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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."
When given similar performance but a slightly higher price, i would prefer the SSD. I can't take the flash to the next PC as i can do with the SSD. Hard disks have a highe life expectancy than mainboards (i usually find some good use for old HDs, i never did for old mainboards). Unless the SSD will cost 2-3 times as much as the flash on the mainboard, i believe SSDs will still be used. But maybe this will lead to lower SSD prices.
Now only if they could start following the server side folks and place an internal USB connector inside and then MS and others could give us the OS on its own usb drive (read only) and we could use the hard drive for updates and programs we could enhance the security as well...
Life is but a Beta test...
Sounds like a good plan. Throw cheap battery backed memory, 4-16Gb onboard to act as a transparent buffer between harddrive(s) and system.
Fast IO is ensured as most operations happen in memory, and dataloss isn't an issue as the memory is battery backed.
RAID cards have done this for ages, but it's becoming real option for desktops as memory price keeps declining.
16Gb might be overkill for most purposes, you could get away with 2 if the system is used only for low-power tasks like surfing and email.
There are no atheists when recovering from tape backup.
Funny - this very thing was being discussed around 1985 (I think), but using battery-backed RAM as a way to reduce boot time. The thinking was people wouldn't put up with a computer that took 30 seconds to start, and if we didn't have a 2-5 second boot time (equal to a TV), the personal computer would never fly. But since it took from 1985 (80386 chip) to 1995 (Windows 95) for a 32-bit OS to become popular, maybe 25 years is reasonable.
Or not. Man, this industry moves at a snails pace in a lot of areas. Why do we still live with the x86 instruction set. Is "the year of UNIX" here yet?
Anyway, three competitors will emerge:
- Someone will put NAND directly on the drive, and get an instant speed improvement. All the tech sites will rave about it and it will be an instant must-have item.
- Their competitor will figure out a way to put the OS files in NAND, for fast booting, via a utility or firmware. The marketing war begins.
- The third competitor will work with Microsoft or Apple to get OS support for fast boot. Apple will get there first and you'll see a commercial on TV with the Mac guy wondering why the PC guy takes the entire commercial to wake up.
In a single drive system, the cost will be about the same. Doing it on the drive will create an instant performance boost on any machine, and well worth the estimated $10 added cost.
Place nail here >+
No. When flash fails it becomes unwritable, not unreadable. Your data is safe, your capacity declines.
> Your OS doesn't always have time to shut down properly. Don't think anyone's fond of the idea of having their last couple of saves go poof because Windows crashed.
So, what happens if my PC crashes because of some hardware failure and I have to plug in a different HDD for some reason? Or plug the HDD into a different mainboard? All the things I thought I wrote to the disk will be gone. In fact, the file system might be inconsistent if this thing doesn't honor flush requests. But if it does honor flush requests then nothing is gained, it'll still be the OS that does all the caching.
Well, it'll still be a great read cache, 4-16GB read cache is more that most people have as RAM caches, so it'll be good for something.
Today's experiment
Why a USB connector ? That causes the same problem as making SSD cards use the SATA interface - the serial interface becomes slower than the things it is connected to.
What I would like to see is a set of sockets on the motherboard, mapped into the main memory address space (not PCI), a physical switch on the board to make them read only and software in the BIOS to make them look like a bootable disk.
Four sockets with 16 or 32G in each would give you enough space to store the entire OS. I don't know how Windows would handle it, but in a Unix or Linux based system it would be fairly easy to mount the devices as read only partitions and map them into the filesystem. This would be ideal for a server system, mapping the entire OS into the main memory address space and making it read only.
In fact all the BIOS would need to do is make the first 100M visible as a boot partition, and leave the OS to handle the rest.
The buffer should obviously be on the hard disk. That way the data on the disk will always be in sync, even if there are writes buffered in the flash cache when the computer loses power. I can't see a good reason to put it on the motherboard instead. Especially as most consumer systems have exactly one HDD.
The article says that the flash buffer could work for "all system io". I can only think of optical disks and flash drives possibilities other than hard disks. But optical disks are interchangeable, so they have to be reread on each use anyway, and could just as well be cached in RAM. And it makes no sense to cache flash drives in flash cache...
Capacity is still an issue though.
Not really for most people.
The last few systems I have worked on for 'standard consumers' were all quite upset at being forced into purchasing a 'way too big' 300gb hard drive, simply because any drive under 100gb is both very hard to find, and likely expensive in comparison. 500gb was a waste to them, when they only sync their camera once a month and have office and a couple games installed.
Outside of work where I would be classed as a standard consumer, it would cost me far, far too much to buy enough SSDs to transfer my 4TB of data from my HDDs.
You are not allowed to use "standard consumer" and "4TB of data" in the same sentence :P
Careful, they might swoop in and hole punch a warning into your geek card!
Anything >= 2tb is far far above the standard consumer. Even 1tb is far above the average consumer, although 1tb is still falling well within the power user and average gamer groups.
Flash memory is at present growing in capacity much faster than magnetic drives.
If magnetic drives really push the capacity growth that might not hold; magnetic drives have shrunk in size and increased rotational speeds to decrease latency during that time as well. If they just simply give up the performance race and go for vast capacity they could move back to 5 1/4 full height disks. Can you imagine the amount of data you could stick on that surface area with modern technology? I wouldn't be surprised if a 25TB disk could be produced today, at a price not much higher than the cost of current high capacity disks.
Sure, latency would stink, but it's still faster to wait for those 20ms extra for any HD video you'd ever recorded to start than getting out of the sofa and locating some physical media.
Using SSD's for latency sensitive stuff and slower magnetic media for bulk storage is one possible way it can play out. It may change in the future, but (outside my professional capacity) I've found that not having enough storage has beaten not having fast enough storage every single time.
Well, obviously the volatile drives aren't much faster than Intel's SSDs. Most SSDs are already starting to bump against the upper limit of what you can get out of SATAII when doing sequential reads.
The first ones I saw were for the PCI-slot and that one is limited to 133 MB/s and 266 MB/s for 64 bit PCI, both of which are lower rates than SATAII.
PCI Express of course starts at 250 MB/s per lane and tops out at 1 GB/s per lane for the latest version. Compare that to DDR3 which peaks at 12.8 GB/s per channel. To saturate a PCIe x16 lane we could settle for three DDR3 channels.
Size is another concern of course, as most of these things tends to go for sockets to plug the memory into.
So, you could try to top out a system with 160 GB of DDR3 RAM (would require 30 blocks), costing $14,099.7. And I'm not entirely sure, how you'd fit 30 blocks of RAM onto a single PCIe card, even if it's full length. This setup would obviously only be performance limited by the PCIe bus and the card's memory controller.
Now, HP StorageWorks' IO Accelerator 'only' provides about 700 MB/s depending on the workload, but only costs slightly more than half of the DDR3 solition at $7,700.
The biggest problem with the PCIe-based volatile solutions is fitting enough memory to be useful and that you're fucked if there's a bad power outage. The non-volatile PCIe solutions' biggest problemt hey're hideously expensive compared to regular SSDs and the only advantage they have to RAID-0'ed SSDs is the IO performance, as raw speed is faster if you raid a few of Intel's SSDs to a good controller.
And all the PCIe based storage mechanisms have one huge problem - non-bootable.