REALLY needs to be fast C) its on USB anyway, not like we're talking about a high performance bus in the first place

Re:Lets try the other way around, eh

[LooseBrie]

Can't wait to get the last mechanical pieces out of my computers. I'm intrigued how you read CDs/DVDs. I'm also interested how you keep your machines cool.

Re:Lets try the other way around, eh

[Anonymous Coward]

You magnetophiles really take the cake ... I suppose next you'll be telling us that if we can't tell the difference on our monitors between data pulled from a simple SSD as compared to your overpriced magnetic platter storage with wooden control knobs and monster cable connecting everything together, it's because our vision isn't discriminating enough.

Re:Lets try the other way around, eh

[cbreaker]

Well, the USB bus is capable of 480Mbit. USB overhead is quite high for high speed transfers but still, you could achieve 40MB/sec over this interface. It's not that slow.

Current consumer flash-based hard-drive replacements are still slow as shit. Yea, you could do it all crazy with 250 1GB sticks to achieve good performance, but those are already available and they cost HUGE DOLLARS.

I realize that eventually, Flash will catch up and could very likely replace hard drives. I think it sounds wonderful. But it's just not here yet, even with the new disks introducing this year.

Re:Lets try the other way around, eh

[Geoffrey.landis]

No, no.
Hard drives are actually vented. There's no pressurized compartment. They run at the same atmosphere as the rest of the machine. My error; I apparently failed to be sufficiently explicit in what I wrote. When I wrote "in the space environment," what I actually meant to say was "in the space environment, which is a vacuum, a technical word which means that there is no atmosphere..."

Re:Lets try the other way around, eh

[amorsen]

Bulk trasfer speed does not have to be slow. Its not like your hard drive in your PC now reads from one head at a time.

Err yes, in fact, that's exactly what it does.

It uses multiple heads to achieve higher rates by reading/writing all the platters at one time.

No. It was attempted, I believe by Seagate in the first Barracuda drives, but it was quickly abandoned. The only way it can work at modern capacities is if you added a drive motor and independent electronics per head. Doable, but it's cheaper to just buy two drives and do RAID-1.

Your points about flash are correct though.

Re:Lets try the other way around, eh

[fenrisulfur]

"Four years into their 90-day mission" Priceless

Re:Lets try the other way around, eh

[dfn_deux]

The 32GB SSD you can buy for 250USD will be unlikely to provide any performance or reliability increase over what that same 250gb would buy you in traditional magnetic media. I've done perf/reliability testing on all the current generation SSDs from mtron, stec, memoright, and ritek. And even the 800-1000USD SSD drives fall way short of their predicted write lifetime when put into any environment where i/o is primarily small random r/w operations vs large sequential stream r/w operations. Write leveling is generally limited to 512b or larger blocks which makes it ineffective for these types of loads, furthermore the cheaper devices tend to use MLC flash nand vs. the less dense SLC.

Re:Lets try the other way around, eh

[Cyberax]

Right now, I have a computer with 150Gb SSD drive - it's a rugged industrial design for high-vibration environments. It works very fast, about as fast as 7200RPM desktop drive on bulk reads/writes and _much_ faster on random access.

There's only one problem: this SSD drive costs about $5000.

So we have the technology, we only need to wait until prices come down to reasonable values.

So we are back to RAM drives!

[LWATCDR]

Oh well everything that old is new again I guess.
I used a RAM drive on my Amgia way back when. Yes I know that they are how using flash but it does seem very familiar.
I wonder when we might see a hybrid flash-ram drive? A big bunch of ram for high speed and flash for permanent storage. Just use a super cap for a power backup and have it copy the ram to flash on power down. A little bit pricey but if you need the speed you need the speed.

Re:So we are back to RAM drives!

[Sen.NullProcPntr]

I wonder when we might see a hybrid flash-ram drive? A big bunch of ram for high speed and flash for permanent storage. Normal magnetic hard drives already do this to speed up sequential access (read ahead) among other reasons. No reason to believe this feature won't be transfered to SSD media. Although flash is much faster than magnetic media already.

Re:So we are back to RAM drives!

[ch-chuck]

I always setup a ram disk for swap space - it's so much faster than regular drives.

Re:So we are back to RAM drives!

