TB-Sized Solid State Drives Announced 130
prostoalex writes "Several companies have announced solid state hard drives in excess of one terrabyte in size. ComputerWorld describes one from BitMicro that's just 3.5". Their flash drive will support up to 4 Gbps data transfer rate. From the article: 'SSDs access data in microseconds, instead of the millliseconds that traditional hard drives use to retrieve data. The BitMicro E-Disk Altima 4Gb FC delivers more than 55,000 I/O operations per second (IOPS) and has a sustained data transfer rate over 230MB/sec. By comparison, a fast hard drive for example will run at around 300 IOPS.'" Ah, the speed of tech. Seems like only last month we were talking about 500GB drives.
Don't Forget Fusion IO's PCIe Card Drive (Score:5, Informative)
The Texas Memory Systems datasheet claims 24 GB/second of random sustainable data bandwidth which is much higher than the Fusion IO card but it looks like they are serializing this possibly across multiple drives. They also claim higher (3.2 million) operations per second.
The BitMicro drive is groin grabbingly amazing in size but claims only 55k operations per second & sustained data transfer rate over 230MB/sec.
So what I would wager is that PCIe might provide more throughput than SATA but don't quote me on that. I'm interested to see where this goes & also curious to see whether we continue dumping drives on channels like the Texas Memory solution or if it just goes back to a server with a ton of PCIe slots on it and hot pluggable card swapping for 'drives.'
Worth revisiting is the fact that Fusion IO claims to be releasing the cards for sale next month. As we all know, sometimes it's just a case of who gets to market first that wins in the technology world.
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Ouch!
Re:Don't Forget Fusion IO's PCIe Card Drive (Score:4, Informative)
The Texas Memory Systems RAMSan requires 2500W of power.
For the BitMicro SSD: 230MB/s >> 800 Mb/s card, and 55K IOPS >> 300 IOPS for todays hard drives.
It sounds to me like the BitMicro is a clear winner, especially considering that today's fastest HDs deliver about 300 IOPS and a max of about 40MB/s sustained data transfer. You can RAID the drives to increase performance, but I imagine the same will hold true of the SSDs. The only issue is price. The Texas Memory System is out of the question - it makes an Intel P4 Extreme look like a power miser.
Re:Don't Forget Fusion IO's PCIe Card Drive (Score:4, Funny)
It appears that one of these is NOT ready to be used in your next laptop in the near future!
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It appears that one of these is NOT ready to be used in your next laptop in the near future!
You mis-converted... (Score:2)
??$/gig up to 1.5 tb, plus the cost of a 4G fiber card.
FusionIO is 700 MB/SEC + 87K iops (3x more bandwith, Exceeds SATA 2)
30$/gig up to a 640GB card (19k$)
TMS, its huge and heavy, and blows the doors off either product, and expensive. They have a $150/gb
product that is still pretty fast. 2GB/sec 100K iops (8x more than bitMicro)
Unless the Bitmicro comes in at a price that is below fusionIO ($30/gig) I don't see the point, just buy 3 fusionIO devices in raid-0
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Modern 7200 RPM SATA drives can deliver 70-100MB/s in sequential reads, depending on where the data is stored on the platters.
Most people don't know it, but hard drives have been getting steadily faster. Not crazy-insane-faster like semiconductors, but they have been making some sizable gains.
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Just FYI: the 60 MB/s surprises me for non SCSI hardware, that's a pretty darn good number.
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The OP apparently confused you when he incorrectly used Mb instead of MB.
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In the first video, at one point the CTO claims that a "regular hard drive can do around 100 IOPS" and that their device can do 100,000 IOPS. So that's probably where they get the 1000 times faster figure from.
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As long as your product doesn't suck, that is.
Re:Don't Forget Fusion IO's PCIe Card Drive (Score:5, Insightful)
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Yep. Still, in the pricerange they're in it's hardly single disks they're competing against, so comparing to those is about as useful as comparing with the performance of 5 1/4 inch floppys. Perhaps they want to have a market position as an SAN accelerator, but SAN cabinets in that range are pretty generous with RAM caches anyway and stripe storage over many spindles.
