SSD Prices On Parity With High-End HDD By 2011

kgagne writes "EMC executives were heavily pitching the virtues of solid state disk drives at their annual users conference in Las Vegas, saying that SSD will not only be on price parity with high-end Fibre Channel disk drives by the end of 2010 or early 2011, but that NAND memory will solve all sorts of read/write issues created by spinning disk technology. EMC's CEO and its storage platforms chief said the company will do everything it can to drive SSD prices down, and adoption up, by deploying them in their products. One issue might be that EMC is using SSD from STEC, which is being sued by Seagate for patent infringement." The article also mentions some of the work EMC has been doing to make sure SSD is enterprise-class reliable, such as developing "wear leveling" software.

Comments

SSD from STEC

[quarrel]

> One issue might be that EMC is using SSD from STEC, which is being sued by Seagate for patent infringement.

Why is this an issue? If EMC think the technology is a winner, and they don't have a stake in a particular player (of course they have to choose a supplier, but that hardly indicates a long term commitment) then what do they care who wins?

One of the great things about being in EMCs shoes is that you want these things commoditized.

Either way, as a the sooner SSD is directly competitive the better. They're ICs - you churn them out, and only worry about yield. HDDs are mechanical and will always have their mechanical shortcomings.

--Q

Re:SSD from STEC

[vax]

if seagate has the patent then they better start making some damn SSD drives. (that are actually on the market)

it would be good to have some competition anyway to drive the prices down..

still. I cant wait for 100gb SSD drives.. finally a laptop for gigging that can handle a beating.

really once these are standard in laptops I think you will see more robust laptops on the market since the spinning disks have always been one of the quickest parts to fail (well assuming that the laptop has decent cooling design and isnt running some desktop processor that is melting the damn thing)

Re:SSD from STEC

[Iron Condor]

still. I cant wait for 100gb SSD drives.. Already exist.

Re:SSD from STEC

[bluefoxlucid]

Vacuum tubes are better for gigging (though I'm working on combining them with MOSFETs in non-signal-affecting channels like for switches, current boosting, and tube stabilization). Stop lip synching to MP3s.

Overlords

[ickleberry]

I've had 4 hard drives fail on me in the past year and a half so I for one welcome our new SSD-based overlords

My laptop and server already run off SSD and with any decent bit of wear-leveling it is near impossible to wear out a SSD.

Re:Overlords

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, you've got to stop buying your drives from Lucky's Hard Drive and Bait Shop.

Re:Overlords

[delysid-x]

i've never had a drive fail, not even my first 10mb hard drive. man, that was way better than the 2 360K floppies.

Re:Overlords

[toddestan]

My laptop and server already run off SSD and with any decent bit of wear-leveling it is near impossible to wear out a SSD.

I'd be more worried about the controller chip. I've had a few USB thumbdrives go bad on me this way, rendering the data on them inaccessible unless you're really good at soldering. As a matter of fact, I've even had more USB thumbdrives go bad on me the past few years than harddrives, though admittedly I'm not carrying harddrives around in my pocket so it isn't fair comparison.

But when

[rossdee]

will they be competitive with mid range priced hard drives? You can get 500GB for $100 these days.

Re:But when

[pyite]

will they be competitive with mid range priced hard drives? You can get 500GB for $100 these days.

In a few years. Right now SSDs perform incredibly in terms of IOPS (I/O operations Per Second) that enterprise storage type folks are eying them longingly. They just need a little bit more space for the money. Until such time, it's very possible that we'll see more in terms of using SSDs as caching components in front of more antiquated spinning media.

Re:But when

[Courageous]

More than six years away, following from current price points and reduction trends, which is to say "there is no predicting".

C//

Re:But when

[menace3society]

Or, use them for different purposes. Do you backups to a RAID, boot from read-only flash and have your database in SSD.

I mean, even in the old days they could choose between punch cards, tape, and teletype for data storage and retrieval.

Re:But when

[CastrTroy]

Yeah, but currently the largest SSD are only 64 GB, and cost about $1000. By 2011 will you be able to get a solid state drive that measures 500 GB? Will it cost anywhere close to $100? Probably not. By price comparable do they mean you will be able to get a solid state drive for under $200? Probably, but the capacity will be much lower than a even the high end hard drives they are price matching. You can get a 146 GB, Fibre Channel, 15K RPM drive for under $350. In 3 years, I don't think you'll be able to get a 146 GB flash drive for $350 GB. I also don't know how well it would compete with a high end drive.

Re:But when

[v(*_*)vvvv]

Once you've experienced a 120Mb/sec read+write SSD, there is no turning back. You'd get a drive for 100 dollars even if it were only 64GB.

Re:But when

[Midnight Thunder]

will they be competitive with mid range priced hard drives? You can get 500GB for $100 these days.


The other thing I am curious to know is when we are likely to get SSDs with similar read/write performance to current mechanical HDs.

Re:But when

[Courageous]

You can get SSD's with better performance than mechanical drives right now. For an extreme case, go check out http://www.fusionio.com/

Re:But when

[rubeng]

More like $80 for 500gb, which is about 16 cents/gigabyte. The cheapest SSDs, at least listed on that site, are $5.16/gb, so there's still about a factor of 32 difference.

The Future is Solid State

[Bananatree3]

Spinning disk hard drives are the mode, median and mean today. You can grab a 1TB platter hard drive for under 200 bucks. It may not last as long as a SSD, but at that price you can certainly buy a bunch of backup drives for a lot cheaper than a 1TB Solid State drive.

However, SSD is the future wave, as it Just Works better than platter drives. A high quality, high density, low priced SSD would knock the socks off any platter drives today if it were available. Platter drives will be the mainstream market for a while because of cost and size availability. However as SSDs become cheaper and hold more space, the WILL push platter drives out.

