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Israeli Startup Claims SSD Breakthrough

Posted by kdawson on from the believe-in-what-you-write dept.

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."

32 of 159 comments (clear)

  1. Cost? by Manfre · · Score: 4, Informative

    If we have to ask how much it costs, we definitely cannot afford it.

    1. Re:Cost? by the+linux+geek · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Early adopters will pay for continued R&D, which will then make this affordable for most people down the line. It's how these things work.

    2. Re:Cost? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      You have an interesting point there.

      Several years ago, maybe back in 2005, Anobit visited us and showed off what they were working on. They were little guys in the flash/solid state business and had come out with this nifty algorithm that would allow the flash with really low read/writes with perform like today's current SSDs.

      They were the first (that I know of) to come up with a way to spread the writes across unused portions of memory so that on average, every bit of memory would have the same amount of wear on them. It wasn't until several years later that I saw on Slashdot that Intel had come up with this "new" idea in their SSDs.

      Back at the time, the Anobit technology was really cool. But unfortunately, they were prohibitively expensive and we could not use them in our rugged systems.

      Seems that they have still been hard at work over there. Very cool. They deserve the success.

    3. Re:Cost? by morcego · · Score: 2, Insightful

      If this is really astroturfing, they just shot themselves on the foot. I mean, I've just got the message that this new technology of theirs will be "prohibitively expensive" ...

      --
      morcego
    4. Re:Cost? by bm_luethke · · Score: 2, Insightful

      So, lets assume what you say is true - is this really a nice business that deserves success? Hard to say.

      Obviously if they can do all that is claimed then they "deserve success", though of course that depends on your definition of success. If success means being the richest company in the world showered with personal sex slaves then, no, they really didn't deserve that. If you mean deserve to pay their employees a slightly above average salary for their area and have a slightly above average return for their investors then certainly - I would say they deserve more than that.

      Of course that is the crux of the problem that is asked and the one you bring up - they took a cheap system and through software made it perform as well as the high dollar items. They then apparently turned around and charged the similar to the high end items which kinda defeats the whole "cheaper" angle. They do not deserve to do that because they found a nifty way to do something.

      Since you are an AC there are already a few posts accusing you of astroturfing, if so then it is a poor attempt. You tell us a story where someone is charging WAY too much for their product and basically failed due to a bad marketing department (marketing isn't just there to hype a product, in a successful business it has a real impact on how profitable things are). If they can take a cheapo drive and through software/firmware make it perform like a high dollar one and then charge me most of what the high dollar one costs - why purchase theirs? They would have to have nearly totally equal guarantees that the enterprise level devices did.

      In short getting 95% the benefit at 90% the cost isn't really worth it - that extra percentage in costs is usually worth other intangibles ("Who ever got fired because of purchasing IBM" was an effective marketing tool for a reason even when you got 90% the benefit at 110% the cost), getting 90% at 70% the cost very much is. In the longer run if true then this will make a difference - if they have a patent then selling/licensing it can generate a decent amount of money if done well. But if they follow the pricing model you allude too then it will be a dead end.

      --
      ------- Sorry about the spelling, I suffer from two problems. Dyslexia makes it difficult to spell well, lazy makes it
    5. Re:Cost? by renoX · · Score: 2, Informative

      Not really: their technology is used to make MLC as robust as SLC, so if it cost more than SLC's price, then it's useless..

    6. Re:Cost? by BronsCon · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Really, they should be developing this tech for use with SLC drives. If it can make an MLC perform like an SLC, imagine what it would do for the already-faster-and-longer-lasting SLC drives.

      --
      APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
    7. Re:Cost? by samkass · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I don't know the details of Anobit's technology, but it sure sounds like they are, essentially, adding Forward Error Correction to the written data. Thus, even if the data you get back is a little garbled you can detect how garbled it is and recover the original signal if it's not TOO garbled. You lose some percentage of your capacity, but, like RAID, you can use more cheaper parts to provide the same effective capacity cheaper.

      It sounds like a clever and retroactively obvious thing to do-- I wonder if they've patented it and how much Slashdot will scream if they did.

      --
      E pluribus unum
  2. Old adage(Slightly screwed up) by moogied · · Score: 4, Funny

    Never do what you can in hardware, in software. ...and we can't do this in hardware! :)

    --
    So basically, -1 troll/offtopic is really slashdots way of saying "I hate that you thought of something before me."
    1. Re:Old adage(Slightly screwed up) by Trepidity · · Score: 2, Insightful

      It also often costs more and is less upgradable, though. These days Linux's software RAID, for example, beats out hardware RAID in a lot of ways (except on the high end).

      --
      10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
  3. Price is the biggest issue by guruevi · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    --
    Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
    1. Re:Price is the biggest issue by XanC · · Score: 2, Informative

      Isn't it more like $10/GB?

    2. Re:Price is the biggest issue by Shikaku · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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.

