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

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?

[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:Price

[Yvan256]

You can't afford it.

Re:Terrible Article

[UnknowingFool]

The article repeats itself about 3 times on one page.

Apparently slashdot editors.
Apparently slashdot editors.

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: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.

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: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: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:MythTV

[TheRaven64]

Ah, an EMACS user.

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!