Sandisk Debuts World's Smallest SSD Yet

siliconbits writes "Weighing less than a paper clip and smaller than a postage stamp, Sandisk's iSSD comes in a tiny Ball Grid Array and boasts support for the SATA standard, which means that it can be soldered directly on motherboards."

Comments

Make them cheaper, not smaller

[e065c8515d206cb0e190]

Please?

Re:Make them cheaper, not smaller

[Anonymous Coward]

I think that the two are actually positively correlated.

Re:Make them cheaper, not smaller

[MBGMorden]

Cheaper and higher capacity I'd say. I don't care if they've got some weight/size. 2.5" form factor for notebooks and very small pc's and 3.5" form factor for normal sized desktops is absolutely fine. My computer sits under my desk anyways.

Re:Make them cheaper, not smaller

[Monkeedude1212]

What is it with everyone and their demands from hard drive makers?

Don't make them smaller (in physical size) make them more affordable!
Don't make them bigger (in memory) make them faster!
Don't make them hold more, make them more reliable!

Did it ever occur to you guys that maybe, just maybe, SSD manufacturers only know how to do ONE thing?

Re:Make them cheaper, not smaller

[Anonymous Coward]

Did it ever occur to you that drive manufacturers and researchers work on all of those things, but don't magically make breakthroughs in a given area simply because a bunch of jackasses on slashdot want them to? I mean, over the past 5 years, SSDs have gotten smaller, cheaper, bigger, faster and more reliable. This story just happened to be about a development in one of those areas.

Re:Make them cheaper, not smaller

[Anonymous Coward]

yea take your money for a oversized sd card

Re:Make them cheaper, not smaller

[e065c8515d206cb0e190]

In the end their purpose is to sell the product. That's why listening to consumers matters.

The only way I'm buying SSDs is if they become dramatically more affordable ($/GB). And I tend to think most people would agree. I'm not exactly asking for free stuff here, just helping those guys understand what matters. And I couldn't care less about a postage stamp SSD. I don't need that kind of speed at that price in my phone or my fridge. I want a fast disk for my workstation/server. And unless I have $1M to spend on a RAID array of 1024 SSDs the size of a postage stamp, I'm not going to mind if they're 3"1/2.

Re:Make them cheaper, not smaller

[Kepesk]

Oh yeah?? Well my SSD is smaller than a pinhead, weighs less than a flea, and can hold 1.21 jigabytes!

Re:Make them cheaper, not smaller

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not exactly asking for free stuff here, just helping those guys understand what matters.

Because anyone at SanDisk is going to know that you made this and the other posts? Because they are just sitting with baited breath at a computer hitting F5 to see what Slashdot thinks of their latest announcement? Puuuhleaze. Go back to the basement whacking off to your furry porn and shoving fists full of cheetos and totinos pizza rolls down your gullet.

Re:Make them cheaper, not smaller

[ciderbrew]

Almost a Daft punk song there "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger".

Re:Make them cheaper, not smaller

[blai]

Make SSD manufacturers more efficient! Do all three at same time!

Re:Make them cheaper, not smaller

[petermgreen]

I want a fast disk for my workstation/server.
In a desktop you can put in a SSD as your OS drive (which is where most random access takes place afaict) and keep a spinner for your data. Doing this is already reasonablly affordable.

However if you want a laptop with a SSD at the moment you have to either choose a SSD that can store everything you want on the laptop (which if you store a lot on your laptop means $$$), go for a monster size machine or sacrifice the optical drive (and pick your laptop from the very limited choice of machines that support replacing the optical drive with a hard drive).

With this a laptop vendor can put the SSD on the motherboard while having negligable impact on the rest of the machine.

Re:Make them cheaper, not smaller

[somersault]

Why would they bait their breath? I await your reply with bated breath.

Re:Make them cheaper, not smaller

[jeffmeden]

Exactly. It would be pretty hard to make something that sells for less by ultimately putting more of [xyz] material in it... Making them smaller pretty directly leads to same-size price reduction. GP needs a -1, Whining mod created just for him.

Re:Make them cheaper, not smaller

[AndroSyn]

Yes, something sure does seem fishy around here....

Re:Make them cheaper, not smaller

[hattig]

It will be cheaper to build in most cases.

Normal SSD: SSD controller chip, cache RAM chip, PCB, flash chips, SATA interface, etc.
iSSD: Integrated chip (probably a sandwich chip - the controller, then RAM, then up to 8 (or 16) flash dies.

But new technology commands a premium. It will be interesting to see how these are used initially. The fast read/writes compared to normal flash storage in low-end systems could be a real boost on tablets.

Re:Make them cheaper, not smaller

[geekoid]

Actually you do care.
Getting 64G on a postage stamp means you get 650G(or more) in your half size HD.

I suspect you wouldn't buy 64G SSD the size of a normal HD.

Re:Make them cheaper, not smaller

[Anonymous Coward]

You only complain, you didn't buy anything, you are not yet a customer.

This new SSD seems quite nice. What you have to realize is that you are not in the intended customer group and your opinion does not matter at all. This chip is intended for useage in embedded PC's, netbooks and possibly laptops. You might be a customer for the end product but since you haven't bought a SSD yet... well.. they tend to market stuff to people who actually buy things, they sort of make more money that way.
Sinced it uses a standard SATA interface it will be possible for laptop manufacturers to just place one of those chips next to the SATA controller. It's very little design work and the SATA controller probably already has a spare port. The end result is that your laptop gets an internal SSD while still leaving the standard HDD port for whatever you like to place there.
If they want to slim down the laptop they can just drop the 2.5" format and only support the internal chip.

Re:Make them cheaper, not smaller

[ultranova]

Did it ever occur to you that drive manufacturers and researchers work on all of those things, but don't magically make breakthroughs in a given area simply because a bunch of jackasses on slashdot want them to?

Actually, they do. No through magic, but because they are cunning businessmen who have had the divinely inspired realization that if they direct their research towards producing what their customers - such as the jackasses on Slashdot - want, they might make more sales. Yes, I know, I didn't believe it either at first, but it really works!

I guess that's why they're manufacturers and you're an Anonymous Coward. And congrats to whoever modded you Insightful, too.

Re:Make them cheaper, not smaller

[MozeeToby]

I got an 80 gig SSD for my laptop which is enough for the OS and applications (as long as you don't go too crazy with AAA games). I put the old 500 gig spinning drive into my desktop and made it a network share for data. Got enough fast storage for the things I do and plenty of slow storage over the network. When it comes to putting an SSD into a desktop, I really have to question if its worth it. A couple of 7200 RPM raided will provide nearly the nearly same performance for a much lower cost. The advantages on a laptop are speed without a RAID, better battery life, better reliability when being moved around, and less noise; for the most part those things don't matter with a desktop.

Re:Make them cheaper, not smaller

[Anonymous Coward]

Bazinga!

Re:Make them cheaper, not smaller

[TooMuchToDo]

You are not the target market. People who need raw IOPS are the ones who are buying these things, and their budgets are *WAY* bigger than yours. Stick to spinning media if $/GB is what matters to you.

Re:Make them cheaper, not smaller

[Bigjeff5]

With electronics, smaller = cheaper.

It was recently leaked that Intel has moved their NAND chips to a 25nm process instead of the much larger 45nm process, which is expected to cut price per GB in half.

The smaller they can make them, the more of them they can make at a time (they don't do these one-off you know). For example, if they have one square foot of space per run and each chip takes up one square inch, that means they can do 144 of them in a single run. If each chip takes up only 1/2 inch squared, they can make 288 in a single run.

The costs per run don't change much, if at all, and it significantly reduces the amount of expensive materials (like pure chip-quality silicon) per chip which leads to a halving of the cost per chip.

What you really pay for when you buy the "latest and greatest" is the engineering and design time, as well as any re-tooling. That's why prices drop so fast - as soon as the money is recovered they drop the price to expand the target market, and they can do that because the manufacturing costs are very low (and continue to drop with smaller chips).

That's why today you can buy a microcontroller that has the same power as the original 486dx processor, but smaller than your pinky-nail, for around $4. The 486 cost $1500 (adjusted for inflation) initially, and still costs around $100-$150 today because the chip itself is so much larger, and therefore more expensive to produce.

Smaller = cheaper.

Re:Make them cheaper, not smaller

[Bigjeff5]

Furthermore, smaller = faster, smaller = cheaper, and the smaller = denser (that is, more memory in the same package).

Making them smaller accomplishes all your goals, that's why they continue to make them smaller. Saying "don't make them smaller, make them cheaper instead" is like saying "don't add horsepower to my car, just make it go faster"*. Uhh...

Seriously people. The way you make electronics cheaper is by making them smaller. The more chips they can fit on a platter, the cheaper each chip is.

*This is obviously ignoring the minor speed improvements that can be had by reducing weight or removing parasitic losses like the flywheel and AC unit. Changing these invariably changes the purpose of the car (from a comfortable cruiser/street car to an uncomfortable racer) as well, which is assumed to be an undesirable compromise in the analogy.

Re:Make them cheaper, not smaller

[ilsaloving]

1.21 jigabytes, is it?

But... can it transfer data at 88 MBps?

Re:Make them cheaper, not smaller

[Tim C]

What is it with everyone and their demands from hard drive makers?

