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Toshiba To Launch First 512GB Solid State Drive
designperfection9 writes "Toshiba said Thursday that it will show off a new line up of NAND-flash-based solid state drives with the industry's first 2.5-inch 512GB SSD.
The drive is based on a 43 nanometer Multi-Level Cell NAND and claims to offer a high level of performance and endurance for use in notebooks as well as gaming and home entertainment systems."
Just $2,001,099!
I guess if you have to ask that usually means you can't afford it, but how much would something like this cost??
I only see numbers for sequential access (240MB/s read, 200MB/s write). I don't suppose anyone knows how it does for random read/write speed?
These articles on SSDs seem to pop up once or twice a week, with news on how much more space they provide, but there haven't been any articles recently addressing fundamental problems for long term practical use. Until these problems are hashed out, I wouldn't consider getting a device that utilizes such a drive, whether it be 1 GB or 1 TB.
Is there any reason to buy a platter drive anymore, aside from cost? Id rather have speed, reliability, and long life.
PS - Imagine a beowulf cluster of these.
It's my intention to grab one of those Toshiba systems once they start shipping. I hope that a Solid State Drive will be able to handle the constant read/write operations associated with MythTV.
Some folks here at Slashdot, have suggested that SSDs are not a good choice for applications like MythTV. This time, I will prove for myself.
FTA: It has a maximum sequential read speed of 240MB per second and maximum sequential write speed of 200MBps meaning faster boot and application loading times. The drive also offers AES data encryption to prevent unauthorized data access.
Nice, but does someone have the details about the AES implementation? What mechanism is used to change the AES key on this drive?
Who wrote this garbage? The article repeats itself about 3 times on one page.
MABASPLOOM!
I hate not to be all positive about this, but I'd much rather the prices drop rather than the sizes get bigger. Then again this is a huge sized solid state drive. I wonder if it is actually worth it. I'd like to see some real numbers comparing these drives to normal laptop drives.
A part of me also wonders when something like this will be thrown into the next ipod or DVR. It'll most likely be a price thing that determines it.
It may say 512GB now, but we all know that once marketing gets a hold of it, it'll be
Tosiba's Brand New 550GB* drive.
*1GB = 1,000 MB
$1200?
I can buy a USB disk drive that has twice as much for 1/10th the price.
You can buy 1TB USB disk drives for $120?
and that's exactly the reason why I'm wearing no pants
$1200?
If so I'm not going to go run and buy one. I can buy a USB disk drive that has twice as much for 1/10th the price.
I think this is like many other computing/electronics items in that the early adopters pay a lot more than the rest of us are willing to pay until the prices come down. Remember how expensive the earliest CD burners were? Really I'm glad that there is more interest in non-volatile solid-state storage. Over the years I've seen so much vaporware (like the 3D gelatin cubes that are written to and read from with lasers, like a hologram) in this area that it's good to see something that is actually going to be available. Even if solid-state drives are expensive as hell and not much better than current mechanical/magnetic hard drives right now, I don't expect them to stay that way so this is a step in the right direction.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Pretty close - newegg has one for ~ 129.99
Prediction: The real iPhone killer is going to be sex robots from Japan. Think about it.
In fact, you can.
... didn't I read something about SSDs working best in Windows 2000?
Yes.
You betcha!
Even cheaper if you get them sans enclosure.
Early adopters are just paying more early(unless its someone/thing that needs cutting edge technology). They aren't paying the way to make it cheaper for us. It's just an early indicator of interest and a short-term way to start recouping costs. When people make more than the cost it is profit, not discounts that we see. This would be because the MFR makes the same profit either way.
In reality the cost of something is generally (not completely, but generally) far lower than the original price...this is because they know that most things start expensive and get cheaper. Competition brings it down.
When manufacturing costs find a way to make the same item cheaper, do you really think that cost savings is passed on to retail or the consumer? Absolutely not. Consumer's don't even know, for the most part.
Pretty close - newegg has one for ~ 129.99
And 1 in 4 reviewers rated it 2/5 or less. I tend to avoid products where that high a percentage thought the product sucked.
Your link goes to a Seagate Free Agent.
http://www.toshiba.com/taec/news/press_releases/2008/memy_08_550.jsp
Yes, it does.
Prediction: The real iPhone killer is going to be sex robots from Japan. Think about it.
When manufacturing costs find a way to make the same item cheaper, do you really think that cost savings is passed on to retail or the consumer? Absolutely not. Consumer's don't even know, for the most part.
Yes I do think that cheaper manufacturing brings lower prices. When one company figures out a cheaper way to manufacture something, they can sell it for less but keep the same profit margin. Since it costs less, they'll sell more, and thus, get more profit. That's ONE way to do business. Of course another way is to keep the price fixed as production costs go down and make a greater profit on each item sold, but sell less items. I think more companies lower their prices in order to sell more units though. Luxury brands don't, but most others do.