Re:The Future is Solid State

[arbiter1]

i've had platter hard drives go 8+ years, and one i know of is at 9 years old and still goin strong

Re:The Future is Solid State

[Anonymous Coward]

Then again, I've had IBM Deathstar* hard drives die in months. Anecdotal evidence does not help the situation, though.

The reality of the matter is that solid state is simply more reliable** than mechanical electronics in most cases.

*IBM Deskstar
** reliable is relative to the usage.

Re:The Future is Solid State

[hostyle]

-1 Re-Iterating The Damned Obvious

Re:The Future is Solid State

[hostyle]

The reality of the matter is that solid state is simply more reliable** than mechanical electronics in most cases. Great to have your opinion onboard. Some links to factual data backing up your anecdotes would be nice. [CITATION NEEDED]

Re:The Future is Solid State

[Anonymous Coward]

You must be new here. This is not Wikipedia, it's Slashdot. Citations? We don't need no steenkin citations.

Re:The Future is Solid State

[Spatial]

It would be even nicer if you went and looked for the facts yourself instead of expecting them to be handed to you on a silver platter.

Re:The Future is Solid State

[mikael]

I had one in a desktop workstation - at least it gave a warning that something was up, it kept making a grating/grinding noise.

I've lost a Travelstar laptop drive in a similar way - another family member helpfully moved the laptop into direct sunlight during a bright Summer day, and left the laptop lid down. The poor hard disk drive overheated and fried out (gave a whining noise until the laptop powered down).

The only people who could really make any fair comparisons would be search engine/internet archive maintainers/large departments who purchase and install large number of these systems every year.

Re:The Future is Solid State

[pyite]

It would be even nicer if you went and looked for the facts yourself instead of expecting them to be handed to you on a silver platter.

If you write any sort of research paper, you can't go and write, "and I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to confirm all my supposed 'facts.'" There is an accepted procedure that the burden of proof of claiming anything lies on he who claims it, at least in professional and academic circles.

Re:The Future is Solid State

[Anonymous Coward]

My apologies. I was the AC who made the original post. I did not realize that I was writing a research paper. It was my intent to make an informal post on an informal newsboard.

I guess I must be new here.

Re:The Future is Solid State

[Znork]

Eventually, without a doubt. Although by that time SSD may have little to do with what we regard as SSD today.

How it plays out depends on how the hard disk manufacturers deal with it; personally I'd prefer they play their strength and simply forget about speed and concentrate on their forte; storing lots of bits.

I already have all the fast storage I need (if I wanted more I could stripe over more disks). Bulk storage, however, is something I'm permanently short of; I could easily use up to the petabyte range if it were cheap enough (think permanent video archives with mythtv recording anything and everything on any DTV multiplex...)

So quit trying to make it fast and small, go for huge instead. Using larger platters I'd bet 5TB drives would be easily possible today.

Re:The Future is Solid State

[Courageous]

Manufacturers of SSD's are claiming in excess of 2,000,000 hours for MTBF.

High end SAS drives claim 1,200,000 hours for MTBF.

Western Digital claims 600,000 hours for MTBF.

There have been studies from Google and Carnegie Mellon both that suggest that hard drive makers greatly exaggerate, and that drives fail as much as 15X more often than the manufacturers suggest.

SSD makers and spinning disk makers are not the same industry.

One cannot know whether or not the SSD makers "lie the same" as the disk makers.

C//

Re:The Future is Solid State

[Courageous]

This isn't a professional and academic circle. Information is available at the touch of a button. Anyway, if you read Spatial's response, there was a funny in it. Silver platter, get it?

C//

Re:The Future is Solid State

[Stevecrox]

I've had a Maxtor 6.4GB hard drive since pre-melenium time, its been in a computer case hats been dropped down a flight of stairs, the MBR record destroyed itself (for OS purposes you couldn't install a OS to it but it would hold data this happened pre 2000) its been hit with a hammer (fustration at said MBR fault), connected to a PC's whose power supply blew spctacularly and finally it was connected (as slave and on the same power spur) to a 200GB Maxtor Diamond Plus when said 200GB drive short circuted itself and caused one of the more impressive electrical arc's I've ever seen (just after that happened I put it in storage around 2004.)

Last week I was going through my old computer bits and discovered it, since I had a open computer case nearby (was building a new PC out of old PC scraps) I plugged it in and downloaded the contents. It was nice to see what random crap I thought was important enough to store while I was still in school.

The morale of that story is during the same time I've owned that drive I've had a 4.2GB Maxtor fail completely, an uncountable number of Fujitsu 40GB hard drives fail, a 40GB Western Digital motor die, a 200GB Maxtor short circuiting, the 240GB replacement Maxtor gave me because of the 200GB failure having a problem holding data, a western digital 120GB breaing and recently a 40GB laptop drive gaining extremely high read/write tims. Sure somethings will last far past their expected life times, most IDE hard drives in my expearence seem to be designed to fail at 13 months.

Re:The Future is Solid State

[dreamchaser]

This isn't a research paper, this is a geek oriented discussion forum. You score points for pedantry though. There is little professional and nothing academic about slashdot. Go read peer reviewed journals if that's what you're looking for, and stop being too lazy to look up a few facts for yourself :-)

Re:The Future is Solid State

[kesuki]

"One cannot know whether or not the SSD makers "lie the same" as the disk makers."