      Why can't firmware be upgraded on SSD drives thusly:

      there are x-MB where they are labeled bad blocks, always. The firmware updater (which can be written in a script since writes to these bad blocks are just a dd in a specific place), the controller checks a signature, and if passed then halts all writes and reads while it upgrades the firmware.

      Then when it completes all reads and writes resume. ;) Yes I know that can be disastrous but that seems like a good way to live update.

    3. Re:Price is the biggest issue by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      ...

      there are x-MB where they are labeled bad blocks, always. The firmware updater (which can be written in a script since writes to these bad blocks are just a dd in a specific place), the controller checks a signature, and if passed then halts all writes and reads while it upgrades the firmware.

      Then when it completes all reads and writes resume. ;) Yes I know that can be disastrous but that seems like a good way to live update.

      Several years ago, I wrote an ATA drive firmware flash driver and utility, to allow my company's customers to upgrade firmware in the field. Let me explain how drive firmware flash works.

      Most/all modern drives (or at least Enterprise versions) support the ATA DOWNLOAD_MICROCODE command. The flash chips on the electronics board (or reserved sectors on the platters, depending on the implementation) have sufficient capacity to hold the running firmware, and to hold the new version. The new version is buffered in the drive, validated, then written to the chips/spindle, validated again, then activated and the drive reset.

      Modulo some minor drive-specific quirks, the DOWNLOAD_MICROCODE command works as specified. Other than adding model strings to the utility's whitelist, the Intel X25-Es worked without issue. While we've always recommended performing the flash from single-user mode and immediately rebooting, I've done it during normal operations plenty of times. The main things are to remember to quiesce the channel before the doing the flash, and properly reinitializing it afterwards.

      Posting anonymously because I'm revealing details about my job.

    4. Re:Price is the biggest issue by guruevi · · Score: 4, Informative

      Pliant technologies - ls300s - $10,631/300GB = $35/GB (that's one of the cheaper ones). STEC Zeus (high IOPS): $16,911/18GB = $939/GB

      --
      Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
  4. I just glanced at the specs, but Sandforce? by drizek · · Score: 3, Insightful

    How is this different/better than the sandforce controllers we already have?

    1. Re:I just glanced at the specs, but Sandforce? by Christian+Smith · · Score: 2, Funny

      I'm sure Algebra and 0 were invented sometime before 1948.

  5. If anything by Gordo_1 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I suspect this will eventually bring down the manufacturing costs of Enterprise class drives, rather than making consumer drives "more reliable". I think reliability concerns with current consumer-oriented MLC designs to be overstated.

    Anecdotally, my Intel 160GB G2 drive is going on 7 months of usage as a primary drive on a daily used Win7-64 box, and has averaged about 6GB per day of writes over that period (according to Intel's SSD toolbox utility). Given that rate of use over a sustained period (which theoretically means it could last decades, assuming that some as yet undiscovered manufacturing defect doesn't cut it short) combined with the fact that even when SSDs fail, they do so gracefully on the next write operation, I just don't see the need for consumer-oriented drives to sport such fancy reliability tricks.

    1. Re:If anything by afidel · · Score: 2, Interesting

      It totally depends on the use case. Some of my larger san volumes show 2TB/day of writes which means according to Intel's x-25e datasheet a 64GB drive would last ~1,000 days or under 3 years.

      --
      There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
    2. Re:If anything by timeOday · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Some of my larger san volumes show 2TB/day of writes which means according to Intel's x-25e datasheet a 64GB drive would last ~1,000 days or under 3 years.

      I don't get it. Is that 2TB/day per 64GB of storage? (Approx 40 total rewrites of your entire storage capacity per day?) Or 2TB/day spread across a much larger storage capacity? I would guess the latter, in which case the writes would be spread across a large number of drives and less intensive on each drive.

    3. Re:If anything by afidel · · Score: 2, Informative

      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.
    4. Re:If anything by Christian+Smith · · Score: 2, Interesting

      IANADBA, but something like the redo log volumes don't exactly tax a mechanical disk, being mostly sequential reads and writes, and so would be a reasonable candidate to leave as HDD. Even a cheap as chips 5400rpm laptop drive could sustain 23MB/s (2TB/day) sequentially without breaking a sweat.

      However, using the SAME (Stripe And Mirror Everything) principle, spreading all load across multiple mirrored SSDs should provide both the speed and endurance capacity you would need, with the great random performance provided by SSD and less wasted space of short stroked HDD.

      I think it'll be interesting to compare the price/performance of all SSD based TPC benchmarks when they start coming in. High throughput TPC configurations end up being expensive partly due to the huge number of HDDs required to provide the IOPS. SSD should make the storage simpler and reduce the number of drives required, reducing capital and management costs.

  6. Signal to noise ratio in FLASH MEMORY? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    How can a solid state drive have a "signal to noise ratio"?

    It's all digital. Either the voltages are within their valid thresholds or they are not.

    Wouldn't you need the world's fastest DSP to "clean up" noisy digital signals and still maintain the type of transfer rates they claim?

