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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."

112 of 149 comments (clear)

  1. Gaming? by Darkness404 · · Score: 2, Funny

    I really hope all these high-density storage systems will be used for gaming, HDDs are unreliable and large SSDs would allow for fast load times, better non-DRM copy protection and the ability to save games without paying extra.

    --
    Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
    1. Re:Gaming? by ae1294 · · Score: 1

      better non-DRM copy protection

      Really you think? Er, I mean how so?

    2. Re:Gaming? by negRo_slim · · Score: 1

      Bring back the cartridge.

      --
      On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
    3. Re:Gaming? by geekmux · · Score: 1

      I really hope all these high-density storage systems will be used for gaming, HDDs are unreliable and large SSDs would allow for fast load times, better non-DRM copy protection and the ability to save games without paying extra.

      Yeah, because God forbid the game manufacturers(or anyone else for that matter) take advantage of the 1GB or more of DDR5-speed memory on video cards, or the fact that you can slam 16GB of ultra-fast DDR3 memory onto your average mobos these days for a fraction of what you would spend on this kind of hardware. I mean damn, DDR3 only pokes along at a "measly" 1600MBps...

      I really fail to see the setback in this arena. Seriously.

    4. Re:Gaming? by DigiShaman · · Score: 1

      I was thinking the exact same thing. What better way to enforce DRM than with the cartridge. Besides, it has a few things going for that format in that it's robust, no moving parts, and provides fast I/O. Also, you can add in future co-processor technology like Nintendo did with the FX chip (SNES console).

      --
      Life is not for the lazy.
    5. Re:Gaming? by EdZ · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

    6. Re:Gaming? by DigiShaman · · Score: 4, Informative

      Apparently a company called Data Recovery Services claim the ability to recover lost data in SSD format. Not sure how they do it exactly, but I imagine it involving some de-soldering of chips and replacement of new parts on the PCB.

      They've managed to provide a writeup of their claims here.
      http://www.datarecovery.net/solid-state-drive-recovery.html

      --
      Life is not for the lazy.
    7. Re:Gaming? by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I strongly suspect that cartridges would no longer be all that useful for DRM purposes. Doing a ROM dump from a cartridge takes some technical know-how and a bit of motivation; but downloading one from bittorrent doesn't and blank cartridges, fillable with those ROMs via USB, will likely be popping up on DealExtreme and the usual grey-market importers at about the same time the console comes out.

      You could always produce cartridges with embedded contactless smart cards, or some similar authentication measure, to try to raise the difficulty of cloning; but there'd be nothing stopping you from producing Blu-ray disks with a couple of contactless smart-card chips moulded right into the inner polycarbonate ring and getting exactly the same degree of protection with much cheaper storage.

    8. Re:Gaming? by NFN_NLN · · Score: 1

      Apparently a company called Data Recovery Services claim the ability to recover lost data in SSD format. Not sure how they do it exactly, but I imagine it involving some de-soldering of chips and replacement of new parts on the PCB.

      They've managed to provide a writeup of their claims here. http://www.datarecovery.net/solid-state-drive-recovery.html

      Flash drives use write leveling and other algorithms to extend the life of the chips, which have a limited number of write cycles. As a result, even if you *overwrite* data it still logically exists on the chips, it just doesn't show up in the filesystem. They must have a technique to stitch the data of a working drive back together.

    9. Re:Gaming? by Darkness404 · · Score: 1

      Um, because we all know that the PS3, 360 and Wii all read data from 16 GB of DDR3 memory and have 1 gig of DDR5 on video cards...

      --
      Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
    10. Re:Gaming? by DigiShaman · · Score: 4, Interesting

      With regards to DRM; fair enough.

      However, Blu-Ray disks only support up to 25GB per layer. In theory, an octo-layer disk would make that 200GB total. Toshiba though is talking about 1TB of space on something the size of postage stamp. That's quite game changer if I ever saw one. Having fast I/O is also a nice bonus.

      Perhaps consoles will never make it back to cartridge format because disks are so much cheaper to mass produce. But if someone can put this technology into an SSD drive at a reasonable price point, I'll be dropping one in my PS3, laptop, and desktop workstation. While were at it, maybe a few servers too.

      It always amazes me how Star Trek is so prophetic in regards to trends in technology. This new SSD revolution is equivalent to their isolinear chips. Wow, just wow!

      --
      Life is not for the lazy.
    11. Re:Gaming? by Nefarious+Wheel · · Score: 1

      "Hi, I just received a postcard from blizzard-rewards.com with a realm on it. Is it safe to load?"

      --
      Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
    12. Re:Gaming? by omfgnosis · · Score: 1

      HDDs are extremely unreliable. Moving parts equals higher likelihood of failure. I'm not sure I'd say you're lucky to never have experienced unexpected drive failure, but I'm not sure I wouldn't either.

    13. Re:Gaming? by TheLink · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

      --
    14. Re:Gaming? by TheRaven64 · · Score: 1

      I have yet to see one of my drives unexpectedly fail.