Sure you can, they're Human of course they lie. MTBF can be generated, based on how long it takes for 'more than 50% of the data sectors fail' but who would keep using a disc that kept having randomly failing disc sectors, even if SMART technology can reduce the risk of loosing data...

so of course SSD makers are going to calculate a MTBF assuming the type of wear a typical person who boots vista once, for every time it crashes*, and does nothing but plays solitaire, freecell and spider solitaire all day! it takes a lot of hours of playing solitaire, a non disk heavy activity for a SSD device to fail!

remember NAND flash memory is based on changing the structure of a semi-conductor with an electric charge, the more you do it, the sooner the device fails... even reading the state of the material causes wear, because electricity is used to read as well as 'write' to the memory, kinda the way a laser erodes the dye on a recordable optical disc... obviously though if you can Write millions of times, you can read billions of times. there is another problem with NAND though, NAND memory is often made with tantalite, a rare mineral used in semiconductors and capacitors..

if we recycled 100% of computer parts, the tantalite problem would be solved easily, but we're not even close to 10% recycling... so even as we speak gorilla habitat in Africa is being destroyed for tantalite mines. they've been building more and more of the mines, since a price spike in 2000, and the number of mines running are keeping the cost of tantalite from spiking again, but it would be so much better if we just recycled our old computer waste. we could save gorillas, if we pushed for refundable deposits on recycling electronic devices like computers, etc. if it worked for the lead acid battery it can work for tantalite, copper, aluminum, gold, and silver in electronic devices. FWIW plastic in electronics can be recycled into diesel fuel, as i found out from here. http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/small-business/recycling.html

*= which is probably every day, more if you install hardware drivers.

Re:The Future is Solid State

[hostyle]

platters you say? SSDs don't have platters. Whats your game? Is this one of those rick rolling jobbies ?

Re:The Future is Solid State

[renoX]

The future is very near!
Sure currently buying a 1TB Solid State drive would be too expensive, but do we need really it?

No: on my HDD, I have two partitions: one of 30 GB for the OS and the software (which has still a lot of free space), and a big one for the data.

Replacing the OS&software partition with a SSD would bring 99% percent of the benefits of having a 'full' SSD: fast boot time, fast application startup, etc.. Especially as we can use a part of the SSD as a cache for the HDD.
So IMHO, we don't really need big SSDs (30-60GB is enough), but fast SSDs should improve the computers' responsivenesscomputers..

So my ideal computer would have: one fast SSD of 60GB (for responsiveness), 1TB of HDD (for bulk storange) plus another external 1TB HDD for backups.

Re:The Future is Solid State

[Courageous]

"One cannot know whether or not the SSD makers "lie the same" as the disk makers."

Sure you can, they're Human of course they lie.

I have no doubt, but we cannot know if they lie the same. What I mean is that just because hard drives seem to fail 15X more often than manufacturers claim, according to some third party study, doesn't mean the SSD drives will fail 15X more often than the SSD makers claims.

These are different industries, and different circles of practice and so forth.

C//

Re:The Future is Solid State

[Anonymous Coward]

1TB disks have been out well over a year now, but there isn't any larger disks out.

Back in the early 00's, an increased capacity came out every quarter.

Platters based technology is clearly stalling.

Re:The Future is Solid State

[kesuki]

my point was they were gerrymandering their MTBF the same way as HDD makers, using only 'complete' failure as a failure. MTBF is done via comprehensive testing, they cannot inflate the number without having the type of testing practice I've mentioned.

where the 'statistical rate of partial failure' falls, has nothing to do with how they measure their MTBF tests.

Re:The Future is Solid State

[Courageous]

...my point was they were gerrymandering their MTBF the same way as HDD makers...

I personally have no idea how they are gerrymandering their MTBF, hence my comment. The advantage of this particular statement of mine is that it has a 100% chance of being correct. *wink*

C//

Re:The Future is Solid State

[CastrTroy]

Which is great for desktops, but what about laptops. You don't have space for 2 drives in a laptop. Sure if you're just doing work on the laptop (and your work doesn't include editing video), you could probably get by with a 64 GB drive. But many people use a laptop as their main computer. For them, 64 GB probably won't suffice.

Re:The Future is Solid State

[kesuki]

...my point was they were gerrymandering their MTBF the same way as HDD makers...

I personally have no idea how they are gerrymandering their MTBF, hence my comment. The advantage of this particular statement of mine is that it has a 100% chance of being correct. *wink*

C// I was fairly sure they were abusing SMARTs capabilities to keep a drive running after sectors began failing. if you don't count the drive as dead, til it refuses to spin any longer... then you get a much better MTBF even though nobody uses a disk with 75% of the disk as bad sectors.

obviously only an insider would know Exactly how they do the MTBF numbers, but if google calls a disk failed when one sector fails, and seagate calls it a failure when with 90% of the sectors failed, it stops rotating... then you get Radically different numbers. that's why i'm sure that's how they do it, because MTBF has to be a 'mean' time, not an estimation but a mean time.

Re:The Future is Solid State

[Courageous]

The Google and Carnegie Mellon studies can both be found online. I think these are drives that "hard fail," and need to be RMA'd, but if you're really interested, take a look. They were both presented at one of the Usenix FAST conferences. 06, I think.

Let me help you out, however. How many drives exactly, do you think Seagate tests for 1,200,000 hours before going to market with a drive series? Exactly zero.

The difference between Seagate's data and the Google and Carnegie Mellon data, I would say is that the latter teams really are running large batches of drives and seeing no-kidding when they fail.

The drive makers use some other methodology. There being only 8760 hours in a year, dontcha know.

BTW, I think the Carnegie Study said that SAS and SATA drives fail the same, BTW. And Google said something similar.

C//

Re:The Future is Solid State

[kesuki]

"The drive makers use some other methodology. There being only 8760 hours in a year, dontcha know."

math is my worst subject, i'm a lot better with history, see, in history people repeat the same mistakes over and over, in math they want you to get every question right... that's a bit harder...

i'm good with pattern recognition, weaker in other areas.

Re:The Future is Solid State

[Ma8thew]

I always read about how people get through dozens of hard drives, but I've never had one fail. Is it possible everyone else abuses their hard drives, or that I have optimum atmospheric conditions where I am? Maybe my frequent backups are warding off failures.

What about filesystems...

[epiphani]

Given that many filesystems are designed specifically with the spinning magnetic disk in mind, what open source filesystems are out there that will work to the advantages of solid state storage? Has anyone started thinking about that one as something to address before the major switches start taking place?