It's quite simple - until a product meets my criteria I'm not going to buy it.

I'd love an SSD, but at the current price/GB there's absolutely no way I can afford one, so when the subject is discussed I may well opine that they're too expensive (for me). That won't do anything to make them cheaper of course; sucks to be me.

Re:Make them cheaper, not smaller

[CeruleanDragon]

Maybe someone thought him calling us jackasses was insightful. :)

Re:Make them cheaper, not smaller

[StuartHankins]

I recently added a second hard drive to my 2007 MacBook Pro. Yes, it involved replacing the optical drive but the process was simple and cheap and went without a hitch. http://www.mcetech.com/optibay/

Re:Make them cheaper, not smaller

[ColdWetDog]

When it comes to putting an SSD into a desktop, I really have to question if its worth it. A couple of 7200 RPM raided will provide nearly the nearly same performance for a much lower cost.

At least on a Mac Pro, it's totally worth it. I've been running a three year old Mac Pro with a 7200 RPM drive as HD1, bought an SSD for my MacBook and fell in love with it, got another 128GB SSD for the tower and played with a couple of configurations. Using it as a dedicated scratch drive was an improvement over the spinning iron, but replacing HD1 (while keeping that as the scratch) really makes the thing fly. No stutter switching apps, PS just zips along even with 2GB files.

As long as reliability is reasonable, I'm totally hooked.

Re:Make them cheaper, not smaller

[Mitchell314]

Oh, I thought it was -1 inciteful. My bad.

Re:Make them cheaper, not smaller

[Fishchip]

Only when you're running Time Machine.

Re:Make them cheaper, not smaller

[Tassach]

You know, you are allowed to have more than one drive in your system, and it's highly unlikely you need fast storage for everything.

A 64G SSD for the OS and active file and a 1.5T hard drive for long term storage makes for a very nice desktop system. Even with a laptop you can get by quite nicely with a small internal SSD and a large external drive for your multi-terabyte music and pr0n collection.

Re:Make them cheaper, not smaller

[CarpetShark]

Did it ever occur to you that drive manufacturers and researchers work on all of those things, but don't magically make breakthroughs in a given area simply because a bunch of jackasses on slashdot want them to?

No?

Re:Make them cheaper, not smaller

[rsborg]

However if you want a laptop with a SSD at the moment you have to either choose a SSD that can store everything you want on the laptop (which if you store a lot on your laptop means $$$), go for a monster size machine or sacrifice the optical drive (and pick your laptop from the very limited choice of machines that support replacing the optical drive with a hard drive).

Replacing a laptop's optical drive with a 2nd disk (SSD or HD) is a no-brainer and cheap.

There are several companies like NewmodeUs which specialize in hard drive caddies to replace the optical bay... I'm running my MBP 13" with a Vertex2 (sandforce) SSD 60GB for boot/apps + OEM spinning disk for storage (easily upgradeable for now to 640GB, but I'm waiting for 1TB or df to report > 85% usage). Total outlay for the mod? Less than $200, with another $50 if I really needed a USB/FW DVD+RW external.

Re:Make them cheaper, not smaller

[fucket]

A couple of 7200 RPM raided will provide nearly the nearly same performance for a much lower cost.

If you're talking big sequential transfers, sure. If you're talking random access, you're not even close.

I substituted an an Intel X-25M G2 80g SSD for a 10k RPM Raptor as my main OS drive. It cost me exactly $244.10 at the time and was easily the best performance/$ upgrade I've ever done.

Re:Make them cheaper, not smaller

[tom17]

Saying "don't make them smaller, make them cheaper instead" is like saying "don't add horsepower to my car, just make it go faster"*.

Sorry, bad car analogy, I'm currently thinking of building a ~120hp(at an entry level, at least) beast of a car. Not much power, but very, very much, faster than a *typical* car with similar power.

Re:Make them cheaper, not smaller

[tom17]

By which, I meant you don't have to add power, you can add lightness instead.

Re:Make them cheaper, not smaller

[X0563511]

Work it.

Re:Make them cheaper, not smaller

[X0563511]

Next time I get mod points, I hope they have a -10 Bitching About Moderation.

Re:Make them cheaper, not smaller

[IndustrialComplex]

Exactly. It would be pretty hard to make something that sells for less by ultimately putting more of [xyz] material in it... Making them smaller pretty directly leads to same-size price reduction. GP needs a -1, Whining mod created just for him.

It's been a while, but I understood chip fabrication to be slightly different than traditional manufacturing (what you describe).

Lets say your current process allows you to make 10 chips per 'process'. Each process costs approximately X dollars. So each chip costs X/10. Now, you refine your process and now are able to make smaller chips, which allows you to make more per 'process' lets say 20. The chip capacity remains the same.

Now, each time you run the process it only costs you X/20 (The process may vary in cost from the original, but once designed and up and running it will probably be very similar in cost).

As a result, you now have the same capacity chip, smaller, and while it costs the same to make a 'batch' you get more per batch.

Thus you get your lower cost BECAUSE they made it smaller. (The price remaining the same or higher is just a way for them to make a little bit of profit and offset developing the new process and building the equipment to do the new process) Eventually the price will fall as either competitors make similar products or the early adopters become saturated.

Re:Make them cheaper, not smaller

[IndustrialComplex]

Cheaper and higher capacity I'd say. I don't care if they've got some weight/size. 2.5" form factor for notebooks and very small pc's and 3.5" form factor for normal sized desktops is absolutely fine. My computer sits under my desk anyways.

And the computer I use the most during the day sits in my pocket.

Regardless of your primary system, Hard drives, even in the 2.5" form factor, use a lot of space compared to other components, especially now that the optical drives are being phased out. Along with that comes digital storage of the data that was traditionally stored on the optical drives. So what do we need more of? Storage space.

But as I explained above, smaller size of chips IS going to result in a cost reduction once production starts.

So we all win.

Re:Make them cheaper, not smaller

[nametaken]

I don't need that kind of speed at that price in my phone or my fridge.

Well sure, I can see where most don't, but I'd like that. And it seems like breakthroughs like this often herald cost reductions across the line.

I'd like this one on a pico board for my drone project though. :)

Re:Make them cheaper, not smaller

[xtracto]

What about a CardBus/ExpressCard (PCMCIA) SDD drive? using that you don't have to remove your CD/DVD

Re:Make them cheaper, not smaller

[Anonymous Coward]

Digital manipulation of what's in your pocket might not count as computation....

Re:Make them cheaper, not smaller

[sexconker]

Well my SSD is smaller than a pinhead

That's funny. I heard your dick is the same size, too.

So you didn't get the whole "SSD = "Super Small Dick"" thing?

Re:Make them cheaper, not smaller

[Amouth]

well

Making them smaller uses less raw materials - which makes them cheaper

Making them larger can allow for them to be faster (using multi path writing instead of single to simulate a larger available path - write to 2 chips instead of 1 in the same amount of time can effectively double your overall speed)

Making them hold more (more raw space) does increase the reliability by giving more free sectors to be used in ware leveling operations to ensure sectors don't fail early, or if they do fail they have a spare to relocate to..

do One thing?? not so much as to make them better - each step they take is a step in the right direction - while you might not think it is the direction you want in reality it just may be the step that enables what you are wanting..

Re:Make them cheaper, not smaller

[petermgreen]

Does anyone actually make decent expresscard SSDs?

Just to clarify by decent I mean something that meets the following critera

1: Uses the PCIe part of the expresscard port, not the USB part.
2: Has sequential read and write performance comparable to or better than a hard drive and random read/write performance much better than a hard drive?
3: Preferablly is bootable though i'm not sure how laptop bioses would handle booting from an expresscard.

Re:Make them cheaper, not smaller

[Kjella]

In the end their purpose is to sell the product. That's why listening to consumers matters.

Customers want a lot of things. Many of them are the kind I'd categorize as "won't happen", and if you fast forward 10 years still no one has done it because it's just not feasible or economical or meaningful as it can't work by magic like the customers expect. I've worked more than enough with trying to find inputs and processes to deliver outputs to know there's plenty handwaving going on there.

I'd take the flying car as a good example. Even though probably many wanted one, reality just didn't let it happen. You'd be much better off trying to make your current car better on the road than trying to make it fly. In this case I think it will happen eventually, but it may be just as easy to pour through the breach in the high IOPS markets where they are already king of the hill and trickle down as it is to start another uphill battle.

Re:Make them cheaper, not smaller

[ArsenneLupin]

I understand what you mean, but what you manipulate is not in your pocket, even though your digits are...

Re:Make them cheaper, not smaller

[ksandom]

Years ago, there were discussions on putting an OS on a chip to improve boot and operating times. Given the number of patches that come out, that wasn't feasible for mainstream use. These days SSD's are a kind of happy medium in that they offer some performance gain in the right situations, but can easily be updated without the OS needing to be specifically written for them.

So this chip would be really cool for that. It'd also be cool for mini itx stuff.

Re:Make them cheaper, not smaller

[Anonymous Coward]

If you have the balls, any laptop with an optical drive can have it replaced with a second hard drive. Just takes a little handiwork with an optical bay hdd caddy. I say that as someone who managed to hack a thinkpad hdd caddy to work in a MacBook pro. Yes, it involved a bit of cutting and filing, but now I have a extra drive and don't have to lug a useless optical drive about with me

Re:Make them cheaper, not smaller

[drsmithy]

Does anyone actually make decent expresscard SSDs?