      Same here. Mind you, I expect my drives to fail every 12-18 months...

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    15. Re:Gaming? by Ihmhi · · Score: 1

      Also in regards to your point, cartridges are tough whereas optical media is wimpy little girly men.

      You drop a cart and it'll survive. I'm sure gamers would appreciate the extra durability...

    16. Re:Gaming? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      The key distinction here is that when a HDD dies, the data is effectively lost, requiring specialist techniques to recover. Most SSD failure modes, on the other hand, merely make blocks read-only.

    17. Re:Gaming? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      It's the understanding I've always had from a few places.

      http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/kingston-ssdnow-ssd,review-31805.html

      "Tony Chen: More precisely, when you reach the mean time of a drive—its data endurance—it’s not really a fail. It's not like the data is no longer there or the format has vanished. It just becomes read-only at the end of its life."

    18. Re:Gaming? by amorsen · · Score: 1

      I have only heard of performance-related bugs, not about any which threaten the actual data. I'm using an original X25M without bothering to upgrade firmware, so it would be nice to know if I'm tempting fate.

      --
      Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
    19. Re:Gaming? by ae1294 · · Score: 1

      You drop a cart and it'll survive. I'm sure gamers would appreciate the extra durability...

      And this helps the content providers make even mooore money how exactly???

    20. Re:Gaming? by Rockoon · · Score: 1

      This.

      Really.

      The people that are worrying about the write limit on SSD's are bad at math. Assuming a 100MB/sec constant write speed (I choose this because thats about the best you get from a standard hard drive) it would take nearly a year (289 days) to wear out the write limit (10000+ cycles) of one of the larger SSD's (512GB) on the market right now.

      In other words, the SSD could be written to full blast for nearly a year before it couldnt be written to any more. Try writing to a standard rotating HD full blast for a year and see how long it lasts.

      For most people, 1GB/day would be on the very high end of drive writes.. and thats being completely careless (oblivious?) about the fact that its an SSD with limited write cycles. Even a small SSD (64GB) could last 640000 days at 1GB writing per day.

      --
      "His name was James Damore."
    21. Re:Gaming? by Tumbleweed · · Score: 1

      >> Also in regards to your point, cartridges are tough whereas optical media is wimpy little girly men.

      You drop a cart and it'll survive. I'm sure gamers would appreciate the extra durability...

      Yeah, but you can throw optical discs and behead zombies if you're good enough. A cartridge requires much more strength, and is therefore useless during a zombie outbreak. Always plan for the worst-case scenario, dude.

      Rule #1: Cardio

    22. Re:Gaming? by Ihmhi · · Score: 1

      All the strength in the world and the thing will just splinter when it hits something. Maybe it will go in an inch?

      I have years of experience throwing old vinyls at sand and other soft to hard targets for fun. Don't worry, I didn't ruin any classics - it was mostly stuff like Cher and the Monkees.

  2. First by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    First postage

  3. Thank god. by Karganeth · · Score: 4, Funny

    I don't understand metres, they're too complicated. Thank god they used the postage stamp method of measuring.

    1. Re:Thank god. by rockNme2349 · · Score: 4, Funny

      Research shows that by 2012, Toshiba will be delivering Solid State Drives with an information density of 0.1 LoC/(ps^3).

      --
      Sewage Treatment Facilities - "Our duty is clear."
    2. Re:Thank god. by Cryacin · · Score: 1

      That's all well and good, but what fraction of a car is that?

      --
      Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
    3. Re:Thank god. by Rosy+At+Random · · Score: 1

      2012? Oh, you mean MMXII! Sorry, I mean the Year of the Dragon.

      --
      Would you like a slice of toast?
    4. Re:Thank god. by ijakings · · Score: 2, Funny

      Thats all well and good, but I dont understand the significance of this until its delivered in standard Libraries of Congress units.

    5. Re:Thank god. by carlmenezes · · Score: 1

      Well, its like getting 50 teenagers into a mini.

      --
      Find a job you like and you will never work a day in your life.
    6. Re:Thank god. by Khenke · · Score: 1

      Is it just me that think 1TB at the size of 55,7 x 45,8 centimetres is nothing to brag about? Worlds largest postage stamp
      But then again if it is the smallest stamp with 1x1 cm it is something to brag about.

  4. Re:mod 0P by Ethanol-fueled · · Score: 3, Funny

    *sigh*

    That's what happens when the GNAA outsources their trolling to India :(

  5. Good. by anthonyclark · · Score: 1

    Now get back to me when you've built 24+2 of them into a 1x10x10 cm 12 core blade with water cooling.

    Or 256 of them into a 1U half-depth fanless storage array.

    I loathe seeing racks upon racks of heat spewing, power sucking, storage arrays.

    --
    ----- Documentation is worth it just to be able to answer all your mail with 'RTFM' - Alan Cox.
    1. Re:Good. by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 5, Funny

      256 TB of flash... The storage device will be delivered in a standard fedex mailer, the payment will have to go by pallet....

