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Solid State Hard Drives
IcePick writes " Solid State Hard Drives made by Quantum.
Installs and is recognized as a regular hard drive.
Has a seek time of under 60 micro-seconds.
Imagine using it as a swap disk for Windoze or other programs that need swap files.
Some versions are even Non-Volatile!
I wonder why Quantum has been so quiet about them?
"
So I can build my own external RAMdisk..
It's cheaper to put double the RAM in to a box.
the ram inside that thingie is not the same as your ram on your motherboard!
back in the old days, i had a 286 with a 3.0mb solidstate drive which was recognized as a 2.88mb floppy.. boy.. all my friends were amazed by the speed that system could reboot (now it's obsolete, i don't need to reboot without microsoft products)
I am the first to agree that Windows is a memory hog of the first order, but to imply that Linux doesn't need swap is to propagate a fallacy. (No, it didn't say that Linux doesn't need swap, but it's easy to infer from the write-up.)
FWIW, I have a GNU/Linux with 96 megs of memory and I go into swap all the time.
If you're going to knock Windows, great, more power to you. I do it all the time. But knock it honestly, or else you're no better than MS itself.
I have it still... one of these modules which you could stick into your C64. Had a monitor (=deassembler), cheat creator, faster disk routines and much more.
1541 drive = single sided 360k 5.25"
:) for personal backup purposes only, naturally.
1571 drive = double sided 720k 5.25"
1581 drive = double sided 1.4m 3.5"
i don't remember the names of those cool dual floppy drives that had their own 6502. you could download a copy program to the drive and do low-level copies of anything without the drive being attached to the c64 anymore.
In a summer issue of Boot magazine (If I remember correctly), they reviewed a SCSI solid-state disk. After seeing how fast it was, they copied their Windows partition to it, expecting to see a nice boot time speedup. The original hard disk boot was 64 seconds, and booting from the solid-state drive dropped it to only 60 seconds. :) Seems that most of the boot time is spent with registry processing, driver installation, etc.
:( But, I've also just got BeOS R4, and that boots up in under 16 seconds. Hopefully, it will be more resistant to boot bloat.
Unfortunately, they didn't try it with Linux or other OS's. I would like to know much improvement could be gained.
Finally, I remember when I first built my Wintel machine and installed Win95. Booted up in about 16 seconds. After installing all the software (sound card drivers, graphics, etc.) it now takes about a minute.
At $20 a meg it is a bit on the expensive side.
The 950 mb version would cost $19,000!
Barf.
The HP C30 Digital Camera uses compact flash memory. Sandisk is one vendor. PNY is another. I recently picked up a 8MB PNY compact flash chip for $19.99 at SEARS because it wasn't labeled and wasn't listed in their computer. The clerk made up the price. He obviously didn't know what other stores were selling the same thing for.
In any case, the PNY memory comes with a PCMCIA adaptor which with linux and PCMCIA card services makes an efficient method for transfering pictures to a laptop. It is mounted as a block device so you can write any file to the memory, not just a jpg.
/tmp is Solaris is shared with swap and essentially works as a ramdisk. It's wiped out whenever you boot, but that's ok for /tmp.
I would like to see something like this for Linux as well.
/Tommy -- forgot my passwd
If the capacity was larger it could be good for video or sound recording. Even some of the fastest SCSI drives can sometimes have problems keeping up. But 1 gig is way too small right now. I can fill up a 4 gig drive in a few minutes.
KL
if these are cheap enough, there's your solution to a drive for in-car usage for playing MP3's.
A little bit of social engineering has gotten me a free demo of the 1 gig volatile drive :) I'm gonna get a product demo next week and get to play with one for about two weeks or so... i'll post my experience :)
Ramdisks are great for macs. I've seen consistent %200 increases in ram disk boot speed. Also they are great for holding cache files etc...
For awhile, IBM was shipping SCSI drives with Adaptec 154x/2940 chips on them... It depends on the chipset used but it should be possible to make many host controllers emulate a disk.
There was also a project which used scsi controllers this way to do IP networking over the SCSI bus.
Why in the hell would you want EIDE? SCSI is the better choice here, religious wars aside..
Faster, higher throughput, and more drives on a chain. (e)IDE can have only two drives per controller. No getting around that. I'd bet that IDE RAID controller would be at least 5x the price of a comparable SCSI controller.
