Slashdot Mirror
New Device Puts SSD In a DIMM Slot
Vigile points out a new take on SSD from Viking Modular Solutions. The SATADIMM puts an SSD in the form factor of a memory module. "The unit itself actually uses a SandForce SSD controller and draws its power from the DIMM socket directly but still connects to the computer through a SATA connection — nothing fancy like using the memory bus, etc. Performance is actually identical to other SandForce-based SSDs though the benefits for 1U servers and motherboards with dozens of DIMM slots is interesting to say the least. Likely priced outside the realm for average consumers, the SATADIMM will likely stay put in the enterprise market but represents an indicator that companies are realizing SSDs don't need to be in traditional HDD form factors."
Why? If it's only drawing power from the DIMM slot, what benefit does that serve? Sure, in a 1U rack it *might* save a trivial amount of space. I just dont see a market for it.
So you don't have to run a molex or other power connector to the SSD, it's easier to put in, I suppose.
I wonder if there are significant gains to be had by inserting these in place of existing RAM?
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
If your using a DIMM slot for power, and SATA for data transfer, why not use the power supply for power instead of losing a memory slot?
When i saw the headline, i was hoping that this would be a device that allowed an SSD to be connected to a RAM slot and used as RAM, rather than an SSD that takes up a RAM slot.
Additionally, if they can squeeze a 256GB into a DIMM form factor, why the are even 4GB sticks of RAM still expensive
I remember back before computers had onboard drive controllers and there was no such thing as a standard drive interface, they sold ISA hard drive cards, it was a drive & controller all in one. I dont see to much advantage running a drive on a ram slot, you can just dedicate a drive(s) to you work, swap or temp files. I typically do that when editing video, 1 drive holds the raw videos, one drive is a temp drive and one is what the final video files are outputted to when they are rendered. Much faster then using 1 drive or even a single raid to read/write large amounts of data at the same time.
That's kind of crazy how would you access the drive? Would you need a special driver or something to mount it as a sata drive? This seems neat but I'm confused at how this work and the article didn't seem to explain...
check out the Mp3 Garbler I built!
Something like this would be great with the Arima NM46x, it has 16 DIMM slots.
Certainly putting things like swap space and database journal files on SSD would speed things up wonderfully, but how about an OS hack where an SSD drive is a sort of L3 cache between core and traditional disk for dirty disk buffers? Also, I'm wondering about the power requirements between SSD and DIMM RAM.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
From the article:
Final Thoughts: Taking power (and space) from free DIMM slots is certainly a novel idea, and is beneficial to overly cramped installations. I can easily see these being used for embedded and other custom systems where high storage performance is needed without the wasted space.
So the entire purpose of this hyper-expensive convoluted creation is to save a power cable...? The whole article reads more like an advertisement + some benchmarks. I see no benefit to this thing whatsoever. Unless I am missing something, it sounds more like Viking was trying to make a non-volatile memory chip (that would be kinda cool) and realized it wasn't going to work, so they had the engineers rip out everything novel about it and just use the DIMM slot to save a power cord.
This definitely falls into the realm of why would anyone do this? It's the same as a regular hard drive but you can't control where it goes as much. Sounds like a heating nightmare. If it's the same performance, then that's the only difference. I suppose a lack of power cables running across the case is a tiny advantage but whatever, this is still pointless.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
What sense does it make to abandon the traditional form factor when it already works with great efficiency?
I thought that this SSD was actually interfacing with the memory bus, which also would've been a dumb idea given the discrepancies in cost and performance.
But the headline reminded me of OCZ's DDR booster from years ago. "What next?"
Correct me if I'm wrong but couldn't all of this be done with a PCIe RAID card?
The price of flash has nothing to do with the price of RAM. They are completely different constructions, and for different tasks. Flash is faster than magnetic storage but still dog slow compared to RAM. For flash you talk access time in 2-3 digits of microseconds. For RAM you talk access time in single digit nanoseconds. For flash transfer rates are in the 100s of MB/sec with anything over 200 being rather exceptional. For ram transfer rates are in the 10+GB/sec.
Same sort of transition again when talking DRAM (what you put in your system) to SRAM (what processor cache is made out of). Again the price goes up massively so instead of 8GB, you are talking maybe 12MB. However again the speed goes way up and access time way down.