I tend to be sceptical a
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"You keep using that word. I do not think it means, what you think it means."
Clarification to the Summary required. (Score:5, Informative)
The BitMicro article goes on to say that the maximum capacity in a standard 3.5"x1" format is 640GB, so requiring around 2.5" for the full 1TB.
This is Slashdot, so we don't expect facts in the summary to be correct. However, this is still amazing progress.
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Re:Clarification to the Summary required. (Score:5, Informative)
It's actually 24U, and it consists of (what appear to be) 8 3U racked computers that each manage 128GB of RAM storage for the network, and have a 4 drive hot-swap array for backup.
Source: http://www.texmemsys.com/files/f000225.pdf [texmemsys.com]
It's a Ram Disk. (Score:5, Informative)
So, it's a giant ram disk with either flash or hard drive backup. http://www.superssd.com/faq.htm [superssd.com]
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By that time they'll upgrade to the ten terabyte version which comes with fresh batteries.
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So what happens two years down the road when the batteries can no longer hold out for the needed time?
If someone hasn't horribly neglected his/her job, the batteries will not reach such a state.
All UPS-systems have specifications on how long the batteries will last and any UPS that's in professional use should be services properly.
So should those in private use too actually, but it isn't part of anyones job-description to actually keep it serviced so most probably isn't.
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In other news (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:In other news (Score:5, Funny)
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This is not a drive... its an array (Score:4, Informative)
Their systems have been in use for years by folks who need speed at any cost.
Now, the BitMicro drives... those look interesting. I wonder if I can slot them into my StorageTek 6140
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I must admit that I'm drooling over this, there are times when having a drive that ridiculously fast would really come in handy. Of course I can't afford one of those just so that I can compile my software with the bottle neck being largely elsewhere.
And again... (Score:4, Interesting)
the bus will be the bottleneck (Score:3, Insightful)
Once that happens, PCs will really start to get useful!
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Except that you're still subject to driver limitations, and the driver probably makes assumptions about the maximum performance of the device that will limit you anyway :P
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Very nice (Score:4, Insightful)
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Hah. When I were a lad you could get a 7 MEGABYTE Winchester Hard Disk for a mere £3500 (what, about $5000?). (Source, 1981 copy of Personal Computer World).
That's about £10k in modern money (according to this calculator [thisismoney.co.uk] - a.k.a. $20k dollars (or $10k at Microsoft/Adobe screw-the-Brits rates).
Now, if you think that 1981 was, like, ancient history then GET OFF MY LAWN! If the usual growth rate applies, 1TB
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Its a bit more that VAT... (Score:2)
Correct me if I am wrong, but can't USAians avoid tax by buying from out-of-state?
Anyway, although you may need to ignore the tax to get the full £1=$1 ripoff story, the price differences in question are often far more than the tax.
E.g. Adobe CS 3 Design Standard Full from the Adobe online store: UK Price £895 *excluding* tax, US price $1,199 (About £600)...
Anyway, in the past (certainly in the era of that HD drive I quoted) the "VAT inclusive" rule only applied to "retail" shops and
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What I'm sure was meant was when they become competitive with their current hard drives.
In other words, right now, going to any solid-state storage system only makes sense in various specialized places. For example: You need performance at any cost, so you buy some battery-backed RAM with hard-disk backups. Or, you need something smaller and mor
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ReadyBoost, et al (Score:5, Interesting)
I've heard about doing this in Linux by mounting a USB key and using it as extra swap. Here's how in Ubuntu (from http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=395435:
1) Plug the USB drive in your USB connector;
2) If Ubuntu automount the device (usually in
3) sudo mkswap
4) sudo swapon -p 32767
"cat
Filename Type Size Used Priority
Quite obviously, performance is not the same as with real additional ram; however, I feel REAL gain in speed while using eclipse+tomcat+mysql for development on my laptop (which is equipped with just 512MB ram).
