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SSD Prices On Parity With High-End HDD By 2011

Posted by kdawson on from the at-least-it's-not-five-years-out dept.

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.

9 of 106 comments (clear)

  1. Overlords by ickleberry · · Score: 1, Interesting

    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.

  2. The Future is Solid State by Bananatree3 · · Score: 3, Interesting
    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.

    1. Re:The Future is Solid State by arbiter1 · · Score: 2, Interesting

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

  3. What about filesystems... by epiphani · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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?

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    1. Re:What about filesystems... by v1 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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

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      I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
    2. Re:What about filesystems... by 4e617474 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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".

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      Finally modding someone offtopic when they rant about what "Begging the Question" means: priceless.
  4. Re:Yeah, Right by Courageous · · Score: 3, Interesting


    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//

  5. Re:Longevity by hairyfeet · · Score: 2, Interesting
    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

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    ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
  6. Re:Longevity by orkysoft · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

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    I suffer from attention surplus disorder.