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Intel Promises 'Optane' SSDs Based On Technology Faster Than Flash In 2016
holy_calamity writes: Intel today announced that it will introduce SSDs based on a new non-volatile memory that is significantly faster than flash in 2016. A prototype was shown operating at around seven times as fast as a high-end SSD available today. Intel's new 3D Xpoint memory technology was developed in collaboration with Micron and is said to be capable of operating as much as 1000 times faster than flash. Scant details have been released, but the technology has similarities with the RRAM and memristor technologies being persued by other companies.
Intel can't go faster than Barry Allen.
He's the fastest man alive! Ain't nobody faster than the Flash!
They lie...
"I love animals! Some are cute, others are tasty, what's not to like?" - Betsy Schroeder, Jeopardy contestant
They use the word "affordable" in such a way that leads me to suspect they are talking more about what a large company's version of "affordable" would be as opposed to someone who has to live on a somewhat more limited budget.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
You can't call them "flash drives" if it isn't flash memory, can you? We need a name that conveys the increased speed, and that maybe plays up the 3D aspect, where capacity can grow by expansion along the Z axis as well as the traditional X and Y dimensions.
I know! They can call them "Zip drives"!
Don't they know it's not cool nowadays to be associated with gasoline?
TFA was very short on detail, so I went looking for more. Unfortunately, there seems not to be much more out there - everyone is reporting on the same short-on-detail presentation. Here's a few which seemed to me to have something to add:
kitguru has more pictures
pcworld has pictures of actual silicon (not that it has any visible detail)
digitaltrends has some interesting commentary (last two paragraphs).
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
How many write-cycles before they start breaking down? Is it better than current SSD/Flash?
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
I wonder at what point can we abandon RAM and run things straight from these drives? Fewer layers, no swapping, less components, much simpler OS - no need for memory management. How awesome would that be!
If you look at Newegg and Amazon reviews, you'll find that perhaps the most reliable drives are 1TB in capacity and somewhat behind the cutting edge. Sure, you can get 6TB drives, but they're ticking timebombs. They have unacceptably high failure rates. As such, we're already on course for flash SSDs to overtake mechanical drives, because a 1TB SSD is approaching the price of an enterprise mechanical drive. The instant an even cheaper alternative comes out, mechanical drives are dead. They won't be cheaper by the megabyte anymore, and you can't trust them. Manufacturers COULD try to make them more reliable, but that would require more testing of individual units before shipping, which would increases costs even further. Indeed, the only reason mechanical drives are as cheap as they are is because MANUFACTURERS DO NOT TEST THEIR DRIVES. They are specifically designed so that they don't NEED to be tested. They have all kinds of failsafe mechanisms, vibration management, power management, temperature management, sector remapping, and they're over-engineered. A drive can be half broken, but you won't know because it's likely to keep working just fine. The ones that are DOA or die right away are really the worst of the lot and far more broken than you realize. The designers put all their efforts in at design time so as to cut manufacturing costs. But the end is very very near.
or will these ones also commit suicide when they can't be written to anymore?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
" Sure, you can get 6TB drives, but they're ticking timebombs. "
So if you try to take it on an airplane you'll get you computer confiscated by the TSA and your destination changed to Gitmo
Yes, precisely!
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Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Intel demoed the SSD version of the 3D XPoint device at IDF today.
If you listen to the keynote, they say that they'll be releasing 3D XPoint storage in both SSD and DIMM form factors next year.
The demo was relative to the Intel DC P3700 (their fastest NAND based SSD).
The DC (Data Center) P3700 is a PCI Gen3 x4 SSD. There may be higher performance SSDs out there but this one is extremely good.
http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/solid-state-drives/ssd-dc-p3700-spec.html
Using IOMETER, the results for the 3D XPoint SSD were 5x-7x faster than the DC P3700.
They claimed that the demo used short queue lengths so as to show more real-world conditions. They didn't say how short.
This will be the death of mechanical hard drives
Let's not have a party before the fat lady has sung. This XPoint stuff smells "too good to be true". Maybe it's a real thing, but there will be some kind of catch, like extremely high price to be a realistic alternative to HDDs or Flash SSDs. Big technology jumps are actually quite rare in IT. Money is milked by doing small improvements along the way.
Reliability does not matter much, even the most reliable drives need to be in redundant RAID. And then the reliability does not matter anymore.
Today there is almost no difference on which SSD you use. A final user can use either a basic OCZ Trion 100 or the latest and fastest SSD out there, he/she will not notice any difference unless you are running specific benchmarks. Sometimes It is even more important to check which chipset you get. The difference could be huge when using ASMedia, Marvell or the latest Intel chipset, sometimes this makes a bigger difference than the SSD itself. With that said, we are in a place where actually disk are faster than controllers, so I hope intel have also a solution for that.
And yes, I know about the PCIe and M2 solutions that are faster than the standard 550Mb/s offered by SATA, but these formats are currently for most users prohibitive.
Yes, precisely!
And heaven help you if you wear a beard.
So we can all look forward to massive lawsuits spanning at least five years before enough palms are greased and beaks wetted to release this magic to the proles.
This is getting to the point where you can use this as a non volatile RAM drive
Why are other peoples sig's always more witty ???
Obviously you haven't ever had a redundant RAID cluster fail. I personally always suggest a redundant array of inexpensive redundant RAID disks. Or if you want to be EXTRA cautious, even mirroring that would give an extra layer of protection.
These drives are 7 time faster than the fastest SSD, but also more expensive. That should be the other way around to be beneficial to PC users.
SSDs are currently too expensive to use as bulk storage, so normally you have a small SSD, which has the OS and other frequently accessed files and then you have a HDD which holds less used large files (i.e. video library etc.)
The HDD is an order of magnitude slower that the SSD, so this is really what is slowing down the system. This 3D XCross drive is making the part of the system that is already fast, faster.
Personally, I use RAIRRAID-z2, since it uses less storage space capacity per disk hard drive for parity error detecting.
Have you ever actually worked with RAID? There is first of all the issue of all the redundancy failing before you realize it. Then poof, the next failure takes ALL of your data with it forever. There is also the issue of your redundancy failing, and while you're integrating replacement of the redundancy and the RAID is resilvering (which is a big strain on all the drives) a further failure occurs and ... poof again.
RAID is a game of percentages, and reliability/lifetime of the drives DOES matter.
I run my multiple servers in RAID. "failing before you realize it" - mdadm --monitor immediately reports that. I haven't yet faced the second failure of degraded array. Besides RAID6 I guess only a few blocks would get lost, the drives do not disappear completely from my experience.
Even with moders algorithms for remapping blocks, one of the points that keeps me laeving SSDs by the wayside is that they only have a limited number of erase cycles. The numbers have improved over the year, but it is still a kind of storage that has an upper limit of write accesses, making it undesirable for all those small fast writes (swap, database tables, filesystem transaction logs) where the speed would have made them really interesting. For me, the introduction of those flash drives has just replaced the problem of mechanical failure with another, IMHO unacceptable limitation.
Does anybody know how this new drive type rates in regarsd to write/erase cycle limitations?