To turn it off, type:
"swapoff
Obviously you are going to be write limited due to the physical limitations of the flash disk, but reads will be very fast. ReadyBoost will keep a table of files that get read a lot, but written infrequently and then cache them on the flash device. It would probably be possible to do this at the disk driver level in linux with a fast database like BDB, keep a table of the last 1000 files read, if there's a write, remove them from the table. Then move those files up to the flash drive as a disk cache... there may be something like this already, like the Google Prefetch [google.com] project that's in the works.
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Unless there have been some really important changes in the performance of Flash memory, using it as swap would be like the second worst possible scenario in terms of it's life expectancy (using it for main memory would be the worst). Just how long is a typical Flash chip with a guaranteed average of 1 million write
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Since they are only a few dollars now, it's worth a shot. However, as I said, it would be better if it only used frequently READ files.
Windows XP (Score:2, Informative)
One terrabyte! (Score:4, Funny)
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I'm eagerly awaiting the unit "arrhabyte". I propose that it should stand for the amount of software you can pirate in a 24 hour period.
"Dude", I've got a whopping sixteen arrhabytes of warez here in my backpack!"
Just amazing. (Score:1)
Drive Life? (Score:1, Troll)
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The TMS RamSan is flash ssd with dynamic cache.
Attorns Hyperdrive is DRAM.
Bitmicros system is flash.
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My point is, is that if solid state drives had better known failure times, they could be better than the spinning platter types. Spinning platter drives tend to die whenever, for unknown reasons, and they also die if they just get too old. If using solid state drives could solve the first problem, and only have drives die at a known point in the future, whe
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Infiniband (Score:3, Informative)
TB-sized? (Score:5, Funny)
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First it was sneakernet, then the internet.
What are the ?iaa going to do now you can transfer a couple of movies just by sneezing !
Pretty soon, all information exchange is gonna be viral.
About time too (Score:2)
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This means you could build a little >100G RAID of those for 800$ or so.
And I believe the prices go down really fast (I paid 70$ for 2G in May 2006 and thought it was a good deal. Now I could get 8G for that price).
I guess you will get your 100GB flash before September 2008
Enjoy!
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Though the interface for connecting eighty of them onto a single SATA channel wouldn't be completely straightforward just from the point of view of I/O pins; each chip presents eight data pins and nine control pins, so you need a total of about 1500 pins on the disc-controller ICs.
For the early market you'd probably use FPGAs, you'd need six XC3S400A in one of the larger packages to get enough I/Os, which w
Quick Erase? (Score:4, Interesting)
I would like to see that feature incorporated into these consumer level drives. You never know when you might need to ditch that terabyte of pr0n in a hurry...
Re:Quick Erase? (Score:5, Funny)
Not to mention the British police will assume it's just encrypted and you'll get 5 years jail-time for not providing the key.
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Right, because when your house gets raided and the police see you erased your hard drive they just turn around and say "well played". 'Obstruction of justice' ringing any bells?
Since when is pr0n illegal? However, since you want to go down that path...
If whatever your drive contained was 'illegal' or sufficiently incriminating, it may very well be that an "obstruction of justice" charge is preferable to whatever charges would have come about from confiscation of the actual drive contents.
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Since when is pr0n illegal?
Well, why would you need to erase your entire drive for anyone besides the police? You'd have to have a serious lack of crisis management skills to erase your hard drive every time you heard your wife coming. It wouldn't exactly avert suspicion either...
'What are you doing in here honey? Why is the screen black?'
'Oh I'm just err.. reformatting it. Damn thing got corrupted'
'That new "solid state" thingie is useless, this is the third time this week you've had to do that!'
And yes, I know what you're thinking
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Well, why would you need to erase your entire drive for anyone besides the police?
Well, why would you need to encrypt your entire drive for anyone besides the police?
A laptop with a "quick erase" button would be useful to many businesses with people who travel in less than the safe regions. Same goes for people in less than free countries who are working for change. Full disk encryption doesn't stand up to rubber-hose cryptography very well.
I'm sure with more than 30 seconds to think about I could come up with any number of 'legitimate' uses.
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Re:Quick Erase? (Score:5, Funny)
All those zeroes... there must be something hidden in them. Produce the key at once!