[Sen.NullProcPntr]

It has been that way for a long time it is called a cache.
but the cache isn't as big as the drive.
Flash is actually slower for writes and has limited write cycles. True, but flash chips in parallel (the way SSD are made) make that less of an issue. Sort of how certain RAID configurations can speed up disk access times. Samsung quotes maximum write speeds of SSD higher than equivalent magnetic HDD. Even the MTBF numbers are much much better for SSD. Of course the write speed is the maximum-guaranteed-never-to-exceed number the slowest write may very well be slower than the slowest HDD write.

What I was imagining was using a ram drive for reading and writing data and then backing that up to a slow flashdrive when you powered down the drive. On power up You could pre cache the ram or just use it as a very large cache. I see, that would be a very fast drive (once all of flash has been read into cache) and also expensive - how much does 160G of DRAM cost today? Prices will go down but disk capacity will probably go up even faster.

within 5 years, tape manufactuers will have troubl

[WindBourne]

HDD still have a ways to go. In particular, the flash storage will be used for desktops, laptops and the core of servers. The real data will still reside on HDD for a long time to come because of cost / MB. What will happen is that HDD will learn to really park and lower their energy needs, most likely due to dropping in size. Tape has been used for eons for back-up, but I think that HDD will overtake that role as their prices will be forced to go way down.

apple

[theMerovingian]

The sales guy at the Apple store told me that there was a persistent rumor of a solid state laptop coming in the next few weeks...

Boot camp + solid state = me finally replacing the old powerbook!!

Sequential reading?

[ookabooka]

I was talking to a gentleman from (big name hard drive company) about their plans for hybrid and/or solid state drives. Essentially he told me that solid state was still limited by price and sequential reading. So it may be advantageous to put some things on flash like OS files that require a lot of random seeks, but for sequential reading of things like media files, traditional hard drive tech won't die just yet . . .I apologize for being too lazy to back this stuff up with numbers, what can I say, I'm a true slahsdotter.

Re:Sequential reading?

[jdunn14]

I've never seen the performance numbers for sequential vs random read on flash drives, but you have to do pretty damn bad to get beat by random access on a standard hard drive. If you look at the the units used you'll get the idea. Your average random access on a standard drive is based on the average seek time which is measured in small milliseconds (4 ms, 8ms). Access time for flash drives is measured in double-digit nanoseconds (e.g. 60ns). That's 5 orders of magnitude difference. Even if the access time for random reads on flash was 100 times worse than it's average access time those reads would STILL be 1000 times faster than from a hard drive.

I don't think people realize just HOW slow drives are compared to the rest of the machine. Sure we programmers know the disk is "slow" but it really puts it in perspective to know it's a 100000 times slower than an alternative tech.

Re:Sequential reading?

[kestasjk]

Well those are seek times, as you said. Reading/writing continuous data is very fast, and the OS (and some HDDs) will use memory caches so that data access will be continuous as possible. The problem of hard disk seek times has become less and less of a problem as memory has increased.

Re:within 5 years, tape manufactuers will have tro

[DeeQ]

I don't think so, tapes will still have many uses. They are very reliable for backups more than I would trust a hard drive. They also have the ability to be taken to off site locations like all backups should be. Hard drives would make doing that a little more difficult, even with external Hard drives it would be more of a pain than having the media of a tape. I don't see the tape going away any time soon.

I dont see it

[Rooked_One]

Maybe in 09... not 08... unless we get chipsets that can supply greater throughput, the chipset will become the bottleneck - therefore, the only reason to have one of these is in a laptop or desktop... and thats for people for whom price is no object.

In the enterprise sector... forget about it... Even SATA drives are becoming ideal for storage solutions, and a simple raid-5 will max out the cap of a raid controller's bus.

So in other words... I don't see it.

Re:I dont see it

[Lars Clausen]

We have already been running tests showing Lucene to be several times as fast on large indexes and realistic queries using SSD than using normal drives. I'm going to have a smallish SSD in my new laptop combined with an external drive for my large data. Faster, more solid, and less battery usage. Doesn't matter if I get 32GB rather than 160GB on board. I agree fully with the OP, SSD will really break through in 2008. Dell already offers it as an option. It's all a matter of usage patterns right now, in the long term I am prety sure hard disks will die.

