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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.
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?
Trust me, throughput is still important if you're running these in a fileserver on a fast link (10Gb ethernet link, infiniband, fibre channel, etc). The read & write speeds of standard SSD's mean you need a whole bunch in parallel to prevent them becoming a bottleneck, which makes them hard to integrate into existing servers.
In contrast, a single fast PCIe SSD can drop right in. There's definately a market for high bandwidth SSD's in high end storage devices.
...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
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.
You're implying that SSDs fail as often and disastrously as fast-spinning disk platters.
They don't, which is why a beowulf cluster of SSDs is a beautiful thing, though my concern is DDR2 can deliver much faster throughput and ns-latency, while the density trails a bit behind SSD but not that bad.
With 4gb DDR2 modules hitting the mainstream, and 8gb modules in the high end, what's stopping someone from putting a bunch of them on something like Gigabyte's i-Ram (minus the stupid SATA bottleneck) and having themselves a DIY uber-SSD ? Sure, there are differences but it's nothing a battery can't fix.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
the Micron video shows a 2-drive setup performance of 200,000 I/Os per second. (2KB) random read = ~400MB/sec.
a benchmark performed by Linux.com also shows that SSD absolutely creams SATA, even 6 SATA drives in RAID 6, in terms of random seek. in other tests a single Mtron 16GB SSD gave 111 MB/s sustained read with .1 ms access time, outstripping the WD Raptor 150, which was the fastest SATA drive at the time the test was performed (12/13/07). the only area where SSD lags behind is random write, which it suffered 23% over the raptor. but with the several-fold increases in I/Os per second achieved by Micron's PCIe cards, even random write speeds would be be faster than normal mechanical rotating drives.
You mean like this: http://www.mars-tech.com/ans-9010b.htm
And the battery doesn't need to be huge either - it backs your data up to a flash drive if the power cut lasts more than a few 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.
You *are* joking right? Currently the memory bandwidth is only a minor problem against disk performance. Disk IO is either really slow or really really expensive. Even nowadays, I can download faster than that I can save / PAR2 and unrar my binaries. I won't go into playing games at the same time: impossible. Disk spaed is a slow crawl. And that's just consumer stuff, I won't go into tuning high throughput databases.
Actually, random reads are a very big strong point of SSDs, because they have 2 orders of a magnitude less seek time than a platter drive.
Random writes are good on SLC SSDs (the expensive variety) and average on MLC SSDs (although, many MLC drives cause a pause after too many random writes at the moment).