Pseudocode (Score:2)
Right, because when your house gets raided and the police see you erased your hard drive they just turn around and say "well played". 'Obstruction of justice' ringing any bells?
if (time_in_jail(OBSTRUCTION_OF_JUSTICE) < time_in_jail(WHATS_ON_MY_HARD_DRIVE)) wipedrive();
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WANT!!!!!!! (Score:1)
This would be a whole lot nicer than my current stack of SCSI 15k drives, and I'll bet they put out a lot less heat too!
If you have to ask (Score:2)
EVE Online uses the TMS RamSan (Score:5, Interesting)
We've had a few EVE-Online stories lately, so I thought it might be interesting to some to point out that one of the users of the TMS setup is CCP Games, the makers of EVE Online. In fact if you click on 'success stories' in right sidebar of the first link in the summary you'll see a short article about CCP's first install of the TMS RamSan [superssd.com] a while back.
When? (Score:1)
getoffmylawn (Score:4, Funny)
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New! Improved! (Score:3, Interesting)
The marketing slogan should be... (Score:2)
{feel free to groan}
All This For the Modest Price Of.. (Score:4, Informative)
The starting capacity of a RamSan-400 (32GB) is $35,000. It includes:
-32GB DDRRAM storage
-one dual-ported 4Gb Fibre Channel controller
-hot swappable RAID 3 hard disk drives
-hot swappable and redundant power supplies
-redundant battery and fans
-IBM Chipkill in memory (redundant RAM)
-1 year return to factory warranty
Each additional 4Gb FC controller is $3,000 (up to 4 in each chassis).
The RamSan-400 can upgrade in 32GB increments for $18,000 (up to 128GB).
RamSan-400 (64GB) - $50,400
RamSan-400 (96GB) - $65,800
RamSan-400 (128GB) - $81,200
RamSan-500
The 1TB base-level system of a RamSan-500 (1TB SLC NAND Flash, 16GB DDR) is $200,000. It includes:
-one dual-ported 4Gb Fibre Channel controller
-hot swappable and redundant power supplies
-redundant battery and fans
-1 year return to factory warranty
The 2TB base-level system of a RamSan-500 (2TB SLC NAND Flash, 32GB DDR) is $300,000. It includes:
-two dual-ported 4Gb Fibre Channel controllers
-hot swappable and redundant power supplies
-redundant battery and fans
-1 year return to factory warranty
The RamSan-500 can upgrade DDR Cache.
-16GB to 32GB is $10,000
-32GB to 64GB is $20,000
Each additional 4Gb FC controller is $3,000 (up to 4 in each chassis).
In 24U? wow (Score:2)
Black book (Score:1)
Ya, and I'm rich too so I might get two, one for girls I like and one for girls I used to like! Ya!
Filesystems (Score:2, Insightful)
That's so 1980's ;) (Score:3, Informative)
Actually,
1. Even for low level disk access, that hasn't been so since the days of MFM hard drives. Nowadays everything uses LBA (Logical Block Addressing) [wikipedia.org]. Meaning that when the computer wants a certain sector it tells the hard drive, quite literall
the best part is (Score:1)
Woopity doo! Another announcement. (Score:1)
monster (Score:1, Interesting)
Tera- (symbol: T) is a prefix in the SI system of units denoting 1012, or 1,000,000,000,000 (1 million million).
Confirmed in 1960, it comes from the Greek , meaning monster.[1] It also bears a resemblance to the Greek prefix - meaning four; the coincidence of it signifying the fourth power of 1000 served as a model for the higher-order prefixes peta-, exa-, zetta- and yotta-, all of which are deliberately distorted forms of the Latin or Greek roots for the corresponding pow
2500 watss of power? (Score:2, Interesting)
"Requires 2,500 watts of power."
Huh?
bb4now,
PMC
Not Yet Convinced (Score:3, Insightful)
That's also why I don't have a plasma big screen yet. I'm using an alternative technology there as well.
What would OS/400's do? a huge leap into the SLS (Score:2)
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