Duh....
It's aimed at 1U servers that have no free drive bays or PCI slots.
Actually I find this potentially quite cool. Not as much for the power source, but the size. Since most mATX boards don't come with mini PCIe slots, if you want to use an SSD drive you need a 2.5" drive or a PCIe card with a mini-slot on it. Both are much larger than a DIMM option.
And with 50gb, this would be very useful in a media box streaming from a server. Now only if the price could come down.
I can't recall a /. story that has this many ignorant replies.
Aside from the usual lack of RTFS and not reading TFA, I wonder if it's due to ignorance of hardware?
What one fool can do, another can. (Ancient Simian Proverb)
These comments give everyone the chance to figure out whom works with computer hardware and whom just owns a desktop.
This device seems backwards with today's trends. With virtualizaion gaining ground fast, the ideal setup is to have as much RAM as possible with a SAN back end for storage - iSCSI, FC, whatever. Most local disks on servers today are RAID1 mirrors for the small hypervisor.
So, yes, this device wastes a valuable DIMM slot to give you a less-valuable SATA drive?
I can't think of any scenario where this would be useful unless you're talking about handheld devices - a MacBook Air or tablet of some sort.
Most folk'll never lose a toe, and then again some folk'll...
Rack? Who cares about racks. It's not like there's not enough room in 1U servers. What this is awesome for, though, is for small form factor PCs. With video on the mobo or cpu the only thing left that stuck out, was the harddrive or ssd. Not anymore. Awesome! :-) Now I can go get myself a proper 17x17x5cm quad core PC:-)
0x or or snor perron?!
I can see this in an environment when you need to stick a lot of 1U rack systems all over the place, and can't spread out over a larger footprint in any one location. But when else am I going to use this? Didn't we decide a long time ago that large amounts of internal storage wasn't really a good way to handle increasing storage needs?
I'd much rather see a big ol' SAN full of SDDs than put together something like this, unless someone else is seeing an advantage that I don't.
... into a different electronic orifice of the motherboard than what is customary?
This is exciting news, indeed!
I will join this game-changing revolution by using file descriptor 3 for standard output!
We need a new standard form factor or two. Clearly making an SSD in the size of a pattered hard drive makes no sense, but this product makes no sense either. It's just a way to steal power from another sort of slot. In addition to the form factor, I'm not sure SATA even makes sense anymore, so it may be time for a higher level rethink.
I'm not sure the best way to go, but there are some semi-obvious starting points. What about MiniPCI for SSD's? One or two on the motherboard could work well. Maybe a modified SATA design with the cable suppling power for SSD's? They could look like mini-USB sticks and plug directly into the connectors. Maybe we need an entirely new bus interface just for SSD's, and then put them in a SIMM/DIMM type package; that may be the best option for performance and size.
This idea simply does not scale due to SATA cabling limitations, especially in existing systems that locate their DIMM slots for proximity to the CPU, not the onboard SATA controllers. Even a relatively low density of SSD DIMMS would result in a mess of cabling in a typical case let along that crazy 32DIMM/row picture they provide.
Notice they never note the height. Since the SATA connector is in the same location on all the DIMMS and DIMM slots are traditionally lined up any use of standard SATA connectors requires them to be stacked. That means in that crazy picture with 128 slots you would have 32 stacked SATA cables and connectors. Even at 2mm thick that is 64mm, or 2.5" of sata cable all stacked. That is probably best case and that does not even take into account the mess at the controller having to plug 32 SATA cables into 32 SATA ports. There is a reason that higher density disk systems use backplanes that provide power and data connectivity.
The only interesting thing about this product is that you can put SSD chips onto almost anything. Far more interesting would be an industry standard form factor that allows for such densities but where the controller wiring is in the slot as well. Then you can integrate a proper solution like SAS to SAS/SATA SSD Chip Slot backplane so your cabling is not a complete mess.
The new form factor for the new thin apple laptop is much more promising.
Ah, well I did read the summary but I didn't get it I guess. Still, over rated maybe? I just made a mistake, I wasn't trying to be inflammatory or troll anyone.
check out the Mp3 Garbler I built!