As it's been quite a while since I looked, your post inspired me to see if the landscape had improved at all.

It seems this one is ok, once you manage to find one that actually works.

Re:Make them cheaper, not smaller

[dave420]

It is OK? The card uses the USB2.0 connection (and not PCIe), so it's limited to 480Mb/s. I'd hardly call that OK :)

Re:Make them cheaper, not smaller

[drsmithy]

It is OK? The card uses the USB2.0 connection (and not PCIe), so it's limited to 480Mb/s. I'd hardly call that OK :)

No, it uses the PCIe interface. This isn't explicitly in the Newegg specs page, though it is noted by several of the comments. I think if you look up the same (or similar) devices on Amazon, they explicitly mention it's PCIe.

Re:Make them cheaper, not smaller

[WuphonsReach]

However if you want a laptop with a SSD at the moment you have to either choose a SSD that can store everything you want on the laptop (which if you store a lot on your laptop means $$$), go for a monster size machine or sacrifice the optical drive (and pick your laptop from the very limited choice of machines that support replacing the optical drive with a hard drive).

Yes, it's a trade-off.

But it's worth it. As soon as SSDs get close to $1/GB, I'll be going that route for my Thinkpad. Run off a 256GB SSD for the main drive, then stuff a magnetic in the optical bay for auxiliary storage. It'll be like a brand new machine in feel, even though it's already 3 years old.

(I've used other laptops where we refitted magnetic with SSDs... it's amazing.)

Re:Make them cheaper, not smaller

[SnarfQuest]

Did it ever occur to you guys that maybe, just maybe, SSD manufacturers only know how to do ONE thing?

Well, yes. But we don't talk about that in polite company.

Re:Make them cheaper, not smaller

[monkeythug]

The slashdot community has been called many things, but "polite" isn't one of them ;-)

Re:Make them cheaper, not smaller

[monkeythug]

For example, if they have one square foot of space per run and each chip takes up one square inch, that means they can do 144 of them in a single run. If each chip takes up only 1/2 inch squared, they can make 288 in a single run.

I think you'll find that's 576 in a single run if you halved both width and height ;-)

Re:Make them cheaper, not smaller

[StuartHankins]

I use a Sprint Aircard so that's out.

That's a great idea!

[Pojut]

SSD being soldered directly to a motherboard? I'm a bit torn about that idea...

Re:That's a great idea!

[Going_Digital]

Would be pretty good if one was soldered on the main board of a laptop for the boot drive, still leaving space for a traditional hard drive for mass storage.

Re:That's a great idea!

[v1]

SSD being soldered directly to a motherboard? I'm a bit torn about that idea...

ok, so you're saying my hard drive died. How much will that cost to replace?

Excuse me?

(they'd BETTER put it in a socket)

Re:That's a great idea!

[Criliric]

exactally, and if the mother board craps out, good luck getting your data back

Re:That's a great idea!

[Monkeedude1212]

It's a great Idea for Apple products. Because if it breaks, you just send it in to their support and they give you a replacement for the time being (ignoring the fact that you actually need your files right away) while they work on your computer for 4-6 months only to ship you a brand new one in the end. And when its time to upgrade, you just toss your computer out and buy a new one.

Re:That's a great idea!

[v1]

heh, I hadn't even considered that, excellent counterpoint.

Re:That's a great idea!

[Anonymous Coward]

Would be great for laptops and netbooks, well, generally anything really.

A 30GB on-board SSD would work for OSes and some basic setting storage.
A main SSD could be used for everything else.
There could also be an option to copy the entire OS to the child SSD(s) as a form of write-protecting the OS area so it could act as a recovery solution as well.

This is something i have wanted to do for a while, but of course, money was a barrier at those times.

Re:That's a great idea!

[Zocalo]

I think that directly soldering the device to motherboards is more likely to be restricted to devices that are more economical to just replace when they fail; stuff like MP3 players, phones and thumb drives[1]. Anything larger than that and you'd have to be a pretty dumb manufacturer or working to very tight space constraints not to see the potential revenue that might come from putting the chip on a daughter board to create higher spec systems and end-user upgrades.

[1] This doesn't preclude sending the thing to some 3rd world country to be recycled, only that the costs of skilled labour for the a repair exceed the manufacturing cost.

Re:That's a great idea!

[KnightBlade]

We've been hearing about on board storage for eons now. Is this going to be yet another, look we can put this on the motherboard itself and all these magical things will happen announcement followed by disappearance of the technology, followed by yet another, look we can...

Re:That's a great idea!

[jeffmeden]

You *did* have a backup, right?

Re:That's a great idea!

[jeffmeden]

Here's how it could work: solder a 16GB version to the motherboard, make it fast, give it a dedicated SATA channel. Then write a storage driver for windows (or whatever) that masks space from the primary disk for the OS and moves the data to the SSD. Think of it as a lower level cache for the hard drive before going to RAM. Hell, you could keep a synced copy on your actual hard disk to remove the risk of losing anything at all. Bottom line is it's basically "readyboost done right" since it makes for a very fast place to store files that's not as expensive as adding that much RAM (in dollars, watts, space, etc.)

Re:That's a great idea!

[alen]

maybe not for PC's, but for HP server and probably Dell with the CD/DVD they provide to set up the server it's a good idea. more storage on the motherboard means you can put more logic into the scripted set ups that HP/Dell provide. and you can use it as a cheap storage for diagnostic data for servers

Re:That's a great idea!

[bluefoxlucid]

What about the motherboard of an iPhone?

Re:That's a great idea!

[mlts]

I would like this myself. What this would be great for would be putting OS images on and having it be read-only. This way, if Joe Sixpack gets their computer compromised and trashed, it would be trivial to enable the boot device in BIOS and boot from it for a reinstall or a recovery mode. Well, more trivial than getting Joe to find the OS recovery media or buy another copy of Windows.

Even better would be the option of booting to recovery media, or having a recovery partition with tools to do offline malware checking, hard disk imaging, filesystem scanning, and other utilities.

Best would be a the above as well as a hypervisor that supported encryption and trusted booting via a TPM. This way, VMs can boot, regardless of OS and be protected against local tampering or malware tagging the MBR.

Re:That's a great idea!

[Anonymous Coward]

My Apple trolling gets an insightful?

Yeesh

Re:That's a great idea!

[guruevi]

Well, it probably wouldn't be a good idea for Dell then. Because if it breaks, you just call their support phone lines in India, they keep pushing you from person to person (ignoring the fact that your boss actually has to pay you for all that time wasted calling them) while they keep promising to call you back for about 4-6 months only to charge your credit card to ship you a replacement part that you have to fix yourself and if you don't send back the bad part they won't ever give your money back. And when it's time to upgrade, you just toss your computer out and buy a new one.

Actually I have never had any issues with Apple support - all repairs were either made on-site by their techs or within 1 week (if you live outside the coverage area of their tech support) and if they can't commit to that (backlog or known issues) they send you a replacement, an empty box for the bad unit and all shipping labels completely free of charge. Plus it's international so you can walk in any store, anywhere in the world and get it fixed for free.

Of course, you will always lose your data if your hard drive goes bad (which is probably the most common failure in computers) regardless of manufacturer so there is no excuse for losing your data if YOU don't have a backup.

Re:That's a great idea!

[shadowknot]

It would be an absolute pain in the ass but as it uses the SATA standard there should be a way of connecting up the pins and getting the data off somehow. I actually just sent an email, however, around the company I work for entitled "Imaging these will be a bitch" (digital forensics company).

Re:That's a great idea!

[Anonymous Coward]

You didn't back it up into the cloud, home NAS, optical disks, iPod, ... Shame on you.

Who cares if the motherboard craps out and you lose your OS boot iSSD. You did put your data on your main data drive, didn't you?

And as for devices where the iSSD is the only storage, that's a client machine like a tablet, netbook, etc - you're getting the data from a primary machine anyway.

Re:That's a great idea!

[geekoid]

You people.

Did you even read the article? I don't think that 4-64GB will be replacing your hard drive.

SHeesh.

Re:That's a great idea!

[mlts]

This is is what some SAN companies do. One of them has SSD media that functions as a persistent cache. This way, data that is read/written to often goes off of the SSD, while other items end up being written directly to the array that can be made slower.

The good about this method: Not having to worry as much about what tiers of storage, because the SAN head determines where data is placed.

The bad: It might be that OS files end up there as opposed to what you want to have the great performance with. So, it doesn't completely replace the need for tiered storage.

Re:That's a great idea!

[TooMuchToDo]

God forbid you backup your data.

Re:That's a great idea!

[Anonymous Coward]

You are obviously not a Mac guy.

Re:That's a great idea!

[Zerth]

Considering my netbook has 8 gigs of onboard storage, yes it could.

Re:That's a great idea!

[gmack]

I just put a machine together for a Church's overhead display. Since they don't do much file storage on that machine I opted for a 32 GB SSD instead of going for a traditional drive since the price was roughly the same.

The machine it replaced didn't have a drive much larger than that and after installing Windows 7, office and Easy Worship I still have 16 GB left on the drive so the upper end of that size range is easily enough to replace your hard drive.

Re:That's a great idea!

