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Micron Demos SSD With 1GB/sec Throughput
Lucas123 writes "Micron demonstrated the culmination of numerous technology announcements this year with a solid state disk drive that is capable of 1GB/sec throughput with a PCIe slot. The SSD is based on Micron's 34nm technology and interleaving 64 NAND flash chips in parallel. While the techology, which is expected to ship over the next year, is currently aimed at high-end applications, a Micron executive said it's entirely possible that Micron's laptop and desktop SSDs could have similar performance in the near future by bypassing SATA interfaces."
This reminds me of all the demos of holographic disc technology. It'll be on the market in just 1 year! But it never is, and it's never affordable for us /. browsing types.
...when it's there. i'd take one - duke nukem forever would just run fine on this thingy!
SSDs built into mini-PCIe cards aren't new, so obviously they are possible(and I remember the concept going back as far as 44pin IDE drives on special PCI cards). Historically, though, these cards have appeared, from the perspective of the computer, as ordinary IDE or SATA adapters that just happen to have storage attached.
Does anybody know if this widget from Micron is similar, or are they actually pushing some new flavor of interconnect that will require BIOS tweaks and/or special drivers?
64 NAND flash chips in parallel should be enough for anyone!
I'm curious, what are the applications for this kind of disk speed?
"throughput" isn't that important. Random reads/writes is what shows that most of SSD are crappy and weak unfortunately.
The worse thing is that everyone things that throughput is so important :-/
So is this pretty much like placing the chips in a RAID within a single device? So 1 chip failure brings down all the data and makes the entire drive unreadable until you replace the bad chip? How easily can you plug in a new chip to recover all your data?
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
...for really high bandwith stuff.
For example, these puppies from Edgeware, designed for video streaming, can do 20GB/sec:
http://www.edgeware.tv/products/index.html
(And these aren't vaporware, I've seen the actual hardware in action.)
Granted it's very custom stuff, but putting tech like this in a box with a SATA interface is really just evolutionary... Cool none the less though. :)
.: Max Romantschuk
So should we start thinking about replacing SATA with something else that can handle this?
La vida no es una pastafrola.
Storage on an expansion card is nothing new, my Amstrad 1512 had a 40mb hdd on an ide card.
I only buy pepper spray that's been tested on anti-vivisectionists.
...some competition! Seriously, I think they'll be better off. There's probably too many nervous nellies out there unwilling to dive into non-SAS/SATA/FC storage with a newcomer like Fusion I/O.
BTW, WTF is up with "The second generation of PCIe is expected out next year ..."? It's been out for a while now, I've seen motherboards, GPUs, and IB HCAs that support gen2.
It is exciting to see this sort of development on the server front, though these technologies never seem to offer the huge advantage we'd expect. The fact that multiple companies are going in multiple directions for storage technology is excellent for the marketplace.
It seems unlikely that this will really benefit servers because generally for applications that need high IOPS numbers, you're looking at a SAN or some sort of fibre-optic storage.
Database and related apps (like SAP, Oracle, or Exchange) needs a lot of space and while SAN technology is expensive, it provides a lot of advantage over in-chassis storage devices. I can't see it being that useful. I suppose for a small Exchange or Oracle deployment that needs high IOPS without needing a lot of space or the redundancy features of a SAN, it might find some use.
All of this technology is still useful though if for closing off technology development along certain lines when a product dead-ends or for future product development where the underlying technology has merit.
This sig contains a manual self-destruct. Kindly please put your foot through your monitor in 8 seconds.
This would be the first time a storage device would significantly saturate system memory bandwidth.
Indeed Intels SSD has a internal NCQ like command queue system to mask latency of the host. Common storage controllers are (obviously) not up to the job.
1gb/s from a single drive, that finally brings storage speed back in line with moore's law, which only capacity has followed it seems.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
On-topic, concise, and highly effective. Well played.
say with a power outage. I've lost a couple of drives over the years that way.
While Micron's SSD technology is aimed at high-end applications that would run on Fibre Channel SANs, such as transactional databases or streaming video, [...]
PCIe x8 (or x16 for the 2-in-1 card) is nothing rare even in a consumer PC. What is so high-end about it (except, probably, the price)?
If they're trying to say "consumers don't need this speed", I'm sure most consumers don't need speed faster than what an HDD can offer, either.
At this point, I'd be happy with a cheap, reliable piece of storage that can fully saturate an SATA/300 (300 MiB/s) bus. Don't get me wrong, I think SSDs are the future, and faster than SATA/300 would be great. At this point, however, it's what most new hardware has and that shouldn't be overlooked just because there technically are ways to make the things faster. The fastest drives would probably cost more, for one thing, and wouldn't work with as many existing systems.
So if we are going to saturate our data links with fast SSDs now, why not get the SSD into the CPU die together with a GPU, BIOS, OS, and everything else. There are many embedded SOCs around built in this way, but these are aimed at low-power always-on applications. But I think that the era when we will have a desktop SOC is not so far away if we find a way to keep it cool and cheap.
dick.
Bite me
Given that SATA 1 was capable of 1.5 Gbps and SATA 2 is capable of 3.0 Gbps, why the need to go PCIe? This SSD from Micron doesn't even exceed the throughput of the original SATA spec.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Trouble with RAM is that it disappears when the power fails.
Even with the iRAM you lose it after 16 hours if I understand correctly.
So SSD has a real advantage there by the sound of things (in being more like a real hard disk).
Trouble with RAM is that it disappears when the power fails.
Ooops - obviously I mean you lose the information stored in the RAM, and not the RAM itself!
the only area where SSD lags behind is random write
And $/bit.
But it usually takes a superior technology to start the price curve declining rapidly. It looks like they've finally just achieved it.
I hope they put blinky lights on these things so I can tell if the OS is hosed or not.
My God, it's Full of Source!
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