It's not a very exciting use of non-volatile memory. It makes sense, though, to package non-volatile devices for vertical slots like DRAM, and have motherboards that have slots for them. But not DIMM slots - something that actually carries the drive data. The thing announced in the article still needs a drive cable; all it gets from the DIMM slot is power. This looks like an interim product until server motherboards go to that form factor and eliminate drive bays. The near future for server farms probably looks like that - onboard non-volatile storage in some kind of vertical slot, with rotating disks elsewhere in a storage array.
One of the challenges in computing is to figure out what to do with non-volatile memory besides pretending it is a "disk". Today, CPUs and operating systems understand two kinds of storage - "RAM" and "disk". Design has been locked into that model for decades. Nobody really knows what to do with something that has a 35us access time and no variable latency. Going through the operating system's file system drivers runs up the latency, but making big devices accessible as memory makes them too vulnerable. Some kind of intermediate form of access is needed. A tuple store? A database implemented in an FPGA? Something like that might make sense.
There's an interesting analysis over at the daily circuit that covers this and the new Toshiba form factor, comparing in terms of Gigabytes per gram with 640GB 2.5" and 3TB 3.5" drives.
I've had such things in the embedded world for over a decade.
What's next? NEW! small cards serve as memory devices!
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
We use blades even (smaller than 1U) and we run out of DIMM slots before we run out of CPU or I/O.
What kind of application needs lots of servers each underpopulated with RAM and also populated with their own SSD?
Adaptec's like of MaxIQ controllers are the cheapest I know of, Intel also has it on their high end rebadged LSI controllers though you have to pay extra to add the feature. The controllers use an SSD as an additional layer of cache (they also have a RAM cache) for the array to speed things up. Works quite well apparently, if a bit costly.
Let me get this straight, you want us to sacrifice valuable RAM slots, and more so, valuable RAM, to run an SSD device? What would make more sense would be to have a completely seperate 1U unit hooked up to the unit with nothing but SSD devices (or hard drives). Wait, don't they already have those?
Likely priced outside the realm for average consumers,
I also doubt the average consumer will want these. With most consumer motherboards only supporting two or four slots of RAM, I REALLY don't see sacrificing ram slots for SSD. Especially when they top out at, what, 128gig? I just bought a 2TB harddrive for $94. I mean, I guess I could put a single 4gig memory chip in my machine and three of these, but this gives me, what, like 378 gig of space?
Dang, I hoped someone had finally figured out that SSDs would make great (if slightly slow) memory. Why does an SSD need to be connected to SATA? Why not directly to the memory bus?
Everything old, is new again. :) so it was used for caching the "metadata" of things like NFS, rather than direct storage. :-/
Sun did this in the sparc 10 &20 line, by enabling an optional NVRAMM SIMM in the primary memory slot.
A whopping 4 megabytes of RAM max, I think
But putting something directly in memory, and accessing it through the memory bus 'normally' like a basic RAMdisk) sounds a whole lot more efficient than just sucking power from the slot, but looping back around through the SATA bus, so you can then get the data... back into the memory area
http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/802-5670/6i9dnsnct?l=en&a=view
No spindle noise too and it's not just the HDD that takes up a bunch of space, the bay itself can usually be quite chunky, and then there's the heat that they generate
If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.
You still need to use SATA cables. Notice how the picture in the article shows only one of those things in a slot? Guess why.
Also, for 1U, you usually slant the RAM at 45 degrees. Not possible with straigth nor with angled SATA connectors.
Also, the idea is ancient.
But all of this is irrelevant, anyway. People are already working to get the form factor Apple used in the new MacBook Air into other hardware. I am not sure if it's the perfect form factor, but it seems to work reasonably well, it's not a horribly broken crutch like the above and it exists. In 3-12 months, most 1U servers will have one or two of those slots on-board. Problem solved.
Where have you seen this before?
I've seen IDE/PATA flash drives that fit inside of the 40-pin connector and can be powered off the IDE pins or externally through a molex connector. And internal USB flash drives that fit on the 5x2 pin mobo connector (which generally fall out during shipping, bad idea). But for SATA the equivalent didn't exist, because SATA can't come up with enough power on its own to drive anything useful.
It is possible to make a super low profile PCIe flash card that fits in a 1U mobo without any bracket, which would be equivalent to this SATADIMM thing, but better. but all of the PCI/PCIe flash drives on the market are currently full height.