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Israeli Startup Claims SSD Breakthrough
Lucas123 writes "Anobit Technologies announced it has come to market with its first solid state drive using a proprietary processor intended to boost reliability in a big way. In addition to the usual hardware-based ECC already present on most non-volatile memory products, the new drive's processor will add an additional layer of error correction, boosting the reliability of consumer-class (multi-level cell) NAND to that of expensive, data center-class (single-level cell) NAND. 'Anobit is the first company to commercialize its signal-processing technology, which uses software in the controller to increase the signal-to-noise ratio, making it possible to continue reading data even as electrical interference increases.' The company claims its processor, which is already being used by other SSD manufacturers, can sustain up to 4TB worth of writes per day for five years, or more than 50,000 program/erase cycles — as contrasted with the 3,000 cycles typically achieved by MLC drives. The company is not revealing pricing yet."
If we have to ask how much it costs, we definitely cannot afford it.
With Enterprise SSD's (SLC) still in the $100/GB range, we're far away from general acceptance in the datacenter. MLC also has the problem of being slow to write to vs. SLC which is one of the important metrics when considering SSD's to accelerate your classic spindles. SLC's are reliable enough to last for at least 3 years even fully loaded at 3 or 6 Gbps.
I used some Intel X-25-M and Intel X-25-E's in my environment as they are affordable and generally get the highest scores in IOPS and throughput respectively read and write caches and the performance is way under my expectations. The Intel X-25-E's don't work well under heavy loads on LSI controllers (throws errors and SCSI bus resets) while he Intel X-25-M's do work fine. Every other month there is fresh firmware to fix some or another problem and firmware updating is manual labor with a boot CD, not something you can simply schedule at night or do while the system is online so they are what I would call beta-quality. Especially once fully filled the IOPS performance drops from ~3000 IOPS like a brick to ~1000 IOPS which a small set of hard drives can fulfill so the only good thing it's left for is latency.
We'll see what the Vertex 2 EX brings (Sandforce 1500 controller) which has an advertised 50k IOPS although that might be more marketing than anything. I'm still waiting on a decent priced SAS SSD which can actually sustain 5-10000 IOPS by itself even when fully loaded.
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Because dedicated circuitry is more stable and requires less computing overhead?
The stories and info posted here are artistic works of fiction and falsehood.
Only fools would take it as fact.
Say you're talking about a 4-level MLC cell, and say it runs at 3.3V. If the voltage is on [0V, 0.825V), that's 00b; [0.825, 1.65V) is 01b; [1.65V, 2.475V) is 10b, and [2.475V, 3.3V) is 11b. But those are analog voltages - the controller has to read the voltage, do an analog-to-digital conversion, and figure out which level it corresponds to. The ranges listed above are for if you have perfect discrimination - in most cases, it's difficult to differentiate small differences, so they don't use the full range. With better A-to-D and signal processing, they can resolve the differences better, which in turn lets them get more write cycles.
Those numbers are pulled out of the air for illustrative purposes; I have no idea what the real values are.
Nope, that's 2TB/day across 20GB (I believe, logged off my corp systems a while ago but it's in the low 10's of GB regardless of the actual size). It's the redo log volumes for a fairly high transaction load OLTP Oracle server.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Wear leveling was normal for NAND long before that.
What kind of n00b are you?
http://www.google.com/patents?vid=6850443
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
It's a tradeoff. Reliability needs redundancy, and redundancy costs money. So either take the financial hit, or wait until the reliable devices get cheap enough.
I think it's early for that still. SSDs are too expensive to be used for archiving stuff. Their strength is performance. For archiving there's tape.
Exists, in several versions. Like PCI-e cards that take DIMMs, and SSDs too.
Exists as well I think.
LTO already includes a chip for metadata and stuff like that.
IDE has support for password protection. I don't think anything stops the disk from encrypting the data, and since it's part of the standard modern hardware should support it. Laptops have options for this in the BIOS.
If I'm buying 100,000 parts, SLC costs 5x more (per bit) than MLC at the present. I'm pretty certain the reason is supply - there's factories churning out an ungodly amount of MLC for use in memory cards, thumbdrives, MP3 players, etc. but SLC really only finds use in the embedded (where I've used it) and enterprise-SSD space.
MLC isn't *that* bad - the reliability issues you'll find with it are bit errors, not entire lost blocks of data. Add an extra level of error protection and plenty of spare area to handle the extra errors you'll see and you'll be fine.
This is what TFA seems to be doing. Mind you, I wouldn't call it a breakthrough (I hate that word), just the logical thing to do when your storage medium has a lower "SNR" because it's using MLC. If they've got an innovative technique/algorithm for maintaining lots of IOPS through their multiple ECC layers, or an innovative ECC algorithm then that's, well, innovative.
I can't give exact figures but for a little while I was involved with an 1MH MTBF test on STEC SSDs from a major OEM. The consensus from the OEM's engineers was that so far it had been impressive. That was a while back though.