    2. Re:Good. by robot256 · · Score: 1

      Hmmmm. That standard FedEx mailer wouldn't happened to be surrounded by an armed guard, would it?

  6. Radio? by The+MAZZTer · · Score: 4, Interesting

    "...with data transfer that relies on radio communication."

    Well that sounds like an eavesdropping invitation if I ever heard one.

    1. Re:Radio? by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Probably more than the naive observer would expect; but less than you would think.

      My understanding, from TFA, is that the radio communication being used is very short range, a substitute for the usual maze of tiny and hard to fabricate gold wire interconnects that go between stacked dice. Die stacking itself isn't new; but the real-world manufacturability drops off unpleasantly as you stack higher, because of all the little wires. If you can use very short range RF instead, your life becomes rather less painful.

      Assuming a suitable faraday cage layer isn't baked in, somebody with a nice antenna and some serious DSP could probably capture some of the traffic from the chip if they could get within a few cm of it. I'd hesitate to base the next generation of smart cards on such a thing; but it isn't as though it would necessarily be a radical advance over what you can do today with a few needles and a logic probe.

    2. Re:Radio? by Yaa+101 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Radio communication does not say it has to be over the air, it means that there is a carrier wave (in the wire) that has the signals put on top of just like radio.

    3. Re:Radio? by G-forze · · Score: 1

      Using waveguides is a common way of transporting radio waves, which cannot be said to be "over the air". "Over the air" implies that the signals are interceptible by anyone.

      --
      "There's someone in my head but it's not me." - Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon
  7. Who cares about size... by FridayBob · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ... 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.

    1. Re:Who cares about size... by nedlohs · · Score: 5, Informative

      Whereas mine ran for 3 years until I replaced the whole device.

      Aren't anecdotes great!

    2. Re:Who cares about size... by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Was your SSD from the cheap seats, or one of the decent ones? People were doing substantially better than that, in terms of lifespan, back when "SSD" meant "CF card in an IDE adapter"... With an N of 1, I suspect that you might have just gotten a dud. Mechanical drives that are dead when you open the box aren't exactly unknown in the field(on the other hand, though, intel has had a couple of really embarrasing firmware issues, and anything that JMicron has cursed with their misbegotten controllers is utter junk, so the field does have some maturing to do).

      More broadly, though, size and reliability are actually closely linked with Flash SSDs. It is inherent in the nature of Flash that it will only survive a limited number of writes before a given block of cells becomes unwriteable at best and unreliable at worst. SSD controllers deal with this by trying to spread writes as evenly as possible over the available Flash space, and by having some amount of reserve space that can silently be substituted for failed blocks. The trouble, of course, is that since Flash is expensive, there is a strong commercial imperative to make as much as possible of the Flash you include visible storage space, so you can put a big shiny number on the box, and as little as possible reserve space, since that is hard to brag about. As a consequence, you'll note that cheap consumer SSDs ship with substantially less reserve flash than do the expensive; but reliability focused, enterprise ones(some of which will even let the customer adjust the allocation between storage and reserve).

      If you can make Flash denser and cheaper, you'll make it more likely that, for all but the crappiest fly-by-night shops soldering together stuff stolen from nearby dumpsters, adding more reserve Flash is cheaper than processing RMAs and dealing with angry customers. Improvements in the intrinsic reliability of Flash cells would be nice as well, of course; but we are already using vaguely RAID-like techniques to turn quantity into reliability, so improvements in density and cost are almost as good.

    3. Re:Who cares about size... by Kamineko · · Score: 5, Funny

      Not really. I heard an anecdote once and it was really lousy.

    4. Re:Who cares about size... by noidentity · · Score: 4, Funny

      I, for one, will not buy a 1TB SSD until it's small enough that I'm guaranteed to lose it within the first day of getting it.

    5. Re:Who cares about size... by grcumb · · Score: 3, Funny

      Not really. I heard an anecdote once and it was really lousy.

      Colour me surprised. I remember hearing once that 95% of all anecdotes are shite.

      --
      Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
    6. Re:Who cares about size... by leetrout · · Score: 4, Funny

      That's because 83% of statistics are made up on the spot.

    7. Re:Who cares about size... by FridayBob · · Score: 1

      Sorry, but I neglected to mention that the SSD in question was indeed both an early and a cheap model. I believe the manufacturer was OCZ, but I forget which model it was. This may subtract some weight from my original assertion, but I don't think all of it.

      By the end of 2008 the Intel X25-M was supposed to be the best thing around, but even that model suffered from a form of low-level fragmentation that was the result of using both wear leveling and write combining. These are workarounds for problems that are inherent to SSDs that use NAND flash chips -- especially of the MLC variety -- and a lot of the competition involves trying to develop controller chips that are better at keeping that inevitable fragmentation under control. Only, I don't think any of them will ever find a practical way to really solve the issue once and for all. So, I'm getting tired of hearing about the "latest storage breakthroughs" that are based on NAND flash technology.

