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

Yes that's nice.

[electrosoccertux]

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.

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.)

Re:Yes that's nice.

[lysergic.acid]

that's still not quite as impressive as 1600 MB/sec throughput using 2 drives (which can be integrated into a single-card solution).

Re:Yes that's nice.

[TheRaven64]

The InPhase disks are $180 and the drives are $18,000. Unlike your external disk, the disks are rated to last 50 years. Not sure how much the Optware versions cost, but they start at 1TB and go up from there.

No SATA, eh?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

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?

Re:Oblig

[Narnie]

Perhaps loading Vista in less than a minute?

Maybe?

Re:Oblig

[im_thatoneguy]

Uncompressed HD, 2k and 4k film playback and capture.

At work we regularly are working with dozens of layers of 2048x1024 32bit uncompressed footage at the same time.

There is a market...

[Max Romantschuk]

...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. :)

Re:Interleave

[billcopc]

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.

Re:Interleave

[owlstead]

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.

Re:throughput IS NOT most important parameter

[XDirtypunkX]

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).