Or... does solid state storage take care of those oddities in firmware with the whole automatic write leveling technology?

Re:What about filesystems...

[v1]

Driver level can make certain assumptions about the physical drive, such as seek time, and for example, work to decrease disk fragmentation. Fragmentation is very minor issue with SSDs. So there will be a minor performance hit (from maximum possible in the SDD) due to the things the drivers and os do to try to get the most performance out of a HDD.

The only adaptation I can see is trying to minimize wearing on certain blocks, but from the looks of it the SDD's are being designed with wear leveling in mind so I doubt even that will matter to the software.

I could see other minor tweaks. I'm sure no OS seriously expects a new hard drive to spin up reliably in anything under 2 seconds. Imagine how fast wake times on laptops can be when restoring RAM from storage? As long as the hardware is being worked on to wake up that fast. But right now they know they have a few seconds to wait for the HDD to spin up so they're not necessarily seeing a need to optimize wakeup. I'm sure there are other similar issues.

A very useful change would be to alter the standard block size from 512 bytes to something larger, say 32k. Since it's more efficient to flash larger blocks at a time, we may see native block sizes go up for optimal performance on SDDs. No telling how well the OS and software will handle that sort of change. I bet that is hardcoded all over the place. That would dramatically improve write speeds though. So there will be growing pains

Re:What about filesystems...

[serviscope_minor]

JFFS2 for one.

Re:What about filesystems...

[oever]

Flash drives have been around for a while, you know. And so have the filesystems:
YAFFS
JFFS2
LogFS

Re:What about filesystems...

[Anonymous Coward]

The only adaptation I can see is trying to minimize wearing on certain blocks, but from the looks of it the SDD's are being designed with wear leveling in mind so I doubt even that will matter to the software. Actually with proper software you'd probably like to do the opposite - try to wear out certain blocks as fast as possible. This way the lossage is more predictable and rest of the disk is kept in a better shape. Point being that bad sectors aren't really a big deal if you're prepared for those.

Re:What about filesystems...

[Korin43]

I found at least 3 for Linux. I also found some references to Microsoft's "FFS2" and M-System's "TrueFFS", but I can't find any info about them.

Re:What about filesystems...

[tooyoung]

Given that many filesystems are designed specifically with the spinning magnetic disk in mind, what open source filesystems are out there that will work to the advantages of solid state storage? Has anyone started thinking about that one as something to address before the major switches start taking place?

No, no one has even considered that yet. I'll alert the academic world while you clue in the industry.

Re:What about filesystems...

[4e617474]

Flash drives have been around for a while, you know. And so have the filesystems:

YAFFS and JFFS2 look to me like they might be showing their age.

From Wikipedia:

"YAFFS2 is similar in concept to YAFFS1, and shares much the same code... The main difference is that YAFFS2 needs to jump through significant hoops to meet the "write once" requirement of modern NAND flash.

YAFFS2 now supports "checkpointing" which bypasses normal mount scanning, allowing very fast mount times. Mileage will vary, but mount times of c. 3 seconds for 2 GB have been reported.

Measuring mount times in seconds per gigabyte is not encouraging for the design goals we're talking about here. The disadvantages section of the JFFS2 article pretty well speaks for itself, but note

"All nodes must still be scanned at mount time."

Overcoming that hurdle was how YAFFS2 even moved up to the seconds per gigabyte range - the introductory paper for LogFS says

"On the authors notebook, mounting an empty JFFS2 on a 1GiB USB stick takes around 15 minutes. That is a little slower than most users would expect a ïlesystem mount to happen."

The developer's gift for dramatic understatement aside, LogFS sounds like they intend to meet the challenge of what's actually next head-on but the home page still has nice tidbits like -

"http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Logfs - this advertises several non-existent features, so don't take it too seriously. On the other hand, most of them will get implemented over time."

Note that the link above only lists six features so for "several" to be non-existent, well... So no, it's not a given that the problem of a workable filesystem is long since solved, or that a suitable one will actually be ready for prime time when they've got the SSD hardware at the "sweet spot".

Re:What about filesystems...

[kesuki]

The only adaptation I can see is trying to minimize wearing on certain blocks, but from the looks of it the SDD's are being designed with wear leveling in mind so I doubt even that will matter to the software. Actually with proper software you'd probably like to do the opposite - try to wear out certain blocks as fast as possible. This way the lossage is more predictable and rest of the disk is kept in a better shape. Point being that bad sectors aren't really a big deal if you're prepared for those. When NAND memory fails, it can fail in such a way as to make the ENTIRE flash memory device unreadable... this is from real world NAND memory devices failing from real world use, all of a sudden not wear leveling seems like a suicidal mode of wear... if the entire chip can short out from a single block failing.

"In case of a massive damage,

        * If the device is not accessible at all (circuitry failure), no software can even attempt the recovery. Physical intervention is required.
        * Even if the device seems accessible, software recovery run the will take excessive time to complete, making the attempt impractical. On top of that, the recovery run puts further stress on the device. This may be undesirable.

In case of the massive damage, there is no point in attempting the do-it-yourself type data recovery at home. There is little you can do to repair a physically damaged device without the special equipment. If you have a physically failed storage device, we have a discount available for a DriveSavers recovery service. DriveSavers are quite good with physically damaged devices and we recommend you contact them if need arises."

http://www.z-a-recovery.com/physical-flash-memory-failure.htm

Re:What about filesystems...

[Anonymous Coward]

When NAND memory fails, it can fail in such a way as to make the ENTIRE flash memory device unreadable... this is from real world NAND memory devices failing from real world use, all of a sudden not wear leveling seems like a suicidal mode of wear... if the entire chip can short out from a single block failing. There's 0 reason for a properly designed flash device to fail like that due to wear, leveling or not. That's just shitty engineering.

