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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."
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.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
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.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
I think that the two are actually positively correlated.
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."
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.
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.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
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)
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
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?
exactally, and if the mother board craps out, good luck getting your data back
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.
heh, I hadn't even considered that, excellent counterpoint.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
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.
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.
You *did* have a backup, right?
Possible Applications of 64 GB integrated into the motherboard.
And that's right off the top of my head.
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.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
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.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Why would they bait their breath? I await your reply with bated breath.
which is totally what she said
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!
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.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
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.
Let's make like a bird... and get the flock outta here.
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.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
Considering my netbook has 8 gigs of onboard storage, yes it could.
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.
Maybe someone thought him calling us jackasses was insightful. :)
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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.
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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.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
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!
I understand what you mean, but what you manipulate is not in your pocket, even though your digits are...
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.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire