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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."
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.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
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.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
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!!
"If you think you have things under control, you're not going fast enough." --Mario Andretti
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.
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
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.
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?