[Zerth]

It would make a nice replacement for recovery partitions. That would be a fairly low-write and you wouldn't really miss it if your MB died.

Re:That's a great idea!

[ihatejobs]

Modern OS takes up to 20GB once you tack on log files, temp files, etc. This could *easily* replace the notion of using a disk drive for your OS install. Disk drives could purely be used for mass storage.

Re:That's a great idea!

[TheBig1]

It would be an absolute pain in the ass but as it uses the SATA standard there should be a way of connecting up the pins and getting the data off somehow.

True, but that would involve desoldering it first. BGA packages have the pins on the bottom, which means you can't just use probes on the side of the chip to get access to them. If it was in a socket, of course, it would be trivial, but the cost of a socket compared with the 1% of customers who will actually use it, chances are most manufacturers will just not bother.

Re:That's a great idea!

[Kjella]

Yeah and all that stuff that used to be on half a dozen controller cards, now it's all on the motherboard. How terrible. I just checked here in Norway and for the place of the cheapest nettop which is around 1900 NOK I get three hours of computer assistance at 640 NOK/hour - parts not included. And even if you repair an old laptop the other parts are worn and you get no new warranty.

In short, it doesn't pay off. Deliver it at a recycling center and get a new one, they come off the delivery line at so low price it's not worth it to have a specialized guy with tools and knowledge order and install individual parts. They're going the way of broken cell phones, nobody repairs those. Oh sure that huge gaming rig with modular parts might, but the low end net/laptop won't. And maybe they'll refurb a few warranty replacements. But in large it's just to throw away.

Under those conditions you might just as well solder it on.

Re:That's a great idea!

[Dr.Dubious DDQ]

Well, no - but you could fit enough of the tiny SSD's into a hard-drive-sized case to make a decent-sized SSD-based RAID array.

Maybe only Larry Ellison, Steve Ballmer, and Steve Jobs could afford to buy such a thing right now, but the concept is valid...

Re:That's a great idea!

[boorack]

So, they crammed everything in a small chip and made it a BGA package. From this point on it should be easy to design some little socket similiar to all those *SD cards and modify this chip to be a SATA drive fitting to such socket. I wonder why they didn't do it (yet). Has BGA such a great cost advantage over custom sockets or do they avoid competing with conventional disk drive producers ?

Re:That's a great idea!

[Local ID10T]

Well, it probably wouldn't be a good idea for Dell then. Because if it breaks, you just call their support phone lines in India, they keep pushing you from person to person (ignoring the fact that your boss actually has to pay you for all that time wasted calling them) while they keep promising to call you back for about 4-6 months only to charge your credit card to ship you a replacement part that you have to fix yourself and if you don't send back the bad part they won't ever give your money back. And when it's time to upgrade, you just toss your computer out and buy a new one.

You should spring for business-grade support. I call, punch in the number from the machine, get routed to someone in the US who overnights me the parts I ask for -no questions asked unless I ask them talk me through troubleshooting the problem. I swap the part, drop the old one into the box with the prepaid return shipping label. Done.

Re:That's a great idea!

[fucket]

... the company I work for entitled "Imaging these will be a bitch" (digital forensics company).

That's a strange name for a company.

Re:That's a great idea!

[NetNed]

That's why I never understood processors that are soldered to the MB's. Single point of failure that will cost twice as much in some cases.

Re:That's a great idea!

[hydromike2]

Well, that was the first thing that came to mind, but on second thought this would be awesome in smart phones, assuming the power reqs are low enough. Not that the flash memory in smartphones is that slow(relatively speaking), but I am sure that somebody on /. can find a reason to justify why they should be as fast as SSDs. Or really, start putting esata on all computers or put a usb 3.0 controller on this thing and we might actually have a use for usb 3.0

Re:That's a great idea!

[gbjbaanb]

yes, but after a few months of windows updates (and the storage of all them, and the old files they replace being stuck in WinSxS) you'll have a 10Gb space left.

I initially installed windows 7 in a 25Gb partition thinking 'no-one needs that much'. Then I found it got quite tight for space, so I increased it to 30Gb. Now I find its quite tight for space (2.2Gb free out of 29.2Gb). So I guess I'll have to increase it again.

I wouldn't mind so much, but its obviously full of crap - as I install apps (especially big ones) mostly to my D drive to keep the OS backups small. At least its leaner than Vista was!

Re:That's a great idea!

[v1]

mainly the need to be thin. The proc and gpu generally define the thickness of a notebook. They're a fixed height already, are on top of the mobo, and have the heatsink and keyboard on top of them. Add to that the thickness of the bottom case, and there's your notebook. Even the really low profile sockets will add over 1/8" to the overall thickness of the computer.

But then for the larger notebooks that don't much care about being thin, there's really no excuse.

Re:That's a great idea!

[QuantumBeep]

Soldered-down processors are usually not expensive, premium models, so it's no great pain to have to replace the processor with the motherboard. As for the other direction - processors don't exactly fail a whole lot unless horribly abused.

Re:That's a great idea!

[Anonymous Coward]

If some electronics manufacturer was clever, they'd just buy a bunch of these, do what you just said by soldering them to a piece of board with a SATA plug attached, and sell them as SATA sticks. There's definitely a market for that. Plenty of applications where this would be the best option for a lightweight inexpensive terminal made with easily replaced OTS consumer-grade parts. The enclosure for such computers could also be made smaller, since there's no more need for a drive bay.

You think Sandisk would realize that and offer a version like that themselves, skipping the need for a middle-man.

Of course there'd still be some people that would get confused and still end up buying them while thinking they're USB sticks.

Re:That's a great idea!

[timeOday]

ok, so you're saying my hard drive died. How much will that cost to replace? Excuse me?

Who would pay extra for an iPod that's physically larger just so they could replace the storage? Practically nobody. Integration is the key to getting computers cheap enough and small enough that you don't think of them as a collection of parts, but a thing you use, and replace if necessary.

Re:That's a great idea!

[Enigma23]

I disagree - my EeePC has 40GB of memory on it, which is more than I need right now. If really want to store shedloads of data, I'll go buy a 1TB external HDD; they're cheap as chips these days.

My work PC has 70GB storage spread over two drives - any significant data is store on the network drives, or our internal Wiki, where there is significant redundancy to avoid accidental data loss to, for example, a spilled mug of coffee...

Re:That's a great idea!

[Enigma23]

Of course, you will always lose your data if your hard drive goes bad (which is probably the most common failure in computers) regardless of manufacturer so there is no excuse for losing your data if YOU don't have a backup.

Given a MTTF of 3 years, which is roughly when I replace my PC, I can honestly say I've never had a hard drive crap out on me. It's usually the power units and/or motherboards that have been by far the most common failures in any computer I have owned, or used. External backup drives - and using them regularly - are your friend. :)

Re:That's a great idea!

[Anonymous Coward]

I call BS on this... Dell has 3 year next business day onsite warranty option with all their business machines. Any business with any sense would spend the marginal amount to purchase the warranty. I've never had dell arrive with replacement parts more than 1 business day later, with our operations in India, the Middle East or South Africa.

Re:That's a great idea!

[Anonymous Coward]

Put it in an on-board socket so that it can be removed, replaced, upgraded, etc.

Uses? Dedicate it for use for the swap/page file and/or other system usage. Alleviating that workload from current bus lines and devices(HDDs).

Re:That's a great idea!

[coolsnowmen]

Depends on the manufacturer. If the socket reduces the repair time enough, they could decide it saves them money in the long run. After all, who replaces the drive if it is DOA? On warranty? If the customer pays the outrages fee to replace the hard drive after the warranty expires? They do.

Re:That's a great idea!

[wondafucka]

SSD being soldered directly to a motherboard? I'm a bit torn about that idea...

ok, so you're saying my hard drive died. How much will that cost to replace?

Excuse me?

(they'd BETTER put it in a socket)

This is no different than if your PCIe controller died. You can't replace that. You don't want a socketed BGA. Trust me. If you want a "socketed" hard drive, just use a regular SSD. This is for hardware that needs large, fast storage and a small form-factor. Cameras, Video Cameras, Phones, iDouches, etc.

I'm surprised by the number of PC users who are reinforcing the desktop / laptop paradigm as if it is the only way things have ever been, and the only way things will ever be. Technology can be created and sell millions of units without ever being something that a traditional desktop PC would want or need.

Re:That's a great idea!

[Anonymous Coward]

But will there still be enough room if I install Worship Pro: Fire and Brimstone edition?

Re:That's a great idea!

[Samah]

So we've come full circle then... I remember having my RAM in sockets on the motherboard, with a fancy resistor bank to switch over to EDO. :)

Re:That's a great idea!

[v1]

This is no different than if your PCIe controller died. You can't replace that. You don't want a socketed BGA.

I repair computers for a living.

Better than 50% of the repairs I do are to replace failing/failed hard drives.

Irreplaceable mass storage is a really bad idea

Number of bad PCIe controllers I've ran into: 0

Re:That's a great idea!

[Asic Eng]

Sockets are expensive (particularly BGA sockets), and putting something in a socket as part of the manufacturing process is also expensive. Also the danger that the drive actually breaks is relatively low. So I think manufacturers will solder this directly on the mainboard.

Re:That's a great idea!

[dave420]

Serious question: shouldn't they be spending that money on feeding the poor, or was Jesus just full of shit?

