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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."
there haven't been any articles recently addressing fundamental problems for long term practical use.
I wasn't aware that there were any, just a few implementation issues with the early drives (bad wear leveling and f-ed up controllers that can't multitask).
Unless the design is broken
That's the problem; almost all SSDs on the market are broken and have worse write performance than hard disks. Just look at all the "JMicron rage" out there.
Random writes are problematic for SSDs because Flash memory writes are done in two steps: erase and write. The erase step always blanks a relatively big block of Flash memory, so to write a 4K sector, a big block of Flash memory has to be read, erased and then written back with the modification. Randomly writing small blocks is therefore several times slower than continuous writes.
There is a small latency with loading a new address walk through in these high density flash devices. Also it takes additional sata/scsi commands to issue I/O at a new address. If you spend 50% of the time issuing and waiting for the drive to lock on to a new address, then your performance will be cut in half (simple). But on SSD you need to seek extremely rapidly to get to that point. on a spinning disk drive the rate you need to keep seeking to heavily impact performance is a much slower rate.
It's definitely measurable on SSD though. Especially if you issue the I/Os in the least efficient way possible, such as treating each as a single transaction, rather than doing a scatter-gather with a long list of sectors to fetch. But that is more a limitation of the interface of sata/scsi/everything-else than with the medium, but it does have a real world impact.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Since SSDs don't have any seek time (or if they do, it's probably not measurable) the sequential and non-sequential I/O should be indifferent.
Yes, should. But most current SSDs have buggy controllers that can't really handle random IO.
Don't buy an SSD to store a large database that gets lots of updates!
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
But this is a laptop drive, and the largest capacity available for a laptop drive, or 2.5 inch drives in general.
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." - H.L. Mencken
All jokes aside, I'd imagine quite a bit.
As an example, 150GB solid state hard drives are selling around the $7-800.00 US range on Newegg.com I have no idea if those are NAND drives or the older flash drives.
A new NAND tech drive with around 5 times the capacity? Oh geez that's gonna be expensive! Methinks you'd be better off spending the money on a 3Ware RAID card and some really good standard drives.
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
http://www.toshiba.com/taec/news/press_releases/2008/memy_08_550.jsp
As an example, 150GB solid state hard drives are selling around the $7-800.00 US range on Newegg.com
I think you mean that 250GB SSDs are in the $700-800 range.
128GB (the closest I can find to 150GB) are around $250-350.
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...
Not all of them. Intel and Samsung both make controllers that do not have the buggy performance problems that the JMicron controllers have.
They're almost here. $70 for 30GB SSD is currently out of stock but I'm sure they'll get a new shipment within the week. With each new drive that hits the market profit margins are getting squeezed out. MLC NAND flash chips spot prices are about $1 a gigabyte so I wouldn't be surprised if there was a healthy 100% margin still built into these product prices.
From what is sounds like, the problems of a SSD device warrant a differently designed file system.
There already exist a number of file system implementations designed specifically flash such as JFFS, JFFS2 and YAFFS. (I'm sure there are others I have not bumped into yet...)
N.B. There's an IBM Devworks article discussing flash file systems for linux.
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
Actually, most of the SLC SSD drives are fairly immune to the random write stall issue that plagues MLC drives. For example, compare SLC and MLC drives from OCZ. The older OCZ Core SSD drives (SLC) have much faster random write access than newer OCZ Core V2 SSD drives (MLS) even though the Core II have much higher specified/published (sequential) write speeds.
OCZ's official line on the frightening performance problems with random writes on MLC drives (i.e. multi-second system stalls and random write throughput as low as 4 writes/second) is "we encourage potential customers to research this product and insure that it will fill their needs. These MLC based drives have extremely fast reads, and if you need a drive with fast sequential (frequent) writes, please check into our SLC based SATA II drive series."
At least OCZ is somewhat honest up front in acknowledging that their MLC drives are not for everyone. But FWIW, nearly all MLC SSD drives are orders of magnitude for real world performance (that includes writes) than their sequential performance specs would suggest.
Currently, the Intel drives are the only shipping MLC drives with good random write performance out-of-the-box. OCZ has announced (but is not yet shipping) a new "Vertex" series SSD that combines MLC with 64MB of RAM cache that speeds up random writes tremendously.
But in general, right now, it's buyer beware if you need fast random write access for higher system performance (i.e. a Windows user). Make sure you get either one of the Intel drives (MLC or SLC) or a well known SLC drive if you're concerned about anything other than strict read performance. Before you buy a MLC drive, follow OCZ's suggestion and do a lot of research on the drive first.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Sort of. The written Torah is just first five books of the Old Testament. The oral Torah (also called the Talmud) is not shared by either Christianity or Islam, and is arguably more important. It gives you the guidelines for interpretation and understanding of the written Torah. In fact, nowadays, the most important part of the Torah is really the more recent commentaries on the Talmud. They give you actual understanding.
Without the Talmud (and the more recent commentaries for guidance), you would end up with ridiculous, literal interpretations of the Pentateuch (the Christian word for the written Torah) that fundamentalist Christians walk around spouting. (The Earth is 6000 years old my ass.)
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.
Don't buy a cheap, consumer grade SSD for a large database that gets lots of updates.
On the other hand, if it's in your budget, and you don't have any other options, *do* buy an enterprise SSD array that's actually up to the task -- CCP claims a 4000% increase in performance after switching to an SSD-based solution for their game, EVE Online.
However, the solution they're working with was priced somewhere around $150 per gig as of a year ago. Consumer SSDs are currently priced around $2-3/gig, based on newegg price quotes elsewhere in this thread.
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