Sure they're fast, but they're sure expensive too, but there are a huge number of uses for a very fast drive, even if it's only about 1/10 to 1/50th the capacity of current magnetic media.
Proxy Caches - Squid running with one or more of these. Hmmm..
Journal FS - Never lags behind the physical media in writes.
Buffer FS - Super-fast buffers that you just treat like disk.
Mail Queues - Some of the biggest mail transaction hosts use these drives for their mail queue.
Mission Crititcal - The faster the data is stored, the less can go wrong to it if you lose power.
Anyway, enuff for now.
All you lamers who say, Oh PC100 DRAMS are cheeper failed to notice that these SolidState drives are NONVOLATILE, taht is you dont loose data after poweroff
2) they are low power
3) they are 100% reliable, you cant say a harddrive will NEVER FAIL
even if a HD has a 3 year life time gurantee, once you have 12 harddrives installed in a big server, prohability says, the next drive will fail in 3 months!!!
YOU CANT HAVE THAT the HUBBLE uses SOlidState, imagine if its harddrives failed???? you need 100% reliabliity, and it costs!!!
get a clue weenies
"I wonder why Quantum has been so quiet about them?" coz they used to cost $40 - $50k ??? no noes been quiet about it, their pages on seagate etc have had em for years
RESEARCH DUDE!! get out of your hole and know ur shit
if you dont know it all, ur not a nerd boyyyyyyyyyyy
-CB
No, you don't get it. You don't really know what you're talking about, do you? I have 768 Meg RAM in one system, 1 gig in another (the memory costs almost three times the PC). My systems are maxed out as far as memory goes. My RAID arrays cost about $12,000 and barely keep up. If I had super fast drive space I could dump video to disk much easier. Of course this is moot because a 1gig SSD is too expensive and not anywhere near large enough. Before you flame, know what you're talking about.
- 16MB-$20US
- 40MB-$120US
- 72MB-$290US
- (price exponential up to 144 MB)
They have QNX drivers, but nothing for Linux.They also have some sort of SSD embedded in a DIMM chip that they claim is usable with Linux.
Isn't the sustained reading rate part of what you look for when you are looking for a device to boot a system quickly ? With a **sustained** rate of only 3.5MB/s, this device you have mentioned would'nt seem to be any faster than say, an IDE IBM Deskstar 8 drive for example, capible of 5-10MB/s sustained (min-max). And this is just an **IDE** drive running at only 5400RPM. I don't think the reduced access time would make a difference significant enough to make up for the transfer rate. Am I missing something here?
The kernel memory management does all of that stuff on its own; no need for any special procedures, unless perhaps you want to tweak the way the kernel decides what to swap... :P
- RF (dfelker@cnu.edu)
Can't remember the dual floppy number either, but remember the suite of utilities called "Fast Hack'em"? It had a utility that would program two 1541's to copy from one to the other without having to be connected to the '64.
Of course, they had to be connected to the '64 initially to be programmed, but once programmed they could be disconnected and would copy as many disks as you wanted. Clever for early 80's technology...
Is the pricing low enough to be within the range of amateur hobbyists? If so, it would be a wonderful addition to a small robot, or for any electronic application requiring the stability of a solid state drive (I seem to remember a discussion about automobile computers a few days ago on /.).
Brock Arnason
M.Eng. Physics
United Bank of Switzerland
SSD have been around for decades, and have always been as expensive as this. I used a system with magnetic core emulating disks in the 1970s; semiconductor disks are nearly as old.
For mostly read-only use, the flash disks made by companies such as SanDisk work fine. Laptop IDE connector. Using them as swap will wear them out too fast, as the number of writes is limited. Note that some of the smaller ones are starting to show up in the surplus market; $200 for 20MB.
If you already have say 2 or 4 GB memory (why not on a quad Xeon ?). How can you improve things. You
put a SSD. Remember on Linux you can only use 2GB RAM (instead of 4) because of the virtual memory.
Non volatile version can be useful for putting important datas that need fast access for example
databases (what a surprise). You wouldn't lose all your data, I suppose. Even though the transfer rate doesn't seem spectacular (">30MB/s") the access time is (two orders of magnitude at least)...
I have two of prototype units on evaluation
and they are just great for their purpose.