-Lars

Re:I dont see it

[initdeep]

I have a 64GB SSD Drive in my Dell M1330 Laptop. I too use an external as storage for files.
The differences, side-by-side, to one without it, simply for OS Startup, are easily 3 to 1 in speed.

I was lucky enough to basically get the drive for free due to the EPP program coupons and discounts and other discounts..
otherwise i would never have gotten it.

But I'm sure glad i did.

I've also noticed a slight increase in battery life, although this could be simply a small difference in batteries themselves.

Re:within 5 years, tape manufactuers will have tro

[Anonymous Coward]

That's hardly the situation at all. For massive magnetic data storage, tape is still very valid. You're just not going to find 500GB HDD's with such low failure rates in 10-packs for $1000 like you can get tapes at today. And tape can drop in price much more easily than HDD's will.

I'd give it a good 10-15 years before our massive tape storage units disappear from the datacenters.

Wait...

[mc moss]

I thought this was the year of the Linux desktop.

Re:within 5 years, tape manufactuers will have tro

[JerryLove]

As I understand it, the problem with using HDDs for backup, at least archival backup, has more to do with longevity than anything else. An LTO tape has a shelf life of 30 years. HDDs don't.

Reports I Continue to Hear

[Nom du Keyboard]

Reports I continue to hear is of blocks going bad (meaning that overall storage is reduced by measurable chunks, rather than failing all at once the way a head-crash on rotating media can happen) in as short as weeks of use. Especially when the drive is rather full to start with, since wear leveling doesn't tend to move stored data to empty slots.

Until that time is years, instead of weeks, I don't see myself preferring more expensive, or even equal cost SSD, over rotating media drives.

Re:within 5 years, tape manufactuers will have tro

[jaweekes]

I actually see the solid state drives replacing tape (if the cost goes down). They would be smaller then tape, and the life-span would be as good. You could technically have a SSD loader, working like the current tape loaders, and the only thing needed would be a good connector that can take several thousand insertions (like the SD connector). SSD would be more reliable then tape because of the reduced mechanical parts.

SSD's would have all the advantages of tape (portable, easy to load, etc) without the mechanical problems that tape has. Wow, I need to patent this now!

It's not just for laptops...

[johnmcd]

Looks like the big boys are getting into the game also: EMC in Major Storage Performance Breakthrough; First with Enterprise-Ready Solid State Flash Drive Technology Market-leading Symmetrix DMX Systems to Feature Newest Flash-based Technology for Unprecedented Performance and Energy Efficiency http://www.emc.com/about/news/press/us/2008/011408-1.htm They're claiming a 10X performance improvement, but at 30X the cost/MB. Given that a high-end DMX holds around 3000 drives, that a lot of flash memory! John

Say no to moving parts

[eebra82]

We are finally starting to move away from a long era of computers with moving parts. Since conventional hard drives will be gone within 10 years (my prediction), all that remains is the media player (CD, DVD, etc). Obviously, I am not taking fans into consideration since I don't consider it to be a part of a computer system like a processor is.

Hopefully computers will be completely free from moving parts in 10 years or so. Now that would make it interesting for laptop owners.

EMC Solid Storage Array just anounced.

[BrianHursey]

EMC just announced this this morning. They are going to start haveing soldi state drives in there DMX-4 storage arrays. "EMC plans to offer flash drives in 73 GB and 146 GB capacities for the Symmetrix DMX-4 platform beginning later in Q1 2008". http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/141323/emc_readies_solidstate_drives_to_replace_disk_storage.html

SSD as a boot drive

[supertux]

The article talks about large solid state drives, but because of the price premium, I've been experimenting with smaller SSDs. In particular, I've been using an 8GB 266x CF card coupled with a CF->SATA adapter as the OS drive for my mythtv system for 5 months now with great success.

Not only is the flash drive completely silent, it is reasonably fast. Reads always benchmark at 40MB a second and writes benchmark at 34MB a second.

I've been a bit worried about the flash wearing out after repeated writes, but so far so good. Since my mythtv mysql installation is stored on it, as well as the normal system log files, I'm sure it sees quite a lot of action.

But to my point...

One common problem with systems such as mythtv that are under heavy IO stress is that during these moments of stress (lots of recordings going on at once) the whole operating system grinds to a halt or at least becomes sluggish waiting on some needed IO.