      Okay, then why don't the chip manufacturers just ditch NAND all together and switch to a different technology with better prospects? Well, first because there's no demand for anything else (um, they don't want to invest the money that will create the demand), and second for the same reason the hard disk manufacturers don't want to quit: they first want to get as much money as they can out of their current investments (that largely involve MLC NAND). There's nothing to do about it; we're just going to have to be patient and wait for "business to run its course."

      In the mean time, I've now been waiting 15 years for some form of MRAM to finally come of age: a type of universal memory that will blow away all the existing forms of memory, both volatile and non-volatile. Unfortunately, I suspect that for many more years this type of memory will exist only in my dreams.

    8. Re:Who cares about size... by DigiShaman · · Score: 1

      Not that I doubt you, but what make/model were you using?

      --
      Life is not for the lazy.
    9. Re:Who cares about size... by omfgnosis · · Score: 1

      So's your face!

    10. Re:Who cares about size... by bertok · · Score: 2, Insightful

      ... 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.

      You either used a really cheap drive meant for netbooks, or you simply got a broken drive and didn't do a burn-in period. It's not like mechanical drives never fail, so just because you had a bad experience, once, that doesn't mean you should give out bad advice based on an anecdote.

      Even a decent desktop drive can be overwritten at least a thousand times, and most 'enterprise grade' drives are rated for 100,000 or more. At the high-end, look at the products made by FusionIO or EMC, you'll get drives that might go to a million rewrites, and will actively report degradation so you can replace them before they die.

      Also keep in mind that smaller drives are both slower and wear out faster. It's worth getting larger drives or striping several smaller ones to spread the write wear.

    11. Re:Who cares about size... by dnaumov · · Score: 2, Insightful

      ... 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.

      You had a broken/faulty unit, this can happen with any kind of disk. Even cheap USB flash sticks easily last over a year of the kind of use you describe. Intel X25-M SSDs for example, are specced for 24/7 use with 100gb of data being written to disk EVERY DAY and this is a consumer MLC SSD. Enterprise SLC disks are much more resilient then that (albeit a lot more expensive).

    12. Re:Who cares about size... by hahn · · Score: 1

      ... 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.

      Um, those of us who would like a much smaller desktop or a smaller (and lighter) notebook computer care about size. If you can have 1 TB postage sized hard drive, engineers would have a MUCH easier time creating smaller form factors. Furthermore, besides the smaller size, you also have far fewer concerns about heat AND moving parts (a factor for notebook computers which are dropped fairly frequently). With non-server usage levels, SSD's in my experience have been quite reliable.

      --
      "The only normal people are the ones you don't know very well."
    13. Re:Who cares about size... by nedlohs · · Score: 1

      I was using an el-cheapo USB flash drive as the system drive - it had /usr, /var, /etc, and so on. It was just running a upnp to server video from 4 RAID5ed USB hard drives.

      And yes performance was awful (though good enough to manage that simple task) and I'm no longer using it. But the flash drive didn't die.
       

    14. Re:Who cares about size... by MobyDisk · · Score: 1

      That's odd. SSDs are far more reliable than hard drives. So either you did something very wrong, or they were defective and I hope you had them replaced since they would be under warranty. Did they tell you why it failed? Even large-scale MMOs run on SSDs and don't have reliability problems.

    15. Re:Who cares about size... by BobMcD · · Score: 2, Funny

      Did you just make a claim that 'large-scale MMOs' do not suffer from server reliability problems?

    16. Re:Who cares about size... by GargamelSpaceman · · Score: 1

      I seriously thought about ssding it this time around when purchasing a laptop. I just couldn't quantify the supposed advantages in power use of SSD over a HD. Still, SSD may have other advantages in random access situations. It would have been nice to try.

      Anyway, I'm thinking of putting my whole installation on a 16 GB usb keychain thingie, and using the hard drive for archival purposes. Maybe I can just shut the HD off when not in use. Still, those aren't very big. There'd be a lot of writing going on for just 16 GBs.. Maybe it would die quick. Still, maybe 128 gigs will be cheap soon..

      --
      ...
    17. Re:Who cares about size... by MobyDisk · · Score: 1

      lol, only if you take it out of context.

    18. Re:Who cares about size... by bertok · · Score: 1

      I seriously thought about ssding it this time around when purchasing a laptop. I just couldn't quantify the supposed advantages in power use of SSD over a HD. Still, SSD may have other advantages in random access situations. It would have been nice to try.

      Anyway, I'm thinking of putting my whole installation on a 16 GB usb keychain thingie, and using the hard drive for archival purposes. Maybe I can just shut the HD off when not in use. Still, those aren't very big. There'd be a lot of writing going on for just 16 GBs.. Maybe it would die quick. Still, maybe 128 gigs will be cheap soon..

      It's not about the power, many SSDs use about the same amount as a normal hard drive. It's about speed. An SSD vs a traditional disk is a night & day difference. It's like computers have been reinvented. There's just no comparison, and no going back!

      The only other time I got a speed boost this big was when I switched from floppies to hard drives back in the IBM XT days.