Re:That's a great idea!

[gmack]

It's a fair question.

There is an economy of scale to churches since a larger church requires fewer staff than two smaller churches of the same number but then you need sound systems so everyone can hear and either books or a display machine so everyone can sing their favorite songs on Sunday. Certain fixed expenses are actually government mandated such as an accountant to manage the accounts etc.

The machine and projectors is cheaper than a room full of song books so this actually saves money and the labor for the machine was free.

Churches are supposed to feed the poor but they also need to manage a decent service and the display also gets used to show presentations from places the money was spent (queue videos of children learning to play basketball, soup kitchens or orphanages in action etc)

It also gets used to display the financial statements at the end of the year so everyone knows exactly what the money they donated was spent on.

Re:That's a great idea!

[Agripa]

It's even better when you consider Apple upgrades. Just throw your old one away, and buy a new one.

Re:That's a great idea!

[v1]

Also the danger that the drive actually breaks is relatively low.

Citation Needed

(seeing as this is a very new application of the technology, just making sure you're not pulling that out of your arse)

Re:That's a great idea!

[ncc74656]

They're going the way of broken cell phones, nobody repairs those.

Depends on the phone. The $20 prepaid phone you picked up at 7-Eleven probably isn't worth fixing when it craps out, but your average smartphone costs a bit more than that; repair could be worthwhile. I'm considering getting the volume-up button on my iPhone 3G fixed; I saw a sign for a local company the other day that claims to fix most of the things that can break in an iPhone for about $50. Before that, I replaced the keyboard in my Treo 650 after I had spilled a beer on it; that cost me about $20 or so in parts. For phones that cost me somewhere around $300 each when new, it's worth it.

Incredible

[__aaelyr464]

To think that several years ago, a 64GB SSD was the size of a laptop hard drive and ridiculously expensive. Just awesome.

Re:Incredible

[Anonymous Coward]

To think that you won't be doing more than several years ago while we continue to burn fossil fuels to build such useless crap, and there's still no life-extension technology out there because all we do is entertain each other to death. Just awesome.

Re:Incredible

[AvitarX]

Agreed.

http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005148.html#axzz0x49jf8Th

Re:Incredible

[bluefoxlucid]

Life extension technology, listen to you. Are you Holt Fasner or something?

Re:Incredible

[Anonymous Coward]

no life extension technology? During my lifetime (~30y) the life expectancy in my country has gone up 10 years. Maybe it's not molecular repair or whatever it is you're waiting for but it's still pretty impressive to me.

Re:Incredible

[Anonymous Coward]

We need more. Let's do it. I fail to understand the enthusiasm for little tiny increments in boring old computers so we can see more ads, more tweets and more useless clutter.

Basic sanitation, plumbing and clean running water have done more for quality of life than computers ever have.

Re:Incredible

[PitaBred]

I'm doing much more than several years ago. The size may be the same, but the speed of the storage has quadrupled. That's pretty significant. Using a computer is like it should be, stuff responds when you want it to.

Re:Incredible

[Anonymous Coward]

Really? So you're working fewer hours for the same pay? Or the same hours for more pay? Or the same hours and now one less person needs to work? What is this "doing much more" you speak of? What is the end result? Gigs of worthless videos, idiotic tweets, boring pictures? Woop dee fucking doo.

Re:Incredible

[Anonymous Coward]

So wanting to hold on to the only thing in your life that really matters is the same as being some intergalactic tyrant?

SATA=solder to motherboard?

[Sockatume]

I don't think that the SATA spec mandates a BGA interface be provided on motherboards. You couldn't really solder this directly on there any more than you could directly solder a USB device on a mobo that had no headers. You'd have to precision-solder onto the tracks on the board. I think what's meant is that this component can be integrated onto existing motherboard designs without adding a new interface. It can use the existing SATA controller.

This opens the door to a mobo that not only has onboard graphics and sound, but onboard mass storage. That'd be pretty amazing in an "all my hard drives just ate themselves" scenario.

Re:SATA=solder to motherboard?

[v1]

Our POS systems at the bars use a little card with a pair of little ROM chips on it, about the size of flash nand chips, and run windows xp embedded. If the storage fails, you just unplug it and plug in a new one. They'd be out of their minds not to socket this thing or otherwise jumper it.

The obvious way would be to have a regular sata connector at a strategic location on the board, and have this ssd in a slightly larger package, and have it just plug into the connector and screw down with a couple tiny screws, sort of like the wireless cards on laptops. I suppose they might want to use some other sort of better suited connector, which would make their lives easier, but would be less flexible to work on. I'd like to be able to pluck the little guy off the mobo and attach it to a sata cable for troubleshooting, (or to be able to plug in a real HDD for troubleshooting) and not have to fight some proprietary connector.

Re:SATA=solder to motherboard?

[Statecraftsman]

I'm failing to see the benefit of soldered-on in this context as well. To me soldered-on means disposable and my data is anything but. (Yes, I do backup but why make it harder to recover for no significant return?)

Re:SATA=solder to motherboard?

[Anonymous Coward]

You couldn't really solder this directly on there any more than you could directly solder a USB device on a mobo that had no headers. You'd have to precision-solder onto the tracks on the board. I think what's meant is that this component can be integrated onto existing motherboard designs without adding a new interface.

I thought it was pretty damn clear that that's exactly what they were talking about. You'd have to be a pretty big fuggin idiot to think that they were suggesting that you could go out and buy one of these and solder it to the motherboard you already have in your computer.

Re:SATA=solder to motherboard?

[Sockatume]

It'd be guff as a data partition, but you could stick a Linux environment on there for basic tasks. Like those instant-on OSes, but user-accessable. Heck, they could market it as a built-in Readyboost drive.

Re:SATA=solder to motherboard?

[tlhIngan]

It's probably less for PCs and more for embedded platforms (which increasingly do have SATA interfaces - a MIPS board on my desk right now has TWO SATA interfaces).

But it can be useful on a MID - 64GB storage without having to waste space for a 1.8" hard drive or SSD. This will enable smaller handheld PCs (literally - Windows 7 or Linux on a device the size of an iPhone). Or for tablet PCs, you can fill the space the hard drive left with battery and get easily another 20-100% more battery life by having the SSD soldered in.

Sure it eliminates the ability to upgrade, and if the SSD dies, the device dies, but that's not unusual in a lot of things these days (e.g., cell phones - if your iPhone/Android flash dies, it's bricked). Though in the PC case, there's always USB boot.

Re:SATA=solder to motherboard?

[blind biker]

Like the motherboard of the original Eee PC, or the Macbook Air?

Re:SATA=solder to motherboard?

[Bigjeff5]

You apparently have no idea how wires work. (i.e. they can be replaced by copper traces and soldered connections - it's pretty frickin easy)

Re:SATA=solder to motherboard?

[ultranova]

I'm failing to see the benefit of soldered-on in this context as well. To me soldered-on means disposable and my data is anything but. (Yes, I do backup but why make it harder to recover for no significant return?)

No significant return? You just said yourself that if this thing is soldered on, you need to replace the whole motherboard if it dies, rather than just this tiny chip. That means more sales for the motherboard manufacturer.

Or did you mean a significant return for you?

Re:SATA=solder to motherboard?

[gbjbaanb]

then what's the issue between storing your personal data on a traditional HDD (or whatever) and installing your OS on this thing? If the mobo craps on you, chances are you'll be re-installing everything anyway (new drivers, etc, required).

Alternatively, format it as your temp/swap drive.

I like the idea, mobos come with some instant-on Linus OSes, this would let them be pre-installed, and also run more dedicated PCs like a media server. After all, a 32Gb SSD isn't going to replace my movies, pictures, music and work directories anytime soon!

Re:SATA=solder to motherboard?

[rhsanborn]

Three things: 1) I suspect the data "soldered on" is likely to be OS data for something like fast boot, or high capacity cache. Likely less to do with your personal files. 2) They're should make this socketed, like RAM so upgrading it would be relatively easy. 3) This does have applications in embedded systems, like MP3 players and phones that can now have significantly more storage space.

Re:SATA=solder to motherboard?

[Sockatume]

Okay, grab an SSD and solder it into your current motherboard's SATA bus. Good luck.

Re:SATA=solder to motherboard?

[Sockatume]

Precisely.

Re:SATA=solder to motherboard?

[Agripa]

I have seen this done with motherboard USB headers (which provide 2 USB ports plus 5V power) but unfortunately SATA does not have provisions for any sort of standardized combination data and power connection unless you want to use the backplane part of the standard which would require a very wide plug in module. Ideally, SATA would have supported 5V power sufficient for a 2.5 inch drive (somewhere between 0.5 and 1.0 amps although the connector pins are rated to 1.5 amps) in the data connector while allowing the use of the existing data only cables. Given that the standard originally did not even include a positive retention mechanism, I am not surprised.

Re:SATA=solder to motherboard?

[v1]

The narrow data connector is usually right beside the wider but very similar looking data connector on most sata drives now. (100% of laptop drives, about 90% of desktop drives) So the provision seems to be there for power, just in an additional adjacent connector.

Does esata provide power? USB power (1-2) sucks, and nobody seems to want to use firewire which is awesome for providing power. Maybe they just need to change the data format.

Re:SATA=solder to motherboard?

