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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!
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".
Apparently slashdot editors.
Apparently slashdot editors.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
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.
"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.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
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.
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.
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
So you're from Texas?
My blog
See, now look what you've done. You've been modded 'Offtopic'
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Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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.
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.