Re:What about filesystems...

[kesuki]

When NAND memory fails, it can fail in such a way as to make the ENTIRE flash memory device unreadable... this is from real world NAND memory devices failing from real world use, all of a sudden not wear leveling seems like a suicidal mode of wear... if the entire chip can short out from a single block failing. There's 0 reason for a properly designed flash device to fail like that due to wear, leveling or not. That's just shitty engineering. "Tunnel injection is the quantum tunneling effect, also called Fowler-Nordheim tunnel injection, when charge carriers are injected to an electric conductor through a thin layer of an electric insulator."

you should have said 'IANAEE' for i am not an electrical engineer. because the way NAND ram works it is entirely possible for failure to be a complete and total failure of the device, or at least 512 blocks of the device, if it doesn't create a short that prevents the whole device from working.

first today's flash memory is NAND memory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_memory

NAND memory is written with tunnel injection, which causes charge carriers to be injected into a conductor. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunnel_injection

Charge carriers "In semiconductor physics, the traveling vacancies in the valence-band electron population (holes) are treated as charge carriers"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charge_carrier

So we're using an electric charge, to fill, and create 'electron holes' in a conductor. what could POSSIBLY go wrong, in the real world, rapidly changing if a conductor has electron holes or not, by forcing the electrons in or out of the material ...

so trying to intentionally wear out a NAND memory chip can cause a severe problem whereby instead of creating an electron hole, you've created a short circuit. "A short circuit (sometimes abbreviated to short or s/c) allows a current to flow along a different path from the one intended." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_circuit

Re:What about filesystems...

[benhattman]

Given that many filesystems are designed specifically with the spinning magnetic disk in mind, what open source filesystems are out there that will work to the advantages of solid state storage? Has anyone started thinking about that one as something to address before the major switches start taking place?

No, no one has even considered that yet. I'll alert the academic world while you clue in the industry. While you've got those chaps on the line, there are a few other topics I wanted to bring up that probably nobody has considered.

1. Did they notice we don't have enough oil?
2. It's been hot this spring, maybe someone should get on that.
3. Sometimes when I travel I can't watch YouTube. We need this fixed!
4. It seems like we ought to have some way to get into space by climbing a line or something, rather than using those big rocket engines.
5. It'd be really awesome if we could modify plant and animal life genetically so that it would taste better, grow faster, and be more nutritious.

If these "academic world" and "industry" could solve my problems I'd be super psyched. Cheers.

Re:What about filesystems...

[simplerThanPossible]

Come on, HDD and SDD have different seek/read/write characteristics.

I'm sure several algorithms that affect filesystem performance were written with the former's characteristics implicitly in mind.

Maybe some new approaches become plausible, given this underlying change? Historically, being the first to understand and exploit the advantages of a new technology makes a huge difference.

Re:What about filesystems...

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, in Linux you can change the I/O scheduler from CFQ to NO-OP and get a really nice speedup.

Re:What about filesystems...

[CarpetShark]

Please do not link that way, using words like "at" and "least" as the link text. Hypertext (as in HyperText Transfer Protocol) was designed to link complex words or phrases to more details about those particular things. So, for example, if you're talking about a link to a page about JFFS, you link the term, JFFS, not "this other page" or "see here", or anything like that.

It does involve having to think about how you write a phrase sometimes, but means that everyone has a consistent interface, knowing what they'll get when they click on something, and that search engines can contextually analyse links based on the page they come from, etc.

Longevity

[Bananatree3]

I agree that high quality platter drives will last a long, long time. The issue is that anything with moving parts is inherently more prone to breakage than a device with no moving parts. A SSD with no rewrite issues would by principal be inherently longer lasting.

Platter drives are here to stay for a while. Once SSDs get the bugs worked out and the price drops to current platter drive levels, there will be a large migration.

Re:Longevity

[hairyfeet]

While I agree that the enterprise users will end up on SSD,simply due to IOPS, I'm not sure if it will end up in consumer rigs other than specialized laptop situations, and what is more I'm not sure I'd want them to be. We all know how the big PC makers end up starving the low end machines for RAM,so how well will a SSD survive say, a Vista Basic machine with 512Mb of RAM pounding the swap to kingdom come? I know they have wear leveling but consumers are a LOT more likely to fill their drives with junk and I bet that having to move the contents of the entire drive to even out the wear would kill any benefits you would see from SSD speed wise.

Also,what about data recovery? If a little Helen Homemaker gets a bug that bones her pc and she loses her pictures I can often get them back due to the fact that HDD drives just don't "erase" when something gets tossed. If the SSD does as I assume they do and actually erases on delete that could mean disaster for these customers that get virus infections, as for some reason lately they seem to hose the My Documents folder about 65% of the time and that is where many keep their pictures and other personal files,without a backup naturally. Can you even recover deleted files off a SSD? Or does the wear leveling software make that an impossibility? Anyway that is my 02c,YMMV

Re:Longevity

[deroby]

Well, my SD card came with software to find back data that was 'lost'. In essence, I think it allows me to scan the 'raw' chips and look for 'recognizable blocks'. When I come to think of it, I guess there won't be that much difference. When you delete a file (on purpose, by accident or due to some malware), it's actually just the file-entry that gets overwritten, the actual contents scattered over the disk / chips remains as is. Unless you're filesystem incorporates some kind of 'secure erasing', you should have just as much luck finding back stuff on HDD & SDD IMHO.

Re:Longevity

[arbiter1]

well laptops would get it more then likely since SSD's are known for using less power to run on issue with platters, its harder on the drive when you power off the comp and restart it all the time, its harder on the motor's

Re:Longevity

[amRadioHed]

Also,what about data recovery.... If the SSD does as I assume they do and actually erases on delete If a file gets wiped when you delete it is entirely up to the file system, not the hard drive. Your disk only reads and writes what the file system tells it to.