  8. Makes me think of Arthur Clarke. by jcr · · Score: 1

    In Imperial Earth, he mentions a device called a "minisec", which has enough storage to retain anything someone cares to store in their whole lifetime. I wonder what it would mean to have something like an iPad with couple petabytes of capacity?

    -jcr

    --
    The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
    1. Re:Makes me think of Arthur Clarke. by MichaelSmith · · Score: 1

      Yeah but the minisec recorded audio, not video and handled email and encryption. I don't think Clarke thought that device would store more than a few gigs of data.

    2. Re:Makes me think of Arthur Clarke. by TangoMargarine · · Score: 1

      It would still be an iPad, so everyone would mock it.

      What's that? I'm missing the point? Hmmm...

      --
      Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
    3. Re:Makes me think of Arthur Clarke. by KillShill · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I wonder what a useful device like the "minisec" would be without it being straddled to a crippled-by-design product like the iXXXX.

      --
      Science : Proprietary , Knowledge : Open Source
    4. Re:Makes me think of Arthur Clarke. by compro01 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      It would take about 200TB to record a lifetime of audio at CD quality.

      --
      upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
    5. Re:Makes me think of Arthur Clarke. by MichaelSmith · · Score: 1

      It would take about 200TB to record a lifetime of audio at CD quality.

      Yeah but this was just a note taker, and it could offload storage to bigger machines anyway.

    6. Re:Makes me think of Arthur Clarke. by ZosX · · Score: 2, Interesting

      You sure about that? 75 years is 657,000 hours. At FLAC sized files (350mb/hr) it would require 229,950,000 megabytes. I guess you are pretty close there!

    7. Re:Makes me think of Arthur Clarke. by DigiShaman · · Score: 2, Interesting

      And with a few PetaBytes, video as well. It wont be long before bluetooth ear pieces capture video as well. You too could be walking talking 24/7 YouTuber in all of its annoying glory. At least this would have value for Policemen.

      --
      Life is not for the lazy.
    8. Re:Makes me think of Arthur Clarke. by drsmithy · · Score: 4, Funny

      It would take about 200TB to record a lifetime of audio at CD quality.

      Sure, but would you want to record your *life* with the empty soundstage and lack of warmth inherent to mere "CD quality" ?

    9. Re:Makes me think of Arthur Clarke. by compro01 · · Score: 1

      My number was using raw CD quality (16 bit 44.1KHz) PCM recorded in mono and a life expectancy of 81 years.

      --
      upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
    10. Re:Makes me think of Arthur Clarke. by mcrbids · · Score: 2, Interesting

      ... or about 35 TB to record a lifetime at 128k MP3, stereo, "near CD quality".

      Really - do you need your entire life recorded in CD quality? Mostly, you'll worry about proving crimes you didn't commit, so anything better than 32 Kbps MP3 is probably a waste. And while there will be those precious moments, most of your life will consist of you sitting and consuming media that's already recorded elsewhere anyway. Really, do you want hi-def audio copies of the Dresden and Star Trek reruns that you watched?

      A TB now costs about $90. If trends of the last 20 years continue, in about 10 years, a lifetime of audio at 128k MP3 will cost about $90, inflation adjusted.

      --
      I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
    11. Re:Makes me think of Arthur Clarke. by BobMcD · · Score: 2, Interesting

      And while there will be those precious moments, most of your life will consist of you sitting and consuming media that's already recorded elsewhere anyway.

      Oh heck, its worse than that. I'd contend that fully 3/4 of a person's life isn't fit for being recorded at all:

      Sleeping
      Driving
      Toileting/Grooming
      Showering
      Cooking
      Eating
      Cleaning
      Consuming Media

      I'd say that the vast majority of those recordings would be of you talking to yourself, at best. Without video, the time spend doing most of it would lose its context anyway.

      In short, I'm guessing you could get all the important bits on less than 9 TBs...

    12. Re:Makes me think of Arthur Clarke. by wxjones · · Score: 1

      On the contrary, the evidence shows that video cameras have gotten a lot of cops into trouble.

      --
      My SIG is a P226
    13. Re:Makes me think of Arthur Clarke. by GargamelSpaceman · · Score: 2, Insightful

      It would be wasted. That's what always happens to excess capacity. ( Hmm, I don't know if I might be interested in the entire contents of your storage thingy, so I'll just copy it onto mine in it's entirety. ) Of course you've copied many other people's thingies, onto yours and they've copied each other's and through six degrees of separation there's a copy of my thingy of a few versions ago already on your thingie that I've just recopied onto mine. I could clean it out, but I won't because it's more work than it's worth since I have excess capacity.

      --
      ...
    14. Re:Makes me think of Arthur Clarke. by snadrus · · Score: 1

      Agreed! Once you record a whole day, during sleep times your Bluetooth life recorder's data dump can be walked to:

      - Find & delete "Boring Times"
      - Recognize, Tag, & delete Media
      - Tag anything else useful
      - Compress remaining content to [[Device Controller's]] liking.