It was very common on my old mythtv setup where I used the extra space on the OS hard drives as extra storage space for mythtv recordings. I'm not experiencing any of that sluggishness with the new setup.

This has got me thinking that for my future desktop system, maybe instead of getting a raptor for the OS drive, and a large, slower hard drive for the rest of my stuff in order to minimize IO bottlenecks, I should swap out the raptor for a 16GB SSD for the OS drive. I'd end up with something that has almost no latency, good speed, silent, and it may be possibly just as reliable in that role.

What do you think?

Re:SSD as a boot drive

[Heddahenrik]

One thing that has been tested successfully in various places is to RAID (RAID0) the SSD-disks. It makes them about as twice as fast, and it should be possible to RAID them in bigger arrays too. As there is so little risk of one disk breaking down, there is no excuse to not RAID-0 them.

These disks still have a problem with speed on random write though. It's nothing for read-write databases where NCQ (SATA2) disks are faster.

CDMA works for hard drives too!

[Hasmanean]

As far as I know, hard drives encode data on the disk using simple binary waveforms. Communication systems are designed to use elaborate modulation schemes, and employ digital coding methods which make much more efficient use of the communication channel.

Hard drive makers could do something similar, like spreading the data over a number of physical bits on the disk (such as CDMA does.) Essentially, they would not be limited by the density of the data on the disk, but by the SNR (signal to noise ratio) of the magnetic medium, which I imagine is very high.

Taking this idea furthur, they could bifurcate their encoding methods into 2: a low latency one that retains the characteristics of existing drives, and a high-bandwidth-low-latency scheme which uses digital coding methods to spread each block of data over an entire cylinder for example, and has requires reading the whole cylinder to retrieve a single bit. This would be useful for storing video and large image data, which is retrieved linearly and usually buffered too, and does not require low-latency access the way normal files on a filesystem do.

Hybrid schemes are always better than simple implementations, if they provide a closer fit to reality.

Re:CDMA works for hard drives too!

[BillBrasky]

Hard disk drives defintely do NOT write simple binary waveforms to the disk. They use encodings specialized for magnetic media, such as Extended PRML. This is coupled with error correcting algorithms like Viterbi (same as CDMA).

Flat panel/CRTs all over again

[JerryQ]

In (approx) 1992 I went to SID (society for information display) in Florida, and a keynote speaker said, roughly: "I have been coming here for 30 years, and I expect to hear, just like I heard 30 years ago and most years since, that within 10 years flat panels will overtake CRTs and make them redundant. Why has this not happened? Because CRT has continued to get cheaper and better quality, thus removing the opportunity for flat panel, because the goals keep moving" He also pointed out that we would get there (and we have) but that we should never underestimate where old technologies can go. In 1983 I put together a business plan for an outsourced proposal I was working on, and we put in £17K (thats $28k) to cover a 70 megabyte hard drive. Now I see one inch drives in iPods carrying multi gigs. I believe that we will see phased take up, ie where it is needed most (e.g. like the way airlines put in flat panels instead of CRTs to reduce weight), before the HDD manufacturers will curl up and leave the scene. Jerry

Re:What about limited write cycles?

[Wolvie MkM]

Here>/a>, there's a mention about file systems that will accomadate the problem that SSD drives have. Basically spreading out the bits all over the drive if my interpretation is correct.

As for XP, you don't "need" a page file if you've got over a Gig and don't do anything that will come close to the limit. I've removed the page file on all of my systems and been fine (3 Gig Desktop, 2Gig Desktop, & 1Gig notebook). It's an easy way to save some space if you know your limits!

Cheers hope that helped

Re:Really?

[mini me]

Find me a DVD-sized USB drive that can be distributed for the same price as a CD/DVD and I'll agree with you. This is an economics issue, not a technological one.

Ask Slashdot

[pragma_x]

SSD is expensive right now. Is there any kind of DIY solution for battery-backed RAM out there? How about hacking one together?

Solution for /var activity

[r_jensen11]

I've been thinking about this workaround for quite a while, but I never see anything discussed about it. But why not mitigate activity on the SSD by having /var be a ramdrive? Once the system is stable, cron a backup (snapshot) to the SSD, along with writes for whenever the partition is unmounted. Ram is cheap enough that for typical applications, /var shouldn't be too large (unless you have large caches stored in /var, but that can be solved with symbolic links)