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Toshiba Developing High-Density 1TB SSD
MojoKid writes "A new partnership between Toshiba and Tokyo's Keio University has led to the creation of a new technology that could allow SSDs up to 1TB in size to be made 'with a footprint no larger than a postage stamp.' The report states that the two have been able to integrate 128GB NAND Flash chips and a single controller into a stamp-sized form factor. They've even made it operational with a transfer rates of 2Gbps (or about 250MB/sec) with data transfer that relies on radio communication."
... it's reliability that's the real issue. SSDs are a great idea in theory, but in practice the only time I tried to build a server around one, taking great care to ensure that as little as possible would ever be ever written to it (e.g. turned off atime, while /var, /temp, /home etc. were located on hard disks), it ended up lasting only about a month.
I would love to replace my hard disks, arguably the most critical and vulnerable components of my computers, with SSDs, but only if they are more reliable in the first place, and can thereafter be regarded generally as an improvement.
It's more that they were on a ROM, i.e. Read Only. This uses re-writeable NAND flash, so would be hacked in a heartbeat. Never mind that cartridges dies out from being sodamned expensive to produce compared to pressing a disc.
OK, maybe for consoles where for some reason you don't want to just pre-load content from a BD to an internal NAND-based SSD as you play, but it seems far less cost effective to distribute everything on it's own SSD. Hot-swappable SATA HDDs are faster than current optical media, and the per-GB cost is far lower than NAND flash. But I've never heard of see anyone suggesting distributing console games on individual HDDs.
Hard drive development just hasn't been keeping place with flash memory.
I think you're confused. I happen to have a hard drive in a system that creates and deletes thousands of gigabytes of files a month. It's been doing that for seven years straight. Show me any SSD that can achieve the same. Hard drives and flash memory have different properties and that necessarily makes them more or less applicable to different usage scenarios.
7 years * 12 months/year * 10,000 GB/month = 840 TB of data written/deleted
10,000 Erases * 128 GB = 1280 TB of data written/deleted
It seems like any SSD of appropriate capacity will do that. 10,000 erases is actually extremely conservative, most SSDs advertise 2-3 orders of magnitude more than that. It'd take continuous writing at maximum speed for more than a decade* to kill most modern SSDs. Or at least that's the theory, I'm sure someone has gotten a defective one that died in a month or something.
* 5,000,000 Erases * (256 GB / 100 MB/sec) = 405 years
The latest bleeding-edge SSDs aren't that reliable either. Intel has had pretty bad bugs with their SSDs.
Most SSD manufacturers do a fair number of tricks to maintain high performance while doing wear-leveling.
The technology hasn't got to the "boring ho-hum" stage yet.