      --
      Science & open-source build trust from peer review. Learn systems you can trust.
  9. End of the hard drive soon by physburn · · Score: 1
    Hard drive development just hasn't been keeping place with flash memory. And either portable/netbook owner would rather have flash memory, of course i bet these terabyte flash drives are expensive right now, But could we have terabyte+ flash in average computers within 5 years seems likely now, and my laptop will be that mush faster for it.

    ---

    Storage Feed @ Feed Distiller

    1. Re:End of the hard drive soon by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:End of the hard drive soon by izomiac · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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

    3. Re:End of the hard drive soon by petermgreen · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Lets look at a few metrics.

      1: performance: afaict SSDs are already the clear winner here.
      2: density: I can put a 2TB drive in a standard 3.5 inch bay. Afaict SSDs are generally the same size as laptop hard drives and you can put two of those in a 3.5 inch bay with readilly available adaptor kits. Afaict the drives go up to 512GB so the density is about half that of HDDs. For laptops the density situation is even closer (especially if the laptop in question only has a 9.5mm high bay).
      3: cost: the aforementioned 2TB hard drives cost $150-$300 while a 512GB SSD costs $1400 so the cost per gigabyte is about 20 to 40 times higher for the SSD.

      In other words the main issue for SSDs right now is cost.

      --
      note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
    4. Re:End of the hard drive soon by wxjones · · Score: 1

      Wow. That's a lot of churn for a porn collection. Get bored easily do we?

      --
      My SIG is a P226
  10. Bah... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Let me know when they make communication between chips using quantum entanglement.

  11. Which make/model of SSD drive? by darekana · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Would you care to provide the model number of the SSD you used for reference?

    Thanks!

  12. so you want to pay neogeo cart prices for games? by Joe+The+Dragon · · Score: 1

    so you want to pay neogeo cart prices for games?
    neogeo games used to cost alot as the price of the rom chips where high back then and while you can get 1tb HDD for under $100 what will a SSD one cost $500+?

  13. The future is here by Arancaytar · · Score: 2, Informative

    Stamp-sized chips storing the contents of multiple libraries, fully downloadable over short-range radio transfer in roughly an hour.

    Listen to us complaining that we don't have flying cars yet. :P

    1. Re:The future is here by girlintraining · · Score: 2, Funny

      Listen to us complaining that we don't have flying cars yet. :P

      It's because we're afraid of being diddled by a german scientist with a foot fetish.

      --
      #fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
  14. Re:so you want to pay neogeo cart prices for games by Darkness404 · · Score: 1

    Would I pay a couple hundred dollars for a game with no load times, an excellent storyline, excellent play control, excellent graphics, no lag, no annoying paid DLC, near infinite customization, that required no hardware upgrade? Yes. Something along the lines of Fable II only -a lot- longer, no lag, no loading times, more weapons, etc. I would pay $200 easily for. Especially if they don't charge for DLC. Sound unreasonable? Look at World of Warcraft, with a $15 monthly fee, someone paying from 2004-2010 would have paid $1080! And that is assuming the game itself is free along with the expansion packs. So if a game held my interest for 2 years, I would be saving more money than someone who played WoW for 2 years. The problem is, most game developers want to make a quick buck so they create a game, then charge extra for DLC, then create expansion packs, and in the end the $60 becomes more like $150 while still maintaining long load times, imperfect game mechanics and generally sub-par voice actors.

    --
    Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
  15. Re:so you want to pay neogeo cart prices for games by my+$anity++0 · · Score: 1

    and DS games cost $100?

  16. Re:so you want to pay neogeo cart prices for games by wernercd · · Score: 2, Insightful

    People complain about $60 games... you seriously think $200 games would fly? It also seems you are comparing a single purchase game to an online game. WoW on a fast chip would still require a game server. So the comparison of MadeUpGame with a one time purchase vs WoW is far from valid. You should compare it to CoD, HL2, etc... a game that you buy once and play for years, $60 vs $200 simply to get faster load times? I'd pay $60 and load from an ISO if I really wanted faster load times.

  17. And we've reached a point where.... by mark-t · · Score: 2, Insightful

    The total weight of the money that you spend on end-user storage exceeds the weight of the storage device itself.

    1. Re:And we've reached a point where.... by robot256 · · Score: 1

      Actually, the same can be said for a CDR disc, if you pay in pennies. 1 penny = 3 g, 1 CD = 15 g, CD costs $0.17. :-)

    2. Re:And we've reached a point where.... by jez9999 · · Score: 1

      The total weight of the money that you spend on end-user storage exceeds the weight of the storage device itself.

      I pay for my tech stuff online, using a debit card. What's the weight of the bits needed to carry out that transaction?

    3. Re:And we've reached a point where.... by sFurbo · · Score: 1

      The energy lost in a irreversible bit flip is on the order of kT, so assuming that the server operates at 300 K, one megabyte consumes at least 3.5*10^-14 joule, which is equivalent to 3.9*10^-31 kg of relativistic mass, or about a third of the mass of one electron, so storage need to become quite a lot lighter before the bits used to purchase it weighs less then it.