[Agripa]

The narrow data connector is usually right beside the wider but very similar looking data connector on most sata drives now. (100% of laptop drives, about 90% of desktop drives) So the provision seems to be there for power, just in an additional adjacent connector.

Sure. The problem is that power connector is way too wide for an embedded module which does not need 12 volts and 3.3 volts at high current.

Had they done it the way I suggested, the the motherboard data connector would have been lengthened by 4 pins, from 8 to 12, and the existing 8 pin data cables would have worked in it. As it is, how many motherboards have you seen with the SATA power connector inline with the SATA data connector? None? As far as I know, that is only done on SATA and SAS backplanes.

Just to add insult to injury, they managed to come up with two different eSATA standards because it never occurred to them that a self powered external enclosure might be handy and the powered one includes USB anyway!

I would say monkeys came up with the SATA connector standards (No positive retention mechanism? Really?) but that would be an insult to our primate cousins.

Does esata provide power? USB power (1-2) sucks, and nobody seems to want to use firewire which is awesome for providing power. Maybe they just need to change the data format.

Firewire power had the problem of requiring a full switching regulator on the drive side so it really was not competitive with any standard that could do without it. I suspect there were just too many variations of Firewire power to be supported reliably. Ultimately two different standards were needed for supporting external storage (laptop drives and smaller versus anything larger) but the later was already supported using other technologies even if poorly.

mini-itx

[petermgreen]

I wonder if anyone will build a mini-itx board with one of these on? IDE is on it's way out and while you can get SATA disk on moudules a largish lump hanging out of a flimsy sata port doesn't seem like a very robust soloution. A board with one of these on would mean all you would need to add is ram to make a fully functional embedded PC.

Re:mini-itx

[MBGMorden]

Just be a lil more creative :). When I built my FreeNAS box I decided that I didn't want the OS on any of the hard drives. I just took a 2GB USB thumb drive with FreeNAS on it, hooked it via a cable up to one of the motherboard USB headers (some electrical tape wrapped around the drive/cable connection to make sure it wouldn't come out), and then zip tied the drive to the side of the case.

Looks a little goofy if you pop the hood, but it works flawlessly and you can't tell at all from the outside. And for $20 in materials I'm guessing it's a lot cheaper than one of these :).

Re:mini-itx

[LWATCDR]

"some electrical tape wrapped around the drive/cable connection to make sure it wouldn't come out), and then zip tied the drive to the side of the case"
Amateur
Pros use heat shrink tubing and double sided foam tape.

.

Re:mini-itx

[TooMuchToDo]

And hot glue guns.

Re:mini-itx

[Bigjeff5]

Pfft, if you're going through all the trouble, why not just cut off the connectors and solder the USB drive directly to the internal USB headers?

There's no reason not to, and the solder will make sure the connection never slips.

Re:mini-itx

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope that one day using an apostrophe incorrectly will be on "it is" way out too.

Re:mini-itx

[ColdWetDog]

Christ. What is wrong with you people?

Duct tape, all the way down.

Re:mini-itx

[owlstead]

These drives could indeed flourish in the (cheaper) netbook / NAS / internet appliance / TV-as-PC / tablet market and possibly the high end smart phone market as well. My Android just had a 70 MB upgrade to 2.1 and it took quite a long time for it to download and reboot. I'm betting part of that is the flash on the device. Especially netbooks are just made for SSD's. 2.5" drives currently have just one advantage over these kind of SSD's: capacity. All the other things are fully in the SSD camp. It's a shame that the first netbooks came with a rather sub-par flash drive.

Re:mini-itx

[TooMuchToDo]

Problem: You notice how on some Cisco gear and most servers how there isn't a proper latching mechanism to prevent your standard power cord from coming undone?

Solution: Glue gun.

Re:mini-itx

[owlstead]

It may be a lot cheaper, but it will also be a lot slower, smaller and most importantly, it will probably not do write leveling in the way higher end SSD's do. You may not need that for your NAS, but other builders should be aware of this fact.

Re:mini-itx

[LWATCDR]

Actually how about this for a solution. Take this chip and put it on a a PC-Board with an sata connector on the end.
There you go. A small limp to hand off a sata port.
I would also bet that you will see the same board with an esata connector on it for a next gen flash drive.

Re:mini-itx

[curunir]

I thought about doing that for my FreeNAS box, but booting off the thumb drive was slow and I was worried that it would run into reliability problems if used as a primary drive. I ended up spending about $20 more than you did and getting a cheap controller card and an industrial flash module.

The system boots considerably faster than it did off the thumb drive and since it only uses the card's IDE slot, I've now got 2 SATA/eSATA connections to add more storage, should the need arise.

Re:mini-itx

[Agripa]

There are a few USB drives designed for embedded use which plug directly into the USB header on the motherboard but your solution is more cost effective for non-critical applications. I have a couple of IDE to CF adapters which I use for the same application.

http://www.transcendusa.com/Products/ModDetail.asp?ModNo=122&LangNo=0&Func1No=1&Func2No=159
http://www.psism.com/eusb.htm
http://www.ptiglobalusa.com/emusbfldrmo.html
http://www.atpinc.com/p2-4a.php?sn=00000417

Summary++

[Anonymous Coward]

The whole article is just about 5 times longer than the very short summary. I didn't read it very attentively, but the following 2 quotes should be informative and reading them, I think you won't need to spend the 30 seconds it would take to read the full article:

"160MB/sec sequential read and 100MB/sec sequential write speeds being quoted."

"will target the "fast-growing" mobile computing platforms such as tablet PCs and ultra-thin notebooks (and netbooks we presume); as expected, they won't be available to consumers directly but as an integral part of devices."

Re:Summary++

[Kjella]

"160MB/sec sequential read and 100MB/sec sequential write speeds being quoted."

Which is the least interesting performance statistic, making me think the random access and IOPS is not that hot. Still, 64GB with reasonable performance, combined with a TB platter drive makes for one helluva laptop.

iSSD?

[Anonymous Coward]

One rotten apple spoils 'em all.

boost?

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean "boasts"? The literacy level in here is shameful.

Re:boost?

[Drakkenmensch]

No, it really DID mean "boost": http://www.sandberg.it/support/product.aspx?id=130-26

Possible Applications

[dmgxmichael]

Possible Applications of 64 GB integrated into the motherboard.

1. BIOS
2. Hypervisor
3. Drivers

And that's right off the top of my head.

Re:Possible Applications

[PitaBred]

Operating System. Why such lightweight apps? You could do ALL of the things you listed with less than a single GB of NAND flash.

Re:Possible Applications

[owlstead]

But you can already do those with USB based flash components. The added write leveling and speed of an SSD is not really needed for those applications. Of course, that does not matter if the price is right, but I suspect that that might not be the case.

Re:Possible Applications

[spectrokid]

64 Gigabytes of BIOS? What, it's going to show random clips of LOTR in HD during POST? Oh my god.... Well, at least it should be enough for everybody...

Re:Possible Applications

[dmgxmichael]

640 K was supposed to last forever :P

Re:Possible Applications

[Ant P.]

64GB for an OS? You can fit a full OS with a full suite of apps in under 1GB too.

Re:Possible Applications

[WuphonsReach]

Possible Applications of 64 GB integrated into the motherboard.

1. BIOS
2. Hypervisor
3. Drivers

4. Malware / Rootkits / Spam Zombies / Spyware

Re:Possible Applications

[dmgxmichael]

Duh. Show me a BIOS, a Hypervisor or a Driver that isn't vulnerable to any of these Captain Obvious.

Cue The Joke

[Ukab the Great]

About the guy carrying a Sandisk SSD and postal stamp in his pocket who goes down the post office to mail a letter and then sticks the stamp in his smartphone.

Re:Cue The Joke

[Culture20]

About the guy carrying a Sandisk SSD and postal stamp in his pocket who

gets asked "Is that a postage stamp sized SSD in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?" This is /. after all.

different from microSD?

[iamhassi]

How is this much different from a MicroSD?

--Smaller than stamp? Very much so, Check!
--4gb to 64gb? Check!
--100MB/sec read and 160MB/sec write? Hmm... well not by itself, but if you Raid 0 a few MicroSDs it'd probably reach those speeds, and we're hoping the article is correct with the MB term meaning Megabyte and not Megabit because MicroSD's also offer 100 Mbit/s

So while this is announcement is nice, I still feel like they took the same thing we've been using for the past few years, put it in a new box and labeled it as a totally new product.

Re:different from microSD?

[bluefoxlucid]

They solder a MicroSD card to a MicroSD-to-SATA controller chip (really, to the IDE front-end chip: the whole integrated drive electronics thing can skip all the physical media management stuff like stepper motor control and an I/O subsystem, since we're using a tiny flash chip as backing storage with a flash controller built-in). So you get a SATA interface just like a SATA IDE drive (or an ATA interface like an ATA IDE drive, or a SCSI interface like a SCSI IDE drive), but with a flash back-end. The whole thing takes up... roughly the same space as an SD card anyway.

Re:different from microSD?

[TheThiefMaster]

1: MicroSD only goes up to 32GB, and is actually the limit of MicroSDHC. The standard to go above that (expected to be MicroSDXC, based on SDXC) is yet to exist.
2: The MicroSD interface is limited to 100Mb/s, so the 160Mb/s couldn't be had from MicroSD at all

Other than that, yeah, it's just the same data chip as they probably already had but with a sata device-side chip integrated.