How long will drives like this last?
Surely longer than mechanical drives with platters, but has anyone actually verified it?
Also, when they fail, what is the most common reason for failing? Is it something that you could recover the data from?
Maybe it is way too early to know the answers
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
When are the small SSD drives coming? I just need to put my operating system on the SSD-drive, the mp3s and movies are doing fine on the spinning platter. 512GB are total overkill.
So they'll use MLC instead of SLC.
Multilevel Cell (MLC): The cheap and more error prone.
Single level Cell (SLC): The reliable and expensive.
Early adopters are just paying more early(unless its someone/thing that needs cutting edge technology). They aren't paying the way to make it cheaper for us. It's just an early indicator of interest and a short-term way to start recouping costs. When people make more than the cost it is profit, not discounts that we see. This would be because the MFR makes the same profit either way.
In reality the cost of something is generally (not completely, but generally) far lower than the original price...this is because they know that most things start expensive and get cheaper. Competition brings it down.
When manufacturing costs find a way to make the same item cheaper, do you really think that cost savings is passed on to retail or the consumer? Absolutely not. Consumer's don't even know, for the most part.
Sorry but I think you're reading things into my previous post that I never actually said.
Regardless of how it happens, why it happens, or for whom it is profitable, computer storage generally becomes faster, cheaper, and more capacious over time. So, I see that solid-state drives are very expensive and not much better than magnetic hard drives right now and I don't doubt that this will change over time. I'm glad for this. That's all I was saying, full-stop.
I wasn't making a claim about the economics of early adopters and how they affect the market, I was merely observing that if you want one of these right now you're going to pay a lot of money for it (at least, compared to other forms of storage). When I say that early adopters pay more "until the price comes down" I was not claiming that they are doing the rest of us any favors, I was accounting for the simple fact that when the price of a formerly cutting-edge item comes down, it comes down for everyone, previous early adopters included. I appreciate your elaboration of this process but I think it was a bit misguided.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
When manufacturing costs find a way to make the same item cheaper, do you really think that cost savings is passed on to retail or the consumer? Absolutely not. Consumer's don't even know, for the most part.
Unless there's, you know, competition in the market. If Company A and Company B are both selling a widget that does job X (they can replace each other), for $Y, if Company A figures out how to make their widget cheaper you can be damn sure the consumer will get a lower price, because Company A wants more of the market, and thus, more money.
The problem is when you run into monopolies and oligopolies, which is a different discussion.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
That is correct, but don't forget to include economies of scale. Companies will want to lower the price on their product in order to sell more. Once they start selling more, they are able to purchase/manufacture the parts in bulk and at a cheaper price therefore lowering the price of their product even more. This increases demand, allowing the company to sell more and purchase/manufacture the parts at a cheaper price, and lower the cost of their product which increases demand...
Correct my ignorance please if I am wrong, but isn't there a foreseeable problem in how file systems and disk drivers are optimized to deal with problems of rotating disks and not writing to NAND based storage? File system programming isn't something I know much about, but I thought that FS were always engineered with the physical problems of working with a spinning disk in mind.
From what is sounds like, the problems of a SSD device warrant a differently designed file system.
Sorry Sir, but it seems that a transistor has gone in the controller circuit and your data cannot be retrieved!
Why was my post labeled "redundant"? Redundant of what? As far as I know I did not repeat anything; I posted an original message.
FOX NEWS.com should be BANNED from television and internet. Have the Congress take it over and give us Truespeak.
Companies just love to mention cool new Apple products in any of their product briefs: "it can be used in laptops such as the Macbook Air". The all-new Diet Coke, can be drank while listening to Apple's iPod!!! Utterly irrelevant... And in this case- FALSE. The Macbook Air uses 1.8" hard drives, this drive will NOT fit into it. Maybe they could get some other tie-in to look cool. "This drive can be used in an external box connected to Apple's iMac!!!".
See, now look what you've done. You've been modded 'Offtopic'
The first rule of Moderation is you don't talk about Moderation.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Unfortunately improving manufacturing efficiency is not limited to economy of scales with components. Another means of reducing price is to cut the amount of laborers included, which I suppose can be seen as part of efficiency. As the laborers are dwindled down, the cost of labor decreases.
Of course the reduction in labor, if many companies are reducing to improve efficiency, backfires as larger and larger numbers of consumers lose access to the money they would have used to consume whatever product. Thus the companies lose customers and must find a way to further improve efficiency. The further method is often to just keep cutting jobs.
Granted HDD are rather high tech and I know little of the manufacturing process, this is a concept applicable to virtually all fields of production and retail.
"Yes, we can!"
Who?! WTF!? I was talking about Cesar Chavez...
Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure everything I just said is completely wrong.
I have honestly been waiting for large capacity SSDs for years now to purchase a new computer to make my main production and writing machine.
I have multiple TB of audio and video stored on my external hard drives and I have to back them up so many times due to failures (I travel a lot, and in cold weather as well) that the cost of buying so many standard drives far exceeds what buying a handful of SSDs and keeping them for decades would.
I have to buy so many extra external drives a year because the technology is tremendously unreliable. And the cost of data recovery is astronomical. I lost a $250 hard drive with 500GB of data and it ran me over $1500 to recover it. So the cost of backing up that data on a standard drive ended up being $1750 plus the aggravation of thinking I might have lost major parts of an entire project.
Even if large capacity SSDs are excessively expensive it will not matter to me as long as the technology is safe and reliable.
The $1200 may have been unrepeated, but the suggestion that the price is high is the subject of at least three other threads for this story. Thus you are marked redundant.
Happy Holidays,
The Mod Squad
It should have been moderated -1 Wrong but that wasn't an option.
Most SSD's are using Multi-Level Cells to get the most space they can. Unfortunately these are really slow when it comes to writing data. One work around is using Single Level cells, which are much faster, but half as dense obviously. Here's a pretty good article on one of Intel's new single level drives: http://techreport.com/articles.x/15931 It's only 32GB, but fast as all get out. It's also over $700 if you want one: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167013&Tpk=X25-E
The trend has been that as a market for a commodity electronic product grows, even if workers are being laid off due to increased efficiency, either the volume the company has to produce increases and they need equal or greater workers anyway, or those same workers end up growing new companies. You don't hear of companies like Western Digital going under because they became "too" efficient.
Sam ty sig.
I know it's not the correct term, but what find fascinating is that they actually give more GB in that form factor than is available with ordinary drives.
I'm astonished, a year ago we we're looking at 64 GB, this is 8 times more than that.
Don't know about you guys, but I'm impressed with how fast this is going.
If only the prices would drop to actual consumer levels.
These people live in their mother's basements and have more free time than you or I could ever imagine.
Just ignore their bad modding and go about your business. Trying to go at the thing logically will only make your brain twitch.
Yes, but will it blend?
And the second rule (borrowing from Shakespeare):
"Kill all the moderators" because the internet is met to be uncensored. (like Usenet is.)
FOX NEWS.com should be BANNED from television and internet. Have the Congress take it over and give us Truespeak.
Tosiba's Brand New 550GB* drive.
*1GB = 1,000 MB
In my experience, consumer flash memory products such as USB pen drives, CF cards, and SD cards actually have their stated capacity available. For instance, I bought a 512 MB CF card that had 512,000,000 bytes; I guessed that the other 5% of the underlying 512 MiB chip was spare sectors used by the wear leveling scheme. (CF is just a parallel ATA SSD in a smaller form factor.) Likewise, if this SSD has 7% spare sectors, it would have 512 GB available out of 512 GiB.
Sorry, I neglected to include the link for the CCP performance increase article
Why do you care how you get modded? Is there a prize or something?
The fact that Toshiba is now shipping a 512 GB SSD tells me that Apple may be now working on a replacement for the iPod classic (current "6.5G" version with 120 GB hard disk) in two versions, both with larger displays and a 128 GB SSD: one with full iPod touch functionality at US$350 and one with less functionality (more aimed for music lovers) at US$250.
I agree. I also probably should have stated that in some way where it wasn't quite a 100% blanket statement.
However, worldwide, for about 95% of all industries, there are basically only 2 or 3 manufacturers maximum of a given item, and prices are set in stone by contracts agreed to privately and obfuscated to the public by these manufacturers. Thus, you know, there's competition in the consumer retail market only. It's only when the retail distributors push back on that 1 manufacturer for the sake of competition do they actually lower price (and only sometimes).
Example: One single company makes probably 80%-85% of all computer products for cellphones and computer hardware. 1 company makes them for the entire world. That's why we have those little standards markings on stuff. People who work in the standards industry can easily tell you how few manufacturers actually exist. However, this is not a bad thing really. How many consumers could tell you who really makes a product that is UL listed, EC listed, etc?
So the monopolies are there, people just don't know about em. Mostly because those companies make so much money that they don't care and are conscious of the easy abuse, plus they're so huge of companies that national governments usually have a magnifying glass on them at all times. Literally many governments actually have employees hired by said manufacturers (salaried) to inspect the plants on a continual basis.
Islam style finance does forbid interest, but it does allow sharing in the profits. There is just a different semantics for discussing it. If you read about it for several hours, you will start to understand, then as you continue, it will become less and less clear. It starts out very benevolent, then gradually comes back towards western banking as it compensates for economic realities.