Re:Longevity

[CastrTroy]

I'm not so sure I agree. I've had way more RAM chips die than I've had hard drives die. I've only had 1 hard drive die in my personal computers. RAM chips I've had 3 or 4 die. Video cards I've had 3 die. I've seen many network cards go in my life. Countless power supplies. Most of the stuff that does die is the hardware only stuff. I seems counter-intuitive, but when I think about it, it actually makes sense. The hardware parts that die always have very tightly packed circuits, and are very complex. They tend to overheat, or blow a capacitor, just because they get old, or because of dirty power current. Just because you don't see any moving parts, doesn't mean they can't wear out. There's electrons moving through those wires. Incandescent light bulbs don't have moving parts either. Hard drives are actually very simple. Very simple circuits, with all the moving parts encased in an air-tight dust free chamber.

Re:Longevity

[CastrTroy]

I've done this before with a HEX editor. Just look for "EXIF", and then copy the following megabyte-ish data segment to a file. You usually get a pretty usable picture out of the data. That's even after files have been "deleted" (AKA, references removed from the FAT).

Re:Longevity

[hairyfeet]

What I meant was that thanks to the wear leveling going on under the file system there might be more of a chance of a file getting deleted from an empty sector as that sector gets overwritten by other files from elsewhere to even out the wear across sectors. Since many of these machines have or will have Windows on them,let me give an example using XP:

Let us say you have a 6Gb flash with XP installed. For ease let us say the drive is broken up into 12 sectors-A-L. The XP Install is on A-D and the file I delete is on sector E. Since I have not installed updates the OS has not really done much I/O since installation so the wear leveling moves my OS from A-D to E-H so that the sectors that were not used very often now come into play. Since the file that I want to recover was on sector E which now contains my System32 folder it will be a lot harder to try to get anything back than if it were like a HDD and simply left things where they lay. But I'll be the first to admit I haven't taken a close look at the algorithms used for wear leveling so maybe they have a way to recover those sectors,I just don't know which is why I asked. Anyway that is my 02c,YMMV

Re:Longevity

[toddestan]

I'm not sure it works that way, as how is the drive supposed to know what kind of file system you're using? The drive just sees a bunch of data in sectors, and doesn't know what is important, and what is unimportant (as in, marked as 'deleted' by the OS) as the file system keeps track of that kind of thing. I would assume then that the wear leveling algorithms won't trash anything, as it cannot know what it can trash, therefore I would guess that a SSD drive would be the same as a HDD in terms of recovery. That is, unless the wear leveling is moved from the hardware level to the software level - in other words let the OS do the wear leveling as it knows better what to keep so it should be able to do a better job.

Re:Longevity

[orkysoft]

I think the harddrive would not know about file systems, and would actually swap the data between those sectors, but keep the old sector numbering, so it would be invisible to the higher layers, just like virtual memory works.

Re:Longevity

[Arterion]

It should be just the opposite. Since fragmentation isn't really a big issue on SSD's, and since wear leveling would use free space that's been written to the least times -- it seems like a sector marked as "free" during a delete wouldn't be overwritten until the rest of the disk filled up.

Yeah, Right

[Nom du Keyboard]

SSD will not only be on price parity with high-end Fibre Channel disk drives

Yeah, right, just what I buy for my home system right now. The really high-end expensive stuff.

For nearly all of us, this isn't news until SSD is competitive at the consumer disc drive level.

And competitive means price and projected lifetime. Watching my SSD start dying in pieces after only weeks, or months, isn't current hard drive reliability.

Re:Yeah, Right

[amorsen]

For nearly all of us, this isn't news until SSD is competitive at the consumer disc drive level. Come on, Slashdot is a nerd site! When did nerds have to wait for technology to become mainstream?

Re:Yeah, Right

[Courageous]

Well. These drives (FC, SCSI, SAS) are 10% of the market, very lucrative, and quite important for data center operations, server rooms, and so forth.

Projected lifetime for modern SSD drives is now getting to the point where they are more likely to be discarded due to technological obsolescence than they are to significantly deteriorate, BTW.

The projected intersection curve is further than six years out for SATA SSD price parity. That's an eternity in technological time, which is to say, there is no predicting it.

Price per unit of storage is by far not the only deciding factor, even in the consumer market. Flash can scale up performance much more quickly than spinning media. You can expect flash performance to more than double annually from here on out, I would say. You would of course be right to be wondering how the SATA and SAS busses will keep up.

Look at FusionIO (http://www.fusionio.com) to see how flash will accelerate in performance. These devices have 160 internal channels in order to make the bytes flow at the rate they do. You can think of it as a sort of 160-wide RAID-0 striping mechanism.

$2400 for one card is of course way out of consumer space. However, point: 1) the cost of the flash in the system will drop to a fraction of its current price within two years, and 2) the ASICs on board this device will be "paid for" within the same period, allowing them to charge only a small fraction of their current price.

Expect other similar products to develop soon.

When FusionIO proves out the market for these devices--and mark my words, they will--competitors will follow in their footsteps, like bees drawn to honey.

C//

Re:Yeah, Right

[amRadioHed]

Good point. It'll be a long time though before this stuff is obsolete and we can fish it out of a dumpster.

Re:Yeah, Right

[v(*_*)vvvv]

To summarize the great post above, price is only one dimension. Performance is another, and SSDs totally blow away any HDD competitors. HDDs have been around a very long time, and already use caching and other sophisticated trickery to break barriers. SSDs are practically faster than HDDs out of the gate, so just imagine how blazing fast they would be by the time they catch up in price?

In fact, I doubt they will ever catch up in price, because HDDs will ALWAYS have to be cheaper to sell. There is no equating them.

Where can you buy them?

[amorsen]

They keep sending out press releases, but when do they plan on making product available?

I need four of 64GB or more. Price not important, but they must perform well and be reasonably reliable. SAS preferred.