Re:different from microSD?

[Anonymous Coward]

do you even know what IDE is

there is no such thing as a STATA IDE drive, there is no such thing as a SCSI IDE drive, before you run your mouth please take a second to look at wikipedia

and besides its trivial to interface SD cards to pretty much anything you want, they run on simple 3 wire serial, arduino 101

Re:different from microSD?

[evilviper]

His usage was perfectly fine. People think of IDE as a proper noun, but it's really just an acronym indicating the controller is combined with the drive, and not just a raw chunk of memory.

Re:different from microSD?

[gad_zuki!]

You won't get that level of write performance from a microSD card and I also assume this will come with much more sophisticated wear-leveling and TRIM support. There's a reason why manufacturers don't just put 8 microSD cards together and call it an SSD drive.

Re:different from microSD?

[PitaBred]

The article most certainly is correct. You haven't experienced NAND speeds, so you don't know what you're talking about. Flash is not anything like an SSD. It's not as reliable, it's not as fast.

Re:different from microSD?

[Bigjeff5]

Read/Write times are always in megabytes, bandwidth is in megabits. This SSD is in the 1+gbit/ per second range bandwidth, or about 9-10 times as wide as a MicroSD. This means to match this single chip's performance you need at least 10 microSD's. This is born out by the fact that the fastest SD cards I've ever heard of run at about 20mb/s write (160mbit/s).

A 64gb microSD isn't going to come close to the performance numbers on this thing, to match the performance you'd want to use at least 8 class 10 cards (guaranteed 10mb/s, many get closer to 20mb/s). Unfortunately these come in a minimum size of 16gb, so you get 128gb of storage at 160mb/s writes for about $300. Twice the storage, but it's 8x bigger too.

More than likely all Sandisk really did for this chip is put 8 8gb flash chips together and put them in a BGA package. The actual size of a microSD flash chip is tiny, most of the size is the package itself, so this seems reasonable. Just adjust your lithography process make the proper connections between adjacent chips, insert a SATA/Flash controller with built-in cache, and away you go (it's more complicated than that, but it's the basic idea).

That also means this chip should be in the $300-$400 range starting out, which is pretty friggin sweet for that much high-speed storage in such a small package. I could see these being implemented as an intermediate cache between the HDD and RAM, so you can have a nice performance boost without sacrificing space. Actually if done right something similar to this could give you close to SSD performance at $0.25 per GB for a 2tb drive. It's still 5x what a normal hard drive would cost, but it's 1/8 what current SSD's cost per GB, and except for extreme cases its performance should be indistinguishable from an SSD's. You could see HDDs with integrated 64gb of cache (instead of the piddly 4gb, that offers only minor speed boosts) popping up real soon.

Re:different from microSD?

[owlstead]

You forgot a few:
- easy to solder on board [nope]
- wear leveling [nope]
- possibility to do TRIM [nope]
- encryption? [nope]

And in RAID:
- boot (in RAID) [nope]
- no drivers needed (in RAID) [nope]
- cheaper than the proposed solution (in RAID) [nope]
- smaller than the proposed solution (in RAID) [nope]
- less than 15 needed for sufficient speeds [nope]

Informative? Guy says that micro SD exists and could compete with this product? This is not the same product at all.

Re:different from microSD?

[TheThiefMaster]

Yes it means "Integrated Drive Electronics", not it doesn't mean any drive with a circuit, or even any drive with an onboard controller. It was the name of a specific interface, which is also known these days as Parallel ATA.

Re:different from microSD?

[QuantumBeep]

IDE is Integrated Drive Electronics. Everything that isn't a floppy disk, cd, tape, or some kind of MO cartridge is IDE. The more puhdantically correct term you're looking for is ATA.

Protip: For many years, many SCSI hard disks were identical to ATA hard disks, with the exception of a single additional interface converter chip.

Re:different from microSD?

[evilviper]

not it doesn't mean any drive with a circuit, or even any drive with an onboard controller. It was the name of a specific interface, which is also known these days as Parallel ATA.

Nonsense.

Let's go back to the previous suggestion, and check WP:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_ATA :
The terms "integrated drive electronics" (IDE), "enhanced IDE" and "EIDE" have come to be used interchangeably with ATA (now Parallel ATA, or PATA). However the terms "IDE" and "EIDE" are at best imprecise. Every ATA drive is an "integrated drive electronics" drive, but SCSI drives could also legitimately be described as having "integrated drive electronics". However the abbreviation IDE is rarely, if ever, used for SCSI drives.

Re:different from microSD?

[iamhassi]

"There's a reason why manufacturers don't just put 8 microSD cards together and call it an SSD drive."

Actually that's exactly what they have done: "DIY SSD adapter takes 6 SDHC cards, the cake"

Re:different from microSD?

[iamhassi]

"- less than 15 needed for sufficient speeds [nope]"

SATA SDHC RAID spotted: " Impress were able to get a pretty impressive 111.4MB/s read and 55.2MB/s write when combining the device with six Transcend 8GB Class 6 SDHC cards."

While 55MB/s real world speed isn't the "up to 100MB/s" the article claims, that SATA SDHC RAID article is also 2 years old, modern SDHC cards could no doubt close the gap.

- easy to solder on board [nope]

That a feature or bug? I really don't like the idea of hard drives being soldered to motherboards

- wear leveling [nope]
- possibility to do TRIM [nope]
- encryption? [nope]

Article doesn't mention any of those features, I guess you're just assuming this will have all of those because other SSDs you've used had these features?

"- boot (in RAID) [nope]
- no drivers needed (in RAID) [nope]

If the manufacture raided several memory chips at the hardware level, yes you could boot in raid and no drivers would be needed

"- cheaper than the proposed solution (in RAID) [nope]"

Prices have not been announced

"- smaller than the proposed solution (in RAID) [nope]"

If a manufacture took several MicroSDHC cards apart and put them in raid they would be as small as this solution.

Re:different from microSD?

[owlstead]

"SATA SDHC RAID spotted [bit-tech.net]: " Impress were able to get a pretty impressive 111.4MB/s read and 55.2MB/s write when combining the device with six Transcend 8GB Class 6 SDHC cards."

That's a lot of expensive SD cards. Not even micro-SD cards for which higher HC classes are harder to find. This also just translates to 48 GB of memory, for which - in all proabability - none is set aside for wear leveling.

"That a feature or bug? I really don't like the idea of hard drives being soldered to motherboards "

It's not a hard drive, it's an SSD. SSD's have much less reasons for failure than hard drives. This device is clearly targeting smaller computing platforms, where space is at a premium. It's also much cheaper to do this than to somehow get an SSD on a motherboard.

"Article doesn't mention any of those features, I guess you're just assuming this will have all of those because other SSDs you've used had these features? "

Yes, because otherwise it would just be a flash drive, not an SSD. If you do a specialized RAID (which is what an SSD is) it does not make sense to use a sub-par controller. In the worst case they used one where performance drops significantly after many writes.

"If a manufacture took several MicroSDHC cards apart and put them in raid they would be as small as this solution."

That's what they did, except that they probably did not manufacture the SDHC cards first and did not just use a RAID controller. SDHC cards are also just flash with an IO interface.

You are now talking about "if a manufacture..." "if the manufacture raided several memory chips...". Apart from the spelling you are now defending your competing solution by inventing stuff that does not exist.

SSD's are specialized raids of flash chips, that present themselves as a single drive. Trying to make a generic one from SDHC cards is never going to match the performance and (more important) reliability of an SSD.

Re:different from microSD?

[owlstead]

Hmm, looking at the article again, I must say that a 4 GB SSD is very very low. It might be that they just put a single flash chip (or maybe two) behind a SATA controller, put in the same package. In that case they should be shot for false advertising I suppose. Highest density flash chips are available around 64 GB currently.

That would, however, not explain the high throughput, especially for write actions. I don't know many flash drives that can handle 100 MB/s writes (of course, most are USB, so they won't go over 45 MB/s or so anyway).

Re:nano-itx

[rwa2]

Hell with mini-itx, I don't know why more manufacturers don't pump out nano-itx gear. NVidia already showed us it could be done years ago, but no manufacturer has really stepped up to the plate:
http://www.google.com/images?q=nvidia ion reference platform

Sure there's the fit-PC2, which is cute... but still suffers from the crappy PowerVR video with limited driver support.

social convention

[Carebears]

Haven't you heard, "Thin is in" , people will pay more money to get the same product, just thinner and smaller. Example, Ps3, xbox, etc.

Weighs less than a paperclip!

[Anonymous Coward]

I measure all my small item weights in paperclips and sizes in postage stamps.

Just for clarification, what are its actual dimensions?

Geek Version of 20 questions ruined...

[MrMe]

I chose SSD for my "thing" in 20 questions all the time, now Sandisk has ruined it!

It's a thing.
Q1: Is it smaller than a breadbox?
Yes
Q2: Is it around the size of a postage stamp?
yes
Q3: does it weigh less than a paperclip?
yes
Is it a SSD?
Yes! Damn you Sandisk! You'll rue the day!

