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."

Comments

Newegg Special Price!

[Anonymous Coward]

Just $2,001,099!

Re:Newegg Special Price!

[Rene S. Hollan]

IIRC, Islam also forbids the lending of money at interest. Whereas we in the U.S. are used to a lender taking a security interest in property purchased with the help of a loan, people who subscribe to faiths where lending at interest is forbidden solve the problem by the lender taking a depreciating ownership interest in the property, sharing proportionately in it's change in value (up or down), while the loan is being paid off. The purchaser's monthly payment goes partially toward purchasing more of the property and partially toward renting the part s/he does not own. Rather clever actually.

Re:Newegg Special Price!

[camperdave]

No, lending without interest is an Old Testament law written to and for the Jews/Israelites.

If one of your countrymen becomes poor and is unable to support himself among you, help him as you would an alien or a temporary resident, so he can continue to live among you. Do not take interest of any kind from him, but fear your God, so that your countryman may continue to live among you. You must not lend him money at interest or sell him food at a profit. Lev 25:35-37

Do not charge your brother interest, whether on money or food or anything else that may earn interest. You may charge a foreigner interest, but not a brother Israelite, so that the LORD your God may bless you in everything you put your hand to in the land you are entering to possess. Deut 20:19-20

Re:Newegg Special Price!

[BKX]

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.)

Re:Newegg Special Price!

[causality]

IIRC, Islam also forbids the lending of money at interest. Whereas we in the U.S. are used to a lender taking a security interest in property purchased with the help of a loan, people who subscribe to faiths where lending at interest is forbidden solve the problem by the lender taking a depreciating ownership interest in the property, sharing proportionately in it's change in value (up or down), while the loan is being paid off. The purchaser's monthly payment goes partially toward purchasing more of the property and partially toward renting the part s/he does not own. Rather clever actually.

Don't you love it when people get really clever at following the words of a law for the purpose of evading the spirit of a law?

While I'm sure that there are also moral reasons for it, the prohibitions against lending money at interest found in various religions really seem to be designed to prevent a house-of-cards situation like what the USA currently has with the Federal Reserve, where dollars represent debt, not wealth, and paying off all debt would mean no money in circulation, not that you could even do this because the system inherently has more debt than it has dollars in circulation since interest is attached to the money the moment it is created. Just like the religious prohibitions against eating i.e. pork had a real function of preventing food-borne illness for ancient people who could not have known what bacteria/viruses/microscopic parasites are, it fascinates me to wonder whether the prohibition against lending money at interest had a real function of preventing a house-of-cards economy for ancient people who could not have known what centralized banking systems are.

Re:Newegg Special Price!

[idiot900]

If there's anything to be learned from this, it's that God is a lawyer who is easily kept happy through the use of legal technicalities.

Re:Newegg Special Price!

[Fweeky]

the speculative imaginings in other sci-fi works generally focus exclusively on future technological advancements while the world's sociopolitical climate remains relatively unchanged

I suggest you improve your sci-fi diet. There are literally thousands of far better fleshed out, better thought out and more interesting and realistic portrayals of the ramifications of potential technological, social and political changes in the future, they're just mostly in the form of books, not crappy TV shows or movies, which are developed using a process that seems designed to filter out most of what's actually good about science fiction.

i mean, the Federation is basically a pan-galactic egalitarian communist utopia. but this isn't just a random utopian fantasy; everything is thoughtfully reasoned and explained in a way that actually makes sense

Not particularly; the technology doesn't make sense, the portrayed capabilities aren't taken anywhere near their logical conclusions, and frankly most of the universe is left completely untouched; let's face it, most of Star Trek takes place on at least semi-military spaceships, of course it looks like a communist utopia; they're mostly crew. The day to day lives of ordinary citizens is handwaved away with a few soundbites like:

once replicator technology is invented, a capitalistic economy and consumer culture no longer make any sense, and want & poverty are also eradicated

But that's bollocks; it simply shifts your economy from being driven by materials to being driven by (utterly humungous amounts of) energy and knowledge. You want the latest and greatest hovercar? Well, those engines didn't develop themselves, the 50 petawatt hours of energy for a small 2 tonne vehicle didn't magic itself into existance, and the replicators sure don't maintain themselves, the software to run them doesn't write itself, even the sleek fashionable bodywork doesn't spring into existance out of thin air. Replicators can't even make everything, so chances are you'll need to pay for some good old fashioned non-magic manufacturing to go with it; if nothing else, some assembly might be required, since replicators seem to have some upper limit on practical size.

