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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."
Gnmeh!
Have you read my blog? Neither have I.
Just $2,001,099!
$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.
FOX NEWS.com should be BANNED from television and internet. Have the Congress take it over and give us Truespeak.
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
... didn't I read something about SSDs working best in Windows 2000?
http://www.toshiba.com/taec/news/press_releases/2008/memy_08_550.jsp
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.
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!
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!!!".
"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.
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
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.
Yes, but will it blend?
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
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.
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;
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
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.