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Intel's Braidwood Could Crush SSD Market
Lucas123 writes "Intel is planning to launch its native flash memory module, code named Braidwood, in the first or second quarter of 2010. The inexpensive NAND flash will reside directly on a computer's motherboard as cache for all I/O and it will offer performance increases and other benefits similar to that of adding a solid-state disk drive to the system. A new report states that by achieving SSD performance without the high cost, Braidwood will essentially erode the SSD market, which, ironically, includes Intel's two popular SSD models. 'Intel has got a very good [SSD] product. But, they view additional layers of NAND technology in PCs as inevitable. They don't think SSDs are likely to take over 100% of the PC market, but they do think Braidwood could find itself in 100% of PCs,' the report's author said."
RTFA. It's cheaper than DRAM.
There have also been rumors, however, that Braidwood has been canceled, at least in the near term:
http://www.dvhardware.net/article37368.html
First of all, DDR RAM is not cheap (at least, not compared to NAND RAM). It costs significantly more per gigabyte than even the most expensive of Intel's offerings for SSD's. While it should provide more theoretical throughput than any SSD, benchmarks at various places (http://techreport.com/articles.x/16255/1) haven't shown that to be significant yet, at least from the end user perspective (some synthetic benchmarks show that the RAM based disks can be faster than SSD's, but translating that to real world usage scenarios by consumers doesn't quite show any tangible benefits).
DDR RAM uses up a very large amount of power per stick compared to SSD's do. I remember seeing the power consumption of one of the DDR2 based "volatile hard drives", and it was higher than spinning drives (at least at idle), and wasn't particularly faster than the best of intel's SSD's.
So sounds like DDR RAM on board is expensive, power hungry, and doesn't provide that much of a tangible benefit to consumers. Tell me again why it's a good idea?
Sounds like a good plan. Throw cheap battery backed memory, 4-16Gb onboard to act as a transparent buffer between harddrive(s) and system.
Do you mean gigabit or gigabyte? Also, 16 gigabytes of RAM right now isn't very cheap at all. The cheapest DDR2 memory I've seen is about 12.50 dollars per gigabyte, so that's an additional 200 dollars per 16 gigabytes. Is that a good price to pay for some potential increase in speed? IMO, that's what I'd call "extremely hard to justify" for a consumer.
RAID cards have done this for ages, but it's becoming real option for desktops as memory price keeps declining.
Meh, even the most expensive RAID cards loaded up with tons of RAM aren't as fast as a couple of Intel SSD's right now, so why bother with the expense?
SLC flash memory, which the article claims Braidwood will use, is an order of magnitude or two more durable (in terms of write cycles) than MLC flash memory, which is what is used in most consumer-level devices like Intel's X-25M SSDs.
Wear-leveling and overprovisioning should ensure a long life for the memory used in a scheme like Braidwood. Intel, generally speaking, knows what they're doing in this area. Now if only I could afford one of their drives...
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It's *cache*. It's not meant to be moved, and it doesn't prevent you from moving the hard drive. Nor does it prevent you from using an SSD, it just means the performance reasons for using an SSD may get significantly reduced.
No, actually having 4TB of data is way ahead of the curve. The "standard consumer" has maybe 100GB worth of (non-OS) data on a drive, even if the drive is 1TB.
Everyone I know has at least a few TB of data on burnt CDs and DVDs. It would be nice to be able to consolidate your multimedia stuff into one storage device. I'm running 8 terrabytes of data on 10 1TB hard drives on a ATA over ethernet setup in raid6. So yeah I'm pry not your average consumer but being able to access 1000's of hours of movies, tv and home video without having to pay netflix or watch the ads on hulu is pretty nice.
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No, it's called direct access (the DA in DASD, and also the reason for the FreeBSD device name for SCSI hard disks). If you're talking about RAM, though, it's acceptable to call it random access.
If the onboard flash is a cache, that means it will be used frequently do it will wear faster. Won't that mean you're more likely to corrupt your data, even if your HD is still good ?
NAND flash chips are generally guaranteed for at least 100,000 erases per block. As I understand this Braidwood chip, it's a non-volatile ring buffer for data writes. Ring buffers are the easiest thing to wear-level, meaning you can just multiply the cache capacity devoted to writes (let's say 2 GB) by the longevity guarantee to get 200 TB of buffered writes before any failure occurs. And not all blocks on a flash chip fail after the same number of writes; you'll just start to lose ring buffer capacity over time.
Average consumers don't do backups. Ever. Of anything.
You're on slashdot and can quote correctly - you're not an average consumer.
Yes, it looks like they are planning to use a dimm-like slot.
http://www.hardware.info/en-UK/news/ymiclpqWwpyaaJY/Computex09_Intel_P55_motherboard_gallery/
Also remember that flash fails reliably, meaning you know if a write failed (reads will continue to work). So an intelligent controller will be able to simply treat bad parts of the flash as cache misses (in other words performance goes down, but it still functions correctly).
For customers who only want/need a 100GB of storage, SSDs are the way to go. They do currently cost a lot more than rotating storage, but a SSD makes a HUGE difference in the apparent performance of many day-to-day tasks.
A good 120GB SSD like the OCZ Agility costs about $300 compared to $40 for a 160 SATA drive so the price premium is huge.
BTW - I'm not sure why you say drives smaller than 300GB are hard to find - or why your customers complain about it. NewEgg has a ton of drives smaller than that with the smallest at 80GB. Pricing looks like this:
80GB - $35 - $0.50/GB
120GB - $40 - $0.33/GB
250GB - $45 - $0.18/GB
320GB - $50 - $0.15/GB
500GB - $50 - $0.10/GB
It's pretty clear that it's simply not cost effective to produce a drive cheaper than $35. When you can pay another $15 and get 6x the storage space and a drive that is faster as well, it's pretty much a no brainer. If they really only need a 100GB drive, you should consider short-stroking a larger drive (just create a 100GB partition instead of using the full disk) as that will significantly improve random read/write performance due to shorter seek distances.