These drives are designed to keep database
logs.
My only gripe with Quantum is that it drags
its feet with FC-AL version of these drives.
I suppose that it is not cost effective to
use them for swap because they cost about
the same as main memory, counting per megabyte.
--P
Sometimes 1GB just isn't enough. There's at least one program we use here (FormZ, unfortunately running on Windows, but I'm sure it would be almost as bad were it ported to Linux), that routinely exceeds 1.5GB in memory usage. I don't find it too hard to imagine someone using such software in a way that uses more. Now, if you take a 2GB memory motherboard, and a 1.5GB rushmore as swap space, you're set for fast swap up to 3.5GB of total memory usage. That can come in handy when you're doing serious 3D rendering.
----
Open mind, insert foot.
Um, of course it swaps. What do you expect it to do? Use up all the free memory with programs that are sleeping etc? I have a 128MB of RAM, and yes, I use swap under Linux. But compared to 98 where for some strange reason I've got 50MB of used memory on bootup and I start swapping pretty heavily after I open just one IE window....
Nick
Nick
FWIW, I have a GNU/Linux with 96 megs of memory and I go into swap all the time.
It will use swap even if you'll have more RAM than your current swap plus current RAM size -- try to disable swap, and you'll see that things will still work, unless you run something huge.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Companies like SuperNews that curn so many small little USENET stories, have so many hits to the hard drives, that normal drives litterally break down in no time. They NEED to use Solid state drives, otherwise they're replacing hard drives constantly.
--
Proud member of SVLUG
Posted by The Apocalyptic Lawnmower:
For losers that (have to) use NT (as I do ATM), since NT cannot work without a swapfile. We have a machine here that has 1GB of mem and if I set the swap to minimum (2MB) the machine goes bonkers when I start Njetscape.
According to our sysadmin it is because of the way NT allocates memory. Anyone has more info on that? It'll probably be good for a laugh.
- da Lawn
IF you're using it for swap, it becomes a lot more expensive than simply adding the same amount as main memory. Finging motherbaords to adress 1G is no big deal these days
Why not just common board and CPU, with 1Gb or so or RAM, and a 100Mb/s ether card, that boots linux of a floppy.
Add a UPS and a harddisk for power-off memory retention if you require it. (don't need the floppy then). Much cheaper than SCSI and not much worse.
would be a cheap box with a bunch of simm slots in it, so I could finally put all those old 72-pin simms I have to good use.
I must have a couple of gigs worth of 4meg 72-pin simms that would make a wicked-ass RAM drive.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
It looks like the largest of these drives is 1.6GB. Still good for a swapfile, but not much else.
--
Timur "too sexy for my code" Tabi, timur@tabi.org, http://www.tabi.org
Everyone says they're expensive. Just how expensive are they? I assume they're cheaper than DRAM per-unit of storage, right?
--
-- Knowledge shared is power lost. -- Aleister Crowley
I remember an ad from ages ago for a device which supposedly would load C64 games in 8 seconds or something, from a CD. Supposedly you attached the CD player to the C64 with a special cable of some sort.
Anyone know how that may have worked? My suspicion would be an interface from the digital output of a CD player to the C64's bus, writing directly to its RAM. Though most CD players didn't have digital outputs, IIRC.
According to Stephen C. Tweeedie, when we finally get journaling for ext2, the journal will be able to live on a separate filesystem, e.g. a non-volatile ramdisk. That will make for an awfully nice fileserver :-)
"I wonder why Quantum has been so quiet about them?"
Because they're EXPENSIVE. NEC makes SSDD's, too. Basically, they're intended for systems that need fast workspace and can't manage memory effectively, but can't be upgraded in other ways. Banks and other transaction-heavy, legacy-hardware operations eat 'em up.
Often, it seems cheaper and easier to retrofit old systems rather than port code to newer, faster systems. Devil you know vs. devil you don't and all that.
Flash, like EEPROM has a finite write/erase cycle endurance. It used to be around 10,000 writes, then as processes improved manufacturers guaranteed 100,000 write/erase cycles, and now 1,000,000 cycle endurance is common.
But 1M-writes is a matter of a few seconds with the right program. Once a cell has gone beyond its endurance of writes it stops remembering your data correctly.