    4. Re:And we've reached a point where.... by robot256 · · Score: 1

      Yes, but most people pay for expensive things with credit cards instead of cash, and very few things (still in the packaging) weigh less than a credit card. If you keep your $100 bills in a steel suitcase that adds weight too, because obviously you will be giving them the suitcase as well. It's all a matter of perspective, since money is more of a concept than a physical object. However, saying that something weighs less than its worth in $100 bills is an interesting comparison. ^_^

    5. Re:And we've reached a point where.... by guspasho · · Score: 1

      What format of money have you been using? This happened decades ago, but then again I only use pennies.

    6. Re:And we've reached a point where.... by BlueParrot · · Score: 1

      That has been true for regular A4 paper for quite a while...

  18. Impressive,but what is this phrase "postage stamp" by viking80 · · Score: 3, Funny

    Seems very impressive, but what is this phrase "postage stamp". Is this also part of some newfangled technology we may never see? I for on will probably be fine with good old email for a long time to come.

    --
    don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
  19. Make them affordable instead of larger by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    We always hear about SSD flash technology and how cool it is but we never seem to get it. SSDs are now more expensive than last year...So, what's the point of 1TB SSD when I can't even afford a 30GB one?

    1. Re:Make them affordable instead of larger by glitch23 · · Score: 1

      We always hear about SSD flash technology and how cool it is but we never seem to get it. SSDs are now more expensive than last year...So, what's the point of 1TB SSD when I can't even afford a 30GB one?

      Bigger drives will cause the smaller drives to be discounted so that the bigger ones can squeeze into the market. Intel does this all the time with their CPUs. If you don't buy them when they are initially released you can get a particular CPU for cheap after waiting a year and letting other CPUs replace it as the top tier CPU available on the market. Traditional hard drives are more expensive when they are released because they have higher capacity which means the lower capacity drives have to drop in price so they can all share the market. We've seen this before so not sure why you are catching on by now. Obviously SSDs have a higher base price in the first place but that just means it will take longer before most people are comfortable with even buying the model that has been available for a year or so. Blu-ray players used to cost $1,000 (and some still do if you want certain features) and that base price was just too much for most people. Wait a little while.

      --
      this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. -- Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
  20. Flash is also way too expensive by Sycraft-fu · · Score: 1

    It has to come down in price a lot to compete with magnetic storage. Right now, I'd say you'd have to get it to 10% of the current price to be competitive at the high end. Currently, it is about $1500 or so for a 500GB SSD. It is currently about $50 for a 500GB magnetic drive. Now if you could get flash down to about 10%, well then you'd be talking 3x the price of magnetic storage. Still expensive, but due to the high speed it would be feasible in high performance desktops. As it stands, 300GB of 10k magnetic drive runs you about $200 so it'd compete with that fairly well.

    I'm sure we'll get there some day, but we are still a ways out. Even if flash halves in price, it is still too expensive for a general harddrive replacement.

    1. Re:Flash is also way too expensive by TheRaven64 · · Score: 1

      Solid state storage scales down in terms of price a lot better. The fixed price of a hard disk is the enclosure, motors for moving the disk heads, the heads themselves, the controller, and so on. The fixed costs of an SSD are the chip housing, which costs round $0.10. Halving the size of the die more than doubles the yield, so you can make smaller SSDs for much less than you can make cheap HDDs. The cheapest hard disks you can buy have been the same price for years. The capacity has increased, but you won't find many for under $40. Around $35 seems to be the lowest limit. In contrast, you can get CF cards (flash with an IDE controller) for $10. Now, today you're comparing 2GB to 80GB there.

      Flash capacity per dollar has been increasing a lot faster than hard disks, however. A year ago, the cheapest CF card I could find was 128MB. The cheapest hard disk I could find was 40GB. Both price points were about the same.

      My current laptop has a 160GB disk. Realistically, 300GB is going to be enough for me for a few years - certainly for longer than I expect my next laptop to last before I replace it - so anything more than about 300GB is irrelevant to me. If I have a choice between a 300GB SSD and a 3TB mechanical disk for the same price, I'd take the SSD. For a NAS, I'd take the 3TB mechanical disk (well, a few of them, and pop them in a RAID-Z configuration).

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  21. SSDs and Cost by yoshi_mon · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I really like the idea of a device that does not need to be constantly de-fragmented. To me, above the moving parts issue/noise/heat issues, it is paramount. However I need my data storage to be reliable and right now SSDs still don't have the track record.

    I understand that there are those people who are running 2-4x SSD drives in a RAID0 that are fully happy. But mostly they are gamers who don't care if they have to do a reinstall if that array fails. And or don't really have any sort of long term data that they mind wiping at the drop of a hat.

    I personally deal with end users who care a lot about their digital pictures, email, and other assorted crap. As it stands right now those ol' spinning platters still offer us all the best reliability at the lowest cost point.