All Abrahamic religions are actually bogus morally when you look at them. It seems on the surface as if they have moral principles, at least for fellow believers - infidels/gentiles and pagans are SOL, but once you read the fine print you realise they actually don't. Successive generations of scumbags have managed to find loopholes to make those principles worthless in reality, even for the in group that the religion claims to protect.
Islamic finance is one example, but they are ubiquitous. It's like someone said about Judaism "it forces you to be smart because you have to know the loopholes to get anything done".
I suppose the secular example would be the tax code. It would seem obvious that everyone pays tax, and rich people pay more. In actuality rich people can afford to hire someone smart to find the loopholes and can structure their businesses in a way that means they end up paying not just a lower percentage of tax than poor people but often a lower absolute amount. Arguably trying to codify morality or anything means you have an ever increasing body of rules to cover loopholes, but the more rules you have the more loopholes you get. It's like more complex and featureful software has a larger 'attack surface'.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Even if solid-state drives are expensive as hell and not much better than current mechanical/magnetic hard drives right now, I don't expect them to stay that way so this is a step in the right direction.
The fact that SSD devices can compete with Hard Disks today shows not just excellent growth, but purely awe-inspiring growth. Despite being a much smaller marketplace than the magnetic HD marketplace, SSD storage has almost caught up with magnetic Hard Drives.
To show what an incredible accomplishment this is, you need to really understand exactly what this graph actually means.
It shows how hard disk capacity has grown since 1980. Yeah, it's gotten bigger every year... whoopdie doo, right? Notice that this is a logarithmic graph. Each line is 10x the line before, so you really don't see the significance of this, so I rewrote the graph in a "real" scale.
What previously looked like a smooth, predictable growth actually represents a cliff of growth. Capacity has grown so fast that it's been a challenge to find uses for this much storage. We've had to re-invent the meaning of what is a computer in order to make use of so much new found power - over and over, and over again.
And yet, despite having a dramatically smaller marketshare, much less R&D, SSD storage has managed to all-but catch up to this fast-moving target. This isn't just cool, it's incredible. Every year, SSD drives get a little closer to parity with their spinning cousins.
I have an 8 GB thumb drive, but I also still have a couple 1 and 3 GB drives from a few years back on the shelf. This kind of growth is simply astounding!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Those filesystems are designed for FLASH devices like usb keys or memory cards but are probably not suitable for SSD.
The reason being that modern SSDs already perform wear leveling to improve the performances and I don't believe that apply wear leveling could be a good idea.
For the time being, it is probably better to wait for the SSD controller technology to mature.
On the OS, the existing filesystems should be tuned to exploit the lower seek times. Caching the writes so that they can be perform in large consecutive blocks probably make sense too.
All Abrahamic religions are actually bogus morally when you look at them. It seems on the surface as if they have ...
sed 's/ Abrahamic//;s/ actually//;s/ morally.*/./'
There, fixed that for you. :)
I keep wondering, why wouldn't the SSD bring back the 5 1/4" form factor? They could shove more in the space, and make bigger SSD desktop drives.
Is there any reason why the 5 1/4" size would cause issues like it causes slowness for a rotating platter?
Minor generalization, much?
Re. Christianity, how does your assertion sit with Jesus' teachings? If are you just commenting on how fundamentalists somehow manage to ignore the core principles, I couldn't agree more. So many self-righteous "Christians" are a bit too keen to cast the first stone.
This was one of Jesus' pet peeves and earned the wrath of religious learned for pointing out the hypocrisy in such a legalistic approach.
I'm not sure where this "group that the religion claims to protect" comes from, but mainstream Christianity interprets the prime directive "love thy neighbor" to mean all people.
I'm sorry if I haven't offended anyone
It makes my post and everybody else's post below my posts (like yours) invisible to the readers.
FOX NEWS.com should be BANNED from television and internet. Have the Congress take it over and give us Truespeak.
You state the truth, but imply that the link should not go to where it goes. That's because your browsing at a floor of 2. You missed the parent post that refers to a 1TB USB drive for $120.
I talk about stuff.
on:
returns:
Just thought I'd share that with my fellow junior-level, non sed speeking, nerds.
So they finally got around to adding those much anticipated checksum and sign bits, eh? Hopefully someone told the marketers at the telcos that they can stop stealing frames from the trunk lines! They're honest, though; they include those bits as part your bandwidth... they don't just round them off like the hard drive manufacturers do.
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
If you're using ext2/3/(4?), 5% of the file system is reserved for root by default. You can pass "-m %" (where '%' is the percentage of the file system you want to reserve) to the mkfs command to set the reserve. Although I usually try to leave 1%; it sucks to fill the drive and not have enough free space to delete anything!
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
Thanks for pointing that out. You are correct in your statement, I didn't see the parent post.