There are remapping algorithms for moving writes around the total amount of memory, but if you will be committing a lot of writes over a long period (fifo type applications, for example) then these devices are not for you.
However, if your data changes seldom, but is read a lot more than written, they can make a lot of sense.
we use DiskOnChip2000 here at works, M-System make also SSD like quantum's one (IDE)
check m-sys it's cheaper than quantum i think
--
"Science will win because it works." - Stephen Hawking
Can we get a SCSI-3 host adapter to behave as if it were a client disk drive? If so, put said SCSI card in a system with a gig of SDRAM, a processor fast enough to handle both, a UPS and a magnetic drive for power-down/power failure backups and suddenly you've got a solid state disk with .2% of the seek time for 20% of the cost...
Yes, and Lynx -- even running in 8 instances in 8 xterms under X -- won't make it swap as
easily as 8 Navigator windows would.
Navigator under Windows isn't happy about having 8 windows open either.
Your point was what, to compare browsers?
RAMdisks used to be popular in the pre-Windoze days. Is there a technical reason you don't hear much about them now?
.tmp files on the disk regardless of how much memory is available and unused.
I understand the basic issue you don't want to take memory away from cache and the os/application space... my question assumes the computer has enough memory to operate correctly, and the reason you even want a RAMdisk is because many applications -always- create
Using a RAMdisk *strictly* for application and system temporary files. Like for the print spooler if it uses disk space, or other files not created by the user and which should if the app doesn't forget, be deleted.
Ever open a Word document with graphics and linked objects? It creates a ton of tmp files and they're not always deleted when you exit. Another example is WinZIP, which for SOME reason will still use your TEMP space even if you open zips on a system with lots of memory. If you have 1.5 GB RAM I don't see why a compression utility should use the hard disk as scratch space.
I miss the "Commodore-64 2-second boot" days.
Kythe
(Remove "x"'s from
Kythe
The real speed demons were the old tape drives. What was the throughput on those, 'anyone remember? Maybe about 10 kB/minute? Kids today just don't know how easy they've got it... ;^)
One could do some pretty funky things with those 1541 drives. The on-board processor and memory made for some fun times.
Kythe
(Remove "x"'s from
Kythe
What happened to American Computer Corporation's plans to release SSD drives that were near the cost of a standard magnetic hard disk drive. I remember reading about it. Course something could be said for the fact that the company claimed the technology was taken from aliens, and that AT&T invented the transistor by reverse-engineering parts from the Roswell crash..... but hey, everyone is a bit eccentric sometimes
Food: It's whats for dinner
btw, URL is
Food: It's whats for dinner
btw, url is http://accpc.com/tcapdisplay.htm
Food: It's whats for dinner
Sheesh, if you're swapping you should add more RAM.
One of these would be great for your / partition though if you want to boot fast... then again, considering the prevalence of the uptime fetish...
Back in the DOS days, with my whopping 8mb memory, my autoexec.bat would create a 500k ram disk and copy utilities like pkzip, list, zdir et al to it. Made the machine really snappy! It's no longer useful due to good disk caches.
I always mod up spelling trolls.
These would make the ultimate mp3 storage for in-car players. Of course, with the prices being as high as they are, they would probably only be at home in ultra-expensive cars...
All you would need is a motherboard with built in sound and scsi, one of these, and some hack of an interface to the serial or parallel port. With a low profile socket-7 processor, you could probably fit the entire contraption under the passenger seat!!!
There used to be a company that sold something similar to that, it had 4 72 pin simm slots, a narrow scsi interface, and a nicad batery pack...Maximum 256 megs..
Those three pieces of technology should date the little bugger for ya.. I haven't seen one in several years...
How about using 150 NS DRAM instead of 10 NS SDRAM???? Even with "slow" DRAM, the device would obliterate a head/platter unit.... the place I would like to see something like this is indeed for those programs the use /tmp or some other such temp files... Obviously putting swap space on the drive would be worthless instead of spending much less money on additional system memory, but some programs MUST use temp files...
Quantum has been making solid state drives for quite some time. They are effective for some purposes. They are usually cheaper than RAM and have higher throughput than traditional disks. They have gotten less popular over time as disks have gotten faster and cheap memory technology hasn't as much. Back in the late 80s, a solid-state drive could really be a system boost.
