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."

Comments

Re:Yes that's nice.

[Joce640k]

Yeah, but ... Intel is shipping SSDs with 220Mb/s read/write:

http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/11/25/015209

What's so fantastic about 1Gb/s? It's only four times faster...a RAID with four Intel devices will do it so just put four of them in a box with a RAID controller and Bob's your uncle...

Re:Yes that's nice.

[Kjella]

This reminds me of all the demos of holographic disc technology. It'll be on the market in just 1 year!

That one has always been in the mysterious future (3-10 years away, never next year) and never really showed up outside of labs. SSDs on the other hand aren't really "new", they're in essence flash chips like we've been using in cameras and USB sticks for many years plus RAID0 that's been a well known way to make slow storage devices faster by running them in parallel. There's quite a bit more controller magic than that, but it's nothing really revolutional in the creation of SSDs. Only the regular miniturization process that's happening all around which means they are reaching capacities and speeds that are useful for main computer storage.

Re:Yes that's nice.

[SanityInAnarchy]

It was about $300 extra for a 128 gig SSD in this Dell laptop. I just ran a casual test. Keep in mind, this is currently being used (lightly), and I haven't done anything to improve the results of this test -- in fact, probably just the opposite, as the file in question was downloaded via BitTorrent, and I've never defragmented this hard drive. It certainly hasn't been read since the last boot.

dd if=foo.avi of=/dev/null
348459+1 records in
348459+1 records out
178411124 bytes (178 MB) copied, 1.82521 s, 97.7 MB/s

Keep in mind, that's throughput -- it gains nothing from the real killer feature of no seek times.

I can always buy big, slow spinning disks and put them in a NAS somewhere. I can take old desktops, put Linux on them, and turn them into a NAS. For the kind of stuff that takes hundreds of gigs, I don't need much speed.

But for the places where it counts -- like booting an OS -- there is a definite, real benefit, and it's not entirely out of reach, if you care about this kind of thing.

Re:Yes that's nice.

[Glonoinha]

Say what?

Actually, RAID can work EXACTLY in this way. Set up a RAID 0 array of 250Mb/s devices and if the host controller can handle it - bingo, Gigabit throughput from the array. There's a guy out there that RAID'ed six of the Gigabyte iRAM cards on some high end RAID card a year ago - and he managed somewhere in the neighborhood of 800MB/s - surely a year later we can do better than that. The only limitations his rig encountered were the limited space available, and of course the volatile nature of the iRAM cards.

The things by Micron appears to have handled the issue of volatile memory when the memory goes down, and getting all the bandwidth through a single channel bus. When it becomes commercially available - count me in for one (when the price comes down enough for me to afford it.)