Postage Stamp

[ProfessionalCookie]

I really want to know how is this much different than a postage stamp?

system drive

[reiisi]

Well, if you use the soldered-in flash as the OS drive, you shouldn't need to worry about lost data? Maybe?

Also, although I don't agree with what I'm saying here, there is a target device here that many people will consider disposable. Specifically, if the motherboard dies, remove your micro-SD card and buy a new cheap tablet for lost than the cost of repair.

Except that you and I will use our toaster oven to reflow the SSD and/or remove it, perhaps.

Awesome!

[thechemic]

They basically took a MicroSD card and made it SATA compatible. Now stop farting around and put 10 of these in parallel (RAID0) for combinations of blistering speeds and decent sizes. Until then, I’ll stick to my MicroSD cards. At least I wont have to replace an entire mobo if my micro takes a crap.

Re:Awesome!

[Anonymous Coward]

This thing does 160MB/sec read and 100MB/sec write. So you'll have to RAID0 a dozen of your beloved microSD cards just to match one of these. I think the idea is to put these in ultraportables and netbooks so you can have a SSD *and* HD.

Re:Awesome!

[thechemic]

Well certainly. I understand "the idea". However, I'm tired of manufacturers limited thinking. If you put 4 of these in a RAID0 you would at least double the 160 MB/sec reads to 320 MB/sec (or more). With a highly effecient controller and even more of these in RAID0 i'm sure you could reach 500 MB/sec. Now that's something I want in my sick-fast desktop... not some tiny netbook or mobile phone. Currently I have 4 raptors in RAID0. Super fast, I love it. But I want more. I cant fit 10 full size raptor drives in my case to create a higher performance RAID0. But you could certainly fit a massive array of these little things in a computer. I understand not everyone requires this kind of performance but I would sure be in line to get it. I guess we will find out soon enough what they decide to do with this tech.

Embedded Computing Platforms

[Cormacus]

When they boast about being SATA compliant, I don't think the point is that it could be used in {lap|desk}top motherboards, but more as a point of interest for embedded system designers who want onboard storage. Think of it rephrased as "hey, our chip uses that standard interface that your embedded ARM-based processor uses."

Actual Dimensions

[Maarx]

It has a mass of roughly 7.37346606 x 10^(-31) Jupiters.

It is a square with sides of length 2.31481482 x 10^(-4) football fields.

It has a storage capacity of 6.25 x 10^(-3) Libraries of Congress.

Bullshit

[copponex]

I bought a Dell laptop for $700 that included a business warranty. I sent two tickets complaining about a screen defect, provided a picture, and the next day a technician was sent to my location and swapped out the part in less than an hour.

If you don't want to spend the extra $100 on the business warranty, it might take a couple days to get a replacement part. But you can buy a machine with with a three year accidental replacement on-site warranty for far less than you can get a similarly specced Apple product with AppleCare. Even if you pay $350 for the AppleCare for your MacBook Pro, they don't send on-site technicians. You still have to go make a reservation at an Apple Store, talk to a purple haircut who revels in informing you that you'll have to send your $2500 laptop off for repair, and maybe it will be back in a few weeks.

Your best bet is to go to an independent Apple Repair Center. At least they give a shit, and get the part overnighted and your laptop operable within 24 hours.

You'd think that paying $1,200 for a Core 2 Duo laptop would get you some actual customer service. But you'd be wrong.

More Phone Storage!

[gsmalleus]

This is going to be great when it gets integrated into mobile phones. My Moto Droid only has 512MB of for the OS and apps. Recently I have been getting low storage space warnings because of the number of apps I have installed.

Re:More Phone Storage!

[Red_Chaos1]

Yeah, but with Android 2.2 this won't be/isn't an issue since it'll be able to load apps to the SD card and read/write from it instead.

Re:More Phone Storage!

[gsmalleus]

Only if the application supports it. Although most future applications should support, many of them currently do not. Also, I would rather use the phone's memory for applications and keep the storage card for all my data.

Postage Stump

[Anonymous Coward]

I really want to know how is this much different than a postage stamp?

The postage stamp isn't dropping in price.

So...

[Anonymous Coward]

Just pre-install Windows on the motherboard, write-lock a few key sectors, and viola, no more Linux installations. MWAH HA HA

Well-played, editors.

[icannotthinkofaname]

Thank you, Slashdot, for not noting the storage capacity of these tiny SSD's in the summary. I actually had to go RTFA to find out the information I wanted (4-64 GB).

Er, it was a clever ploy to make Slashdotters read the article, right? It wasn't just coincidence that you left out this important piece of information?

iSSD?

[nman64]

Cue the Apple lawsuit...

So... eSATA-based thumbdrives?

[CeruleanDragon]

That's what popped into my head, anyway... but after reading the article, the sizes are only about what you'd find on a USB thumb drive these days, anyway. Although I'm guessing the potential for higher sizes is more on the iSSD side of things.

But it did make me think of something else that might be interesting: What if we saw a complete convergence of USB and SATA? Don't look at me like that, why not? Imagine, instead 2-6 9/1-pin USB connectors on your mobo and 4-8 SATA connectors... just 4-6 USATA connectors, you can connect whatever you want to them, internally or externally.

I'm no engineer, but it doesn't sound like it should be all that far fetched.

Add

[Anonymous Coward]

• FPGA Images
• Rootkits
• pron

Not sure why you'd need this.

[blair1q]

I mean, the point of a hard drive is to have a filesystem on a peripheral bus.

But if you're going to be soldering things to the board, why not just put them on the memory bus and use a flash file system?

If you can do that, going through the SATA bus means you have to have a SATA bus you otherwise wouldn't need, and a couple of layers of data packaging and transfer. Slower, more complex, more stuff to implement. But you can use an OS that doesn't understand FFS (but really, is that likely?)

This thing only makes sense in two cases:

1. you don't have a memory bus (don't ask me, it's just a consideration)

2. SATA thumb drive (which I just noticed CeruleanDragon just posted above me.

ZFS ZIL

[batrick]

This would be really nice for ZFS ZILs I think. You only need a ZIL twice the size of your RAM *at most*. Put a 2 of these on my motherboard for that please :). (Buying a whole SSD is way too expensive just for a ZIL : /)

Has Apple approved the product name?

[twoears]

If not, maybe Jobs & co. will sue Sandisk for using the lower case "i" as the first character of the name. What's all this self centered "i" stuff? What ever happened to "we"?

Re:Has Apple approved the product name?

[couchslug]

"What ever happened to "we"?"

It changed into iUs.

Re:Has Apple approved the product name?

[Yvan256]

What ever happened to "we"?

You missed the meeting four years ago. We changed it to "Wii".

Re:Has Apple approved the product name?

[twoears]

What ever happened to "we"?

You missed the meeting four years ago. We changed it to "Wii".

Apparently so did you. "Wii changed it to "Wii"."

Uh oh

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm supposed to replace my hard drive unit with tiny balls?

Smaller than what

[Anonymous Coward]

> smaller than a postage stamp

Dear grampa,

what is this ye olde postage stamp you speak of?

embedded devices

[OrangeTide]

3. You manufacture a smartphone or smartbook/netbook and want something that is faster than current SD/eMMC solutions and about as cheap.

Flash filesystems are a real pain. The open source ones have some pretty severe limitations (yaffs2), and the commercial ones are expensive and annoying to license (you get locked into them and can't get away). Also, SD/MMC sucks at doing fast reads, while the interface could push 50MB/s most implementations of the interface (not the flash, just the bus itself) can't eek out more than 30MB/s. And managing the flashfile system on the CPU makes doing DMAs almost pointless since you end up using short chunks of data to fit it into NAND's weird topology. The market has shown that device makers really prefer having a smart flash with a small processor to deal with the FTL(flash translation layer, the bit that makes NAND topology into linear logical blocks), this is what SD/MMC/eMMC are (over a medium-speed serial bus).

Processor + MLC NAND flash + a fast bus(SATA for example) is really a winning combination for single-chip flash devices and package-on-package (stacked) devices. Which right now means it is limited to 64GB, but that's hardly a serious limitation. A lot of people are thrilled to have 64GB SSD in their laptops.

If this product is picked up in the big way that I believe it will be, then 96GB-256GB devices would be possible in a stacked configuration.

That wee bit you forgot about.

[Anonymous Coward]

New manufacturing equipment of some sort must still be purchased. So if the tool costs Y, then you have to sell Z number of cost X/20 chips to pay for the tool. After that, you get to make a profit. You can conceal and amortize the costs through whatever accounting tricks strike your fancy, but the cash flow and mid-term profit concerns will weigh heavy. This is usually the largest factor for long-term reduced prices.

backups

[Anonymous Coward]

(ignoring the fact that you actually need your files right away)

Time Machine: plug in an external drive (USB/FW), when it asks if you want to use it for backups, answer "yes". You're done.

Re:Stop the presses!!

[somersault]

You're full of shit - they were Googlers.

Rad.

[dawning]

Frak SMD soldering directly (though nice)..
I wanna see the silicon of this licensed as a layer or whatever inside of an existing SoC, such as a beefy Samsung ARM Coretex based chip. Rad.
We could make such beautiful SoCs now.
(*gets disturbingly over-excited*)

What has to do the medium with the data?

[Anonymous Coward]

You handle each one independently of each other.

If your data integrity depends on your media being soldered or not to the motherboard then you are doing something terribly wrong....