    There is nothing about this breakthrough that makes any sense. Snake oil?

    1. Re:Signal to noise ratio in FLASH MEMORY? by Ster · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    2. Re:Signal to noise ratio in FLASH MEMORY? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      It's all digital.

      Actually, once you get far down enough, nothing is :)

  7. New trend by gringofrijolero · · Score: 3, Funny

    The SSD will have a more powerful CPU than the computer.. All it will need is a graphics and audio chip, more RAM and.. oh... nevermind..

    --
    Todos mis movimientos están friamente calculados
  8. Great tech, but MLC still remains bad news. by blind+biker · · Score: 2, Insightful

    So we can have 50.000 instead of 3000 rewrite cycles. That's great. However, I still like the 100.000 to 1.000.000 rewrite cycles of SLC. Actually, SLC is only 50% more expensive to manufacture (per bit) than two-level MLC - I really don't understand why are manufacturers so enamoured with MLC.

    --
    "The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
  9. This article is IMPOSSIBLE to decode by pslam · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This sounds absolutely no different to how all wear-leveled, error correcting flash controllers work. They all use multiple levels of ECC to decrease the error rate. The 'signal processing' they're doing doesn't sound like anything new.

    If there is something new going on here, it's absolutely impossible to decode from the layman's language used in the article. All I hear is "Other vendors use X bits for ECC. We use Y bits and we do it in software instead of hardware.", which is basically just another way of saying "Other vendors have 4 blades, we have 5 blades."

  10. they didn't invent wear leveling by YesIAmAScript · · Score: 4, Informative

    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
  11. Re:Big Deal. by vadim_t · · Score: 2, Informative

    1: Noticeably better price, but without sacrificing reliability. An average HDD in the enterprise has 1 million hours MTBF with constant reads/writes. A SSD should be similar, or perhaps a lot more because there are no moving parts.

    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.

    2: An archival grade SSD that can hold data for hundreds, if not thousands of years before so many electrons escape the cells to make a 1 or a zero impossible to tell apart. I don't know any media that can last for more than 10 years reliably. Yes, maybe a CD-R or two may last that long, but it is more of a matter of luck than anything else.

    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.

    3: SSDs using a different port than SATA. Perhaps have it interface as a direct PCI-E device with a custom bus to add more SSD capacity in a similar form factor to RAM DIMMs.

    Exists, in several versions. Like PCI-e cards that take DIMMs, and SSDs too.

    4: A SSD drive built onto the motherboard. This way, a laptop can be a bit thinner due to not worrying about a 2.5" drive.

    Exists as well I think.

    8: Put some flash onto a tape format, so a tape can be encrypted with one key, but the flash storage on the tape would store an access list of who can unlock the tape's master key. This way, a passphrase, a smart card, and a PGP/gpg key on someone's machine all work to recover data from a tape.

    LTO already includes a chip for metadata and stuff like that.

    10: A standardized full disk encryption format. This way, I insert a flash disk into my camera or phone, enter a password, and it can read/write to that. Then, put it into my computer, type the passphrase, copy the data. If the flash disk is stolen, the data is protected unless the attacker can yank the key out of the computer or phone's memory (a lot harder feat than just picking up an accidentally lost flash drive.)

    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.

  12. Better ECC by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    It's just a matter of time before someone would use a stronger ECC. Now each 512-byte sector has extra 16 bytes for ECC checksum, which is enough to recover one bit. Given enough space for the checksum it's possible to recover as much data as needed. There are a lot of implementations in hardware. Every wireless tech designed in the last 20 years uses one, typically amount of extra data is in range 1/6 - 1/2. Hard drives certainly implenent better ECC too.

    Now the problem is where to place extra checksums in current NAND chips, but it should be solvable. This problem is about as difficult as implementing wear leveling.

  13. engineers lacking vision by epine · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Extra ECC data and fancy controller trickery can't get around the fact that the write limit is a limit of the underlying flash, not the controller...

    Extra ECC data and fancy controller trickery can't get around the fact that the magnetic media density limit is a limit of the underlying magnetic domains, not the controller...

    No wait! Then they invented PRML. Turns out the underlying limit was actually due to engineers lacking vision. All they needed was a new analytic frame of reference. The same deal has happened over and over again with RF spectrum. One man's noise is another man's signal. I just don't know the RF world well enough to cite examples off the top of my head.

    That said, there's a long of history of quacks who would like you to believe they invented PRML when they actually haven't.

    On gut instinct I'd give this about 3:1 against this having a solid grain of truth, and slightly longer odds against commercialization at significantly better than cost parity compared to other methods of achieving the same end. Even where you find a grain of truth, the product often falls into a niche for one reason or another. Sometimes it's nothing serious, just small things that get refined in the due course of time, which would be great if your massively larger competitors were transfixed with awe.

    So many business plans are missing the critical line item:

    Transfix deep-pocket competitors with awe while we burnish our new technology to ultimate perfection.

    Pity.