    --

    Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
    1. Re:SSDs and Cost by yoshi_mon · · Score: 1

      Sorry to reply to my own post but I wanted to just also say that SSDs as a rule are not unreliable. Rather that at the space/cost ratio that matters for current end users.

      Most of us need these days a lot of space for all the digital media we have and SSDs don't offer that at a price point that is even near what HDs offer. (And as I said HDs, even with their own failure rates, are still preferred.)

      --

      Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
    2. Re:SSDs and Cost by Tromad · · Score: 1

      A hard drive failure should rarely be a big deal. Use the SSD for the main OS and your main programs, all important data on a regular hard drive, and do (at least) weekly external backups for both. In that case if your SSD dies you're out a couple of hours and a warranty return. I just tried to repair my bosses hard drive (irrecoverable; OS won't boot with it attached, tools report hardware failure) and he lost about 5 years of important documents with no backups.

    3. Re:SSDs and Cost by yoshi_mon · · Score: 1

      Of course everyone should be making backups. I've been dealing with that issue since the 80's. But really do you know how many end users do that?

      Now with cheap flash drives it's gotten much better but it's still not enough. Unless I want to get an array of flash drives some end users have 50+ gigs of data that they consider valuable. (Digital video is a hungry mistress.) Hard drives still provide, and again I'm sorry because I was not very good in my OP about making this distinction, the best cost/performance/reliability ratio of all storage currently available.

      SSDs are the future I think. I say that because I'm not so confident that by the time they are ready to replace magnetic spinning platters that some optical storage tech won't come along and replace them. Hell reading that WD thing on Tom's was a blast to the past for me becuase I've not been that invovled with hardware tech since I was reading Nibble.

      My point is that HDs currently are so damn good that you really have to have a special need to not want to use them. I'm gonna break with /. tradition and go with a gun analogy. You can use an energy weapon sometimes but most of the times a bullet will do.

      --

      Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
    4. Re:SSDs and Cost by petermgreen · · Score: 1

      Lots of things people do on thier computers cause a sequence of short operations on the drive at different locations (one example would be scanning a large folder full of files to generate thumbnails or otherwise assess some property of the files). HDDs are pretty constrained in how many operations they can perform per second due to the mechanics of the drive (at 7200RPM rotational latency alone is going to eat about 8ms per operation, 15000 RPM reduces that to about 4ms).

      It also means backing up a HDD full of small files on a file level basis (yes I know you can image the whole drive but that eats a LOT of space) can be very slow.

      --
      note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
    5. Re:SSDs and Cost by yoshi_mon · · Score: 1

      I hate to be pedantic but you act as if cache's don't exist. Most of what you cite is solved by caches and then you add OS level cacheing and it's not an issue.

      As an admin level user I prefer to keep something like Prefetch/Superfetch off but on and end user computer I load them up with a lot of RAM and let it do it's thing.

      So while I'm supportive of your underlying point I'm strained to see how it effects the real world.

      --

      Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
  22. Still takes over an hour to fill. by Hurricane78 · · Score: 1

    The number one thing that I want, is the ability to read/write really fast.

    And the other number one thing is: Don’t ever die (or become significantly slower) after less then ten years of usage!

    --
    Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
    1. Re:Still takes over an hour to fill. by amorsen · · Score: 1

      Why do you care if a 5 year old drive is getting slow? In 5 years it'll be less than half (likely less than a quarter) of the original price to replace.

      --
      Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
  23. Re:Impressive,but what is this phrase "postage sta by SakuraDreams · · Score: 1

    Postage stamp size video - from the 90s! :) When AVIs using the Indeo codec played back in postage stamp size windows...

  24. More vapourware like their SAS SSD? by Eunuchswear · · Score: 1

    What ever happened to the THNS064GF8BEAA?

    Announced Jan 2009:

    Samples of the new drives will be available in late first quarter of 2009, with mass production in the second quarter.

    And where is it now?

    --
    Watch this Heartland Institute video
  25. Re:Impressive,but what is this phrase "postage sta by Software+Geek · · Score: 1

    A "postage stamp" is a unit of area developed specificly for its unique marketing properties. Although many readers assume it is approximately 5 square centimeters, it can actually be anything up to 2551 square centimeters. http://www.joh-enschede.com/?page=jea.news.overview&cid=143

  26. For use by Apple? by 4phun · · Score: 1

    For Apple, who pioneers future tech, and their new iPad?

  27. this'll be great for upcoming 'superphones' by Tumbleweed · · Score: 1

    A superphone with a 1TB SSD in it. Plug it into a dock at home with your huge screen, keyboard and mouse, and take it with you when you go. Rsync when you connect to the dock, which replicates to your off-site storage. Easy-peasy. With 1-2gHz dual-core (and quad core, according to NEC) smartphones coming out this year, the vast majority of computer users won't require anything more. Rock on.

  28. Too advanced by ^_^x · · Score: 1

    That's cool for them, and it may trickle down to us eventually. For now it sounds too advanced to actually happen, so I'll start looking for it after we get those 5TB holographic optical discs that should be available about 5 years after 1999.