Anyway, yes they exist. They are a bit expensive, and several media makers (seagate, quantum) sell them.
-josh
Solid state disks are generally used with I/O critical database servers like Sybase and Oracle. You can place your OLTP critical data on them instead of a regular disk and see some immediate improvements in performance and throughput.
With DRAM prices having been in the tank lately, they ought to be almost reasonable (considering what they used to cost). Of course, working in the DRAM business, I say buy 'em!
Digiteck has a rushmore quantum 950Mb for
$15,000. You could buy more than a dozen GIGS
for that much of PC100 DIMMs...
...
<^>_<(ô ô)>_<^>
CALL EH38J-YF QUANTUM CORPORA SOLID STATEDRI 1+ 12944.000 CALL
CALL EH54E-TY QUANTUM CORPORA ESP5047 475MB W 1+ 10824.000 CALL
CALL EH54E-YF QUANTUM CORPORA SLDSTATE 475MB 1+ 10190.000 CALL
CALL EH54F-TY QUANTUM CORPORA ESP5047W 475MB 1+ 10824.000 CALL
CALL EH54G-TY QUANTUM CORPORA ESP5047WD 475MB 1+ 10824.000 CALL
CALL EH54G-YF QUANTUM CORPORA ESP5047WD 475MB 1+ 10190.000 CALL
CALL EH59E-FP QUANTUM CORPORA SOLID STATE DRI CALL CALL CALL
CALL EH59E-TY QUANTUM CORPORA ESP5095 950MB W 1+ 19645.000 CALL
CALL EH59E-YF QUANTUM CORPORA ESP5095 950MB W 1+ 19011.000 CALL
CALL EH59G-TY QUANTUM CORPORA ESP5095WD 950MB 1+ 19645.000 CALL
<^>_<(ô ô)>_<^>
You see ads for these drives in computer magazines
like COMPUTER SHOPPER all the time! There is no
reason to really push advertisement of these items
because they are extremely expensive and very few
of us can afford them.
This article about solid state disk drives is not news in any way whatsoever. There is nothing new here...
Another place where I think it would serve a useful purpose is in maintaining the local cache for the AFS cache manager. The CODA file system
has a similar process, but I don't remember if
it's called a cache manager or not. Also, and
this is really repeating what a couple of people
have already said, if a job is IO bound, then
actually using it for a filesystem would not be
unreasonable. Like all things, an engineering
decision would need to be made on the cost/benifit
ratio. I do think they are cool, but last time
I saw prices I shuddered!
-- Some people say they can tell the time by looking at the Sun, but I have trouble seeing the numbers.
Being an engineer that actively maintains a supercomputer SSD, and having built one for home once upon a time, I think I can safely comment here. SSDs are dieing out due to high prices and the cheapness of disk and memory today.
In some fields such as supercomputing they will
be with us for a while. When 2 gigs of memory
costs upwards of $2million USD, SSDs are worthwhile.
For home use their used to be a few companies
that sold enclosures that were SCSI-1/2 compat. and took standard 30 pinn simms. The first I recall was on Mac, and used mac simms (ugh)
Later I built one myself using 30 pin parity
and built the parity into SCSI parity.
Wish I could find a home kit to reuse all
these 30 and 72 pinn simms, sipps and dimms...
It would make a NIFTY addition to an online
server for something like Tribes or quake.
AFS cache or NFS cachefs space...
fly on the wall...
These drives are old news. They've been around for several years. We had a few installed in our VAX 3000/4000 cluster around 1994...but the technology hasn't particularly matured and the pricing is astronomically high. They are a dying breed. We dumped ours in favor of magnetic media and the amount of hard drive space that we were able to buy for the money was significantly greater than the amount of solid state "drive" space. Count me out.
Then again probably more so.
...and the time will have come. And the name shall be known... The Kylrathi Viper Clan.
And most are non-volatile. Actually I can't remember seeing ads for anything but non-volatile solid state disks... After all, it's meant to replace a normal harddisk, not RAM.
One place SSD's are VERY useful is in embedded systems - no mechanical motion will affect them, they work on low power - great for logging data that's being collected (drop a PIC with an SSD into a shipping container to monitor heat/humid/vibration and make the shipper honor agreements (not an uncommon use). Don't use them for Swap - RAM is a gazillionth the price and just as useful.
C