Re:Where can you buy them?

[Courageous]

http://www.fusionio.com./ These products can be ordered now, although it will be more than two months for delivery (they is intense demand).

Re:Where can you buy them?

[Stevecrox]

I Don't Know

Re:Where can you buy them?

[lubricated]

http://www.newegg.com/Store/SubCategory.aspx?SubCategory=636&Category=15&name=Solid-State-Disks

Have you even looked. I see at least three 64GB ones. and one 128GB. Price is their biggest disadvantage.

Re:Where can you buy them?

[Wesley Felter]

Try this list: http://www.storagesearch.com/ssd-fastest.html

Re:Where can you buy them?

[kesuki]

you had a typo in that url, an extra period. and those devices are meant for rack mounted server boards with 4 4x PCIe slots available, although they are a low profile board, so if they give a low profile backplane as well, then you can get them in a rack mount server. (not sure if 'low profile' means 1u or 2u i am not a sysadmin)

http://www.fusionio.com/

Re:Where can you buy them?

[amorsen]

They are not enterprise drives. EMC is talking about enterprise drives.

Re:Where can you buy them?

[amorsen]

Have you even looked. Yes, I have looked. None of those dare rate their drives for enterprise use, and none are from EMC.

Re:Where can you buy them?

[giorgiofr]

There is always an implied dot at the end of any FQDN. It's just that usually we omit it. Notice how the web server does answer the request, but errors out because its config files do not point to the requested host.

Re:Where can you buy them?

[kesuki]

you read wikipedia too much, man I've never in any literature had an mention of a 'trailing dot' not even when i configured bind on freebsd.

seriously I've been using the internet since 1994, and not once has 'an implied trailing dot' been mentioned to me anywhere, except in the wikipedia article (and apparently in the RFCs since wiki cites them)

i don't read RFCs ever, and apparently DNS resolvers automatically add a trailing dot, but this was the first time I'd ever heard of needing a trailing dot. and ironically google, yahoo, ask, cnet, w3c and slashdot work with a trailing dot, but microsoft.com. doesn't weirdly enough download.com./ redirects to download.com/

Re:Where can you buy them?

[giorgiofr]

Hehehe that's funny, I didn't expect it to be such an exotic bit of knowledge. I read about it when I was studying how DNS works, one of the first things I learnt was that at the top of the global DNS tree there is a single entity from which everything else descends, and it is called ".". So the FQDN of a host always ends in ".".
In my defense, I never read RFCs either :P

I'm glad

[Anonymous Coward]

that they are going to RAM old HDD with NAND to make an SSD. I hope that the CEO will overcome the patent issues of EMC using SSD from STEC, so LOLCAT comments will not be made in the future.

Juat sayin'.

Re:I'm glad

[Anonymous Coward]

IN UR SSD, LEVELIN UR WEAR

SSD Data Recovery

[ScottCooperDotNet]

Is data recovery possible from these devices if the media is damaged, or otherwise unreadable?

The article doesn't mention numbers in terms of power savings, but I'm looking forward to SSD-based RAID at the same power cost as a single Winchester HDD.

not only price, but density

[fermion]

If we reflect back on the floppy disks days, we see that it was not only cost, but density, that killed the floppy oh so many years ago. A floppy was no longer useful for installing apps. MS often needed upward of 10 disks to ship an app. While 3 MB was big enough to hold most files, we were entering a period in which one could no longer survive with a single 3.5" disk. The CD-R, then the DVD-RW, made sense as they could replace the floppy, though in many ways at a higher costs, due to their higher density. The fact that CD was cheaper than other optical solutions made it a good choice. What did finally kill the floppy was the available of USB drives for the sneaker net. Though expensive, they too had a density benefit, as well as not requiring additional hardware, other than a USB port which initially were scarce on MS Windows machines, and the drivers buggy.

I think that density, not price, is going to drive the SSD market as well. We need space on our small computers, and the mechanical solution is not keeping up. I believe this is why Apple went to flash memory for the iPods, although initially they were dedicated to hard drives. My iPhod mini only has 4 gb, the same as the nano that replaced it. The new nanos have more memory than even the EOL minis. The microdrive, though a good tech, were not scaling. The larger physical size hard disks are now up to 160GB, but that is small for modern times in which many of us have a terabyte sitting on our home machine.

So I think we will pay for SDD prices if they give us more space. The problem right now is that we have more for a SSD drive, and get less space. We pay $1000 to Apple or practically anyone else for 64GB SSD. That is paying money for nothing. Wait until we can buy a Macbook Pro with a terrabyte SSD for $4000, or a Mac Book air with a 250GB SSD for $2000. Then we will be seeing the SSD laptops flying off the shelf.

Of course for low end machines many will stick with HDD for many years, just like people entered the 21st century still storing things on floppy. Of course this will hasten the downfall of HDD, as the cheap unreliable HDD will take an even bigger share of the market than they have today, and, just like today, users will attribute a high failure rate to a problem with the technology, and not that they chose to buy a cheap hard drive. With the last major mechanical part gone, computer will become much more reliable, just like when the stereos, for better or worse, left vacuum tubes behind.

I also hope that DVD drive as a standard goes away soon, and applaud Apple for making the Mac book air drive free. The main reason for a dvd drive, other than installing software, is because we cannot rip out DVDs to a more convinent format. I would much rather carry around a couple Flash Drives than a bag of DVDs. It would seem that in not too many years shipping software on USB dongles would be just as cost effective. Already 4GB flash cost less than $10.

Re:not only price, but density

[RKBA]

"Already 4GB flash cost less than $10."

Yes, but a DVD+R only costs about fifty cents. It will be interesting to watch flash prices.

Re:not only price, but density

[hdon]

I think that density, not price, is going to drive the SSD market as well. We need space on our small computers, and the mechanical solution is not keeping up. I believe this is why Apple went to flash memory for the iPods, although initially they were dedicated to hard drives. My iPhod mini only has 4 gb, the same as the nano that replaced it. The new nanos have more memory than even the EOL minis.