But no, Star Trek goes with "replicators solve everything and everyone lives happily ever after, so let's go and do another stupid holodeck episode because the reality we made was too boring to make another show about".

and with nation-states similarly abolished (and without people fighting for resources), a military serves no purpose

Right, making a cup of tea involves generating and moving around the energy of 475 Fat Man nuclear bombs (assuming 100% effeciency at all points) and there's no longer any problem of resources. That sure does make for interesting social commentary. Also, people no longer have any real ideologies, and certainly don't disagree with anyone over them; there's no terrorism or politics, except out in space, where the implications of these sort of energies being thrown about are never really considered, even at times of war.

likewise, religion would be a cultural anachronism in an advanced spacefaring civilization with extensive scientific knowledge

Again, unlikely oversimplification. We have pretty extensive scientific knowledge *now* and still 90% of the planet is still rather religious, and much of the rest have some pretty strange ideas. Commenting on social and cultural progress should typically involve a little more than some just-so stories which completely ignore most of the issues involved.

Random read/write?

[Timothy Brownawell]

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?

Re:Random read/write?

[Timothy Brownawell]

Except that previous drives have well-known severe problems with random IO, so I'm kinda suspicious that they specified sequential speeds rather than take the opportunity to say "see, we don't have that bug that everyone else does".

Re:Random read/write?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Random read/write?

[OrangeTide]

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.

Re:Random read/write?

[MobyDisk]

Not all of them. Intel and Samsung both make controllers that do not have the buggy performance problems that the JMicron controllers have.

Re:Random read/write?

[adisakp]

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.

Re:Doesn't address fundamental problems

[Timothy Brownawell]

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).

MythTV

[bogaboga]

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.

Re:MythTV

[qoncept]

I don't understand why you would do that. The only upside that I can see to a spinning disc would be noise, and if you're watching TV, how could you hear it? I'd spend a whole lot less money and get a whole lot bigger hard drive.

Re:MythTV

[Daimanta]

"I currently run my computer system off solar panels. They (SSDs) consume less power as compared to systems that have hard disks. FYI, I live deep in the country."

Well, I etch my data into massive stone tables. FYI, I live even deeper in the country.

Re:MythTV

[Archangel Michael]

Moses? Is that you?

Re:MythTV

[morgan_greywolf]

You have stone tables? Damn are you lucky! I live much, much deeper in the country than you, apparently. We have to use sticks to etch our data into the sand. Unfortunately, every time it rains, we lose everything. So we have memorize the data, and re-etch it after the rainy season.

Re:MythTV

[blhack]

Well I release butterflies into the atmosphere. The flapping of their wings changes the flow of the eddy currents in the upper atmosphere. These cause momentary pockets of higher-pressure air to form, which act as lenses that deflect incoming cosmic rays, focusing them to strike the drive platter and flip the desired bit..

Re:MythTV

[alta]

I live much, much deeper in the woods than you. We have yet to evolve sufficiently to maintain those so called memories. We are destined to repeat the same mistakes over and over again.

Re:MythTV

[morgan_greywolf]

So you're from Texas?

Re:MythTV

[TheRaven64]

Ah, an EMACS user.

Terrible Article

[neoform]

Who wrote this garbage? The article repeats itself about 3 times on one page.

Re:Terrible Article

[UnknowingFool]

The article repeats itself about 3 times on one page.

Apparently slashdot editors.
Apparently slashdot editors.

Re:Price

[Yvan256]

You can't afford it.

Re:Price

[d3ac0n]

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.

Re:And the cost is what?

[poetmatt]

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.

Straight from Toshiba

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.toshiba.com/taec/news/press_releases/2008/memy_08_550.jsp

Just give me a cheap fast 64GB already

[ChienAndalu]

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.

Re:Just give me a cheap fast 64GB already

[tknd]

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.

Re:Price

[nabsltd]

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.

Re:Price

[Bandman]

Depends on the lap. I've gotten a 12 drive AX100 on my lap before. Hurt like hell, but hey, you deal with that sometimes.

Re:And the cost is what?

[ColdWetDog]

See, now look what you've done. You've been modded 'Offtopic'

The first rule of Moderation is you don't talk about Moderation.

Re:Platter drives

[merreborn]

Don't buy an SSD to store a large database that gets lots of updates!

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.

Re:And the cost is what?

[mcrbids]

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!