Seriously, there is no viable alternative to SATA or SCSI?

[FishTankX]

Yeah. To everyone else who may be confused, when I say platter size I mean platter capacity when i'm talking about areal density. Ugh. Too late for me tonight.. i'm off to bed.

 

[Pariah]

Because the Raptor is based on year old technology. Comparing SCSI (higher RPM drives) to ATA is like comparing game PC capabilites to console capabilities. While ATA is constantly evolving, SCSI takes fewer steps forward which are bigger.

Seagate 10k.6: 36,000 Mbits/square inch
Fujitisu MAS 15k: 34.7 Gb/in2 areal density

What was available at the same time in ATA?

IBM 120GXP: 29.7 Gb/sq in

Since the current 10k and 15k drives have been released, 2 more generations of ATA (by IBM) have been released which has retaken the crown for ATA. When SCSI's next generation is released, it will likely be right in line with what ATA has. If you're wondering about the odd choice of drives, data density is a difficult stat to find, only some drive makers list them, and only for random drives.

And the 15K drives, they use 18GB platters. That's another halving. Which doesn't make any sense. It should only be a 50% decrease, if that.

That isn't true. The diameter of the platter includes the spindle. When the size of the platter decreases, the diameter of the spindle doesn't decrease, meaning all platter diameter that is lost is potential data storage. Also, HD's used zoned bit recording, so the outside tracks store more data than the inside tracks. So by cutting off the outside tracks, you lose a larger percentage of storage real estate than you lose percentage of tracks/cylinders.

 

[Sunny129]

i don't know if its been mentioned yet, but i think i skimmed across a post in this thread that touched on it. Flash RAMdisks are used in some of the systems you can find here, so that you essentially have a system whose OS, program files, media, etc. are all stored in RAM. its basically a "hard-drive-less" configuration. of course we all know how expensive memory is, and so the system i looked at starts at about $7,000, and i don't even know if that included the flash RAMdisks. but i could only imagine how fast access times would be if my OS and everything else were stored in RAM, and not on a HDD. obviously this is impractical given the current prices of memory, but i configured a system for purchase at that website just to have some fun, and after adding the options i did, the system came out close to $30k. i find it hard to believe there's much of a market for this, but there at least must be a small one if this company exists. i know this website has been referenced here in the forums in the past, but for those who haven't seen it, check it out...

EDIT: i just came across more info on the flash RAMdisks, or something they like to call PuRam Technology. the average seek time is 33 microseconds. my WD1200JB's seek time is 8.9 milliseconds. lets see...these "RAM hard drives" are faster by a factor of 300. compared to what we are used to, i bet that would seem like instant data access. interesting to say the least...

 

[FishTankX]

Problem - Individual flash cells have a max transfer rate of around 6MB/s.

Oh, by the way. I think somep eople were saying that site was a fake.

 

[Matthias99]

Regardless, as a consumer I am personally hoping someone either makes DRAM perform as fast as SRAM or be non-volatile like Flash. As it stands now, DRAM is not really optimized to do anything beyond what it already is employed to do, i.e. perform the role of bulk system RAM. And at the end of the day solid-state drives will simply not be as stellar as people would like them to be simply due to PCI bus limitations. Even if we migrate to PCI express or 66MHz/64bit PCI the bottom line is the ram in the drive is horribly bandwidth limited. We can readily saturate a PCI bus with a simple RAID-0 array, why spend the money for solid state?

Unfortunately, for technical reasons (because it's still based, essentially, on a modified CMOS flip-flop) DRAM *cannot* be faster than SRAM, and cannot be made nonvolatile (unless it has an onboard battery to keep it running). These are limitations imposed by physics, not a lack of research and effort.

I'm confused as to why solid-state drives are limited by the PCI bus. PCI Express (at, say, its 16X speed) offers far more bandwidth, up in the Gb/sec range. So do USB2.0 and Firewire. And why couldn't you put a SS drive on an IDE or SCSI (or Fibre Channel, which is also used in high-end drives but hasn't been discussed here) channel? And if they got cheap enough, someone would build a chipset with a dedicated controller in it just for that, effectively running it like a huge pool of system RAM.

I do see MRAM as an excellent contender for hard drive caches, as it completely sidesteps the "losing data on power loss" issue of a volatile cache. It'll be a while before it makes it as mass storage or system RAM (although, ironically, some of the first IBM computers used MRAM as permanent storage before they had invented magnetic hard drives.)

 

[sparkyclarky]

Originally posted by: FishTankX
Problem - Individual flash cells have a max transfer rate of around 6MB/s.

Oh, by the way. I think somep eople were saying that site was a fake.

And why would they say that? I see nothing on that site that an enthusiast with a boatload of cash can't do on his/her own.

 

[Sunny129]

Originally posted by: sparkyclarky

Originally posted by: FishTankX
Problem - Individual flash cells have a max transfer rate of around 6MB/s.

Oh, by the way. I think somep eople were saying that site was a fake.

And why would they say that? I see nothing on that site that an enthusiast with a boatload of cash can't do on his/her own.

yeah...i really didn't read into whether the whole thing was legit, or even real for that matter. all i did was check it out, custom build and price one computer, and i was done in a couple minutes. during that time i really didn't wonder if it was real or not. and if ritzy establishments can sell intangible services at outrageous prices (such as makeovers and hair stylings at $3,500 a pop) because they know the people who have that kind of money will come and spend it, then why not a $30,000 PC?

oh yeah, i guess i also overlooked the fact that a $30,000 computer isn't technically a "viable" solution to SATA or SCSI...well at least now we know some of the not-so-viable solutions to SATA and SCSI...

 

[Johnbear007]

30k for great justice

 

[sparkyclarky]

Originally posted by: Johnbear007
30k for great justice

What you say? Someone set up us the bomb?!

 

[BD231]

I don't think many realize just how much ATA/SATA sucks compared to SCSI. My only gripe with the current state of HDD's is that storage comes at a HORRIBLE CPU utilization cost, and SCSI comes in at a horrible price point/storage volume.

To put the stink on the sh*t we're stuck on a PCI bus.

The next viable step is making the SCSI spec standard and keeping the spindle speeds where they're at, anything else at this point is simply asking to much of an industry that moves so slow.