I'm pretty confident that Apple's reason for switching to solid state flash memory in their handheld electronics (and now/soon their laptops as well) was because iPods were notorious for mechanical failure as they are often put through quite a bit of physical abuse.

Re:not only price, but density

[Anonymous Coward]

HDDs generally have a significant density advantage over SSDs. They have been made in 3.5", 2.5", 1.8", 1.0", and 0.85".

However, flash price scales linearly down to much lower densities. HDDs really don't.

So, flash might cost say $10 / GB at a given time. At the same moment a 1" HDD might cost $7 / GB. But the HDD would only come in one flavor: 10 GB. The flash on the other hand would be available in 1, 2, 4 GB varieties.

What a crock....

[HockeyPuck]

You can grab a 1TB platter hard drive for under 200 bucks Obviously, you haven't tried to purchase 1TB of EMC DMX disk lately. HighEnd storage is NEVER cheap. EMC will tell you, "These drives fail less, thereby giving you higher uptime. However, you will pay a premium for them." It also allows them to add yet another layer of storage tiering.

Also, SSDs, if they have a lower MTBF will enable EMC to cut costs by having fewer CEs out there replacing drives.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Another layer in the hierarchy

[BradMajors]

Flash is just another layer in the memory hierarchy.

Hierarchy:

registers
cache
RAM
flash
hard disk
tape

Re:Another layer in the hierarchy

[Your.Master]

Right, but I would say the vast majority of home users have dropped tape from their memory hierarchy (and a good number of other users, too), and we hope to drop hard disk from the hierarchy next. These are albatrosses around our collective necks.

Re:Another layer in the hierarchy

[benhattman]

I don't even use a tape deck anymore. When I started listening to these things called audio CDs around 2005, I realized I couldn't go back!

Re:LCDs vs. CRTs all over again

[Disfnord]

Why do we care if Peter Noone buys them?

Large Blocks

[Detritus]

I recently ran across a document that described plans by Microsoft and hard disk vendors to support large physical block sizes on PCs. I don't know when products will be showing up on retail shelves, but it's in the development pipeline.

Re:LCDs vs. CRTs all over again

[benhattman]

Why do we care if Peter Noone buys them? GP really meant to refer to Roger Nobody, but confused the names. Give him a break hey.

Seems less likley

[SuperKendall]

What I meant was that thanks to the wear leveling going on under the file system there might be more of a chance of a file getting deleted from an empty sector as that sector gets overwritten by other files from elsewhere to even out the wear across sectors.

If you undeleted a file on a system that was managing wear leveling behind the scenes, doesn't it seem more likley that area would be allowed to "cool down" for a while since it just had a file in it?

With a normal filesystem it's more random.

However what I'm not sure it's as easy to do is real recovery, the kind that professional data recovery places do. Can they pull back data from flash devices with the same degree of damage? I would think not.

SSDs will reach price parity on June 15th

[DDumitru]

On June 15th, Mtron will start shipping the 1000 series MLC drives. Put these in an array with the right software and you end up with price/GB parity with 36GB 15K 2.5" SAS drives and about 12x the random IO performance.

HDD Array:

8 Seagate Savvio 2.5" HDDs: $350ea $2,800
    configured raid-10
1 SAS raid controller $600
Total cost for 144 GB $3,400 or $23.61/GB

SSD Array:

6 Mtron 1025-32 2.5" SSDs: $290ea $1,740
    configured raid-5
1 SATA raid controller $250
MFT Software License $1,250
Total Cost for 144 GB $3,240 or $22.50/GB

HDD Performance:
    4K and 8K read IOPS: 250/2000 (single-threaded/multi-threaded)
    4K and 8K write IOPS: 1200

SSD Performance:
    4K read IOPS: 8000/48000 (single-threaded/multi-threaded)
    8K read IOPS: 6000/36000 (single-threaded/multi-threaded)
    4K write IOPS: 40000
    8K write IOPS: 22000

These performance numbers are with the MFT driver in place. Without MFT, the 4K random write performance is about 140 IOPS (>250x slower).

Endurance for these SSDs in this configuration is good enough to overwrite the entire array with random data three times a day (500GB of random updates/day) for about five years.

These drives make a wicked mail server (EasyCo just moved one of it's mail servers mirrored to MLC flash and the difference is amazing).

Sorry for the blatant advert, but SSDs are here now.

Doug Dumitru
EasyCo LLC
http://managedflash.com/
+1 610 237-2000 x2

I think there's space for both technologies

[goldcd]

With my limited knowledge - Platters currently provide the best storage per buck, but SSD provide better random access (although after timing my ipod touch vs 60G 5G iPod, I've come to realize that an SSD can be much much slower - thanks Steve). Data Centres where there are very specific needs will I'm sure plump for one or the other - depending upon what their needs are. I'm sure eventually we might all go SSD, but that's way way off imho. What the majority of us need is for some more intelligence in the box we put on the end of the SATA cable. I've been tempted by the idea of an SSD for boot volume and then a conventional platter drive for a storage volume - but well basically that sounds more trouble than a few seconds off my boot time is worth. How about combining the two intelligently (and no this doesn't mean a giant cache or the somewhat simplistic approaches we've seen for combining the two so far). Imagine a 1TB drive (we seem to have stalled at this point) with say a 32G SSD integrated (this will be cheap in a year I swear). Selling point would be that the drive itself would have RAID like functionality shifting the most used files into the SSD partition. Average user could then just plug the drive in and not have to worry about optimizing anything - after a couple of boots he notices his OS is faster to start up etc.

Why not PRAM?

[the_olo]

Seems like phase change RAM would have much more desirable properties (high write performance, much higher amount of writes a single memory cell can take before it's damaged) for discussed uses.