Solid state drives

[imported_miahallen]

It seems all SSD on the market are only targeting corporate buyers.

I'd like to see a device that is user upgradable with SD flash memory, seems like it'd be easy to develope, and as SD media increases in size, users would be able to upgrade.

Imaging a PCI bus powered card with varying configurations of 4-16 SD card interfaces. You can currently buy 2GB SD cards for about $65 on newegg. Then have a SATAII interface for fast transfer (maybe even implementing a RAID controller in a higher end version??). If they could develope a basic 4-port version for <$100, you could get 8GB capacity for ~$360, and upgrade ad capacity increases, and prices fall.

Does anyone else like the idea?

 

[PurdueRy]

Originally posted by: miahallen
It seems all SSD on the market are only targeting corporate buyers.

I'd like to see a device that is user upgradable with SD flash memory, seems like it'd be easy to develope, and as SD media increases in size, users would be able to upgrade.

Imaging a PCI bus powered card with varying configurations of 4-16 SD card interfaces. You can currently buy 2GB SD cards for about $65 on newegg. Then have a SATAII interface for fast transfer (maybe even implementing a RAID controller in a higher end version??). If they could develope a basic 4-port version for <$100, you could get 8GB capacity for ~$360, and upgrade ad capacity increases, and prices fall.

Does anyone else like the idea?

no

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: miahallen
It seems all SSD on the market are only targeting corporate buyers.

I'd like to see a device that is user upgradable with SD flash memory, seems like it'd be easy to develope, and as SD media increases in size, users would be able to upgrade.

Imaging a PCI bus powered card with varying configurations of 4-16 SD card interfaces. You can currently buy 2GB SD cards for about $65 on newegg. Then have a SATAII interface for fast transfer (maybe even implementing a RAID controller in a higher end version??). If they could develope a basic 4-port version for <$100, you could get 8GB capacity for ~$360, and upgrade ad capacity increases, and prices fall.

Does anyone else like the idea?

Why wouldn't you just buy CF cards with CF->IDE or CF->SATA adapters and use regular disk controllers? People have been doing this for a while; it's hardly a new idea.

I don't see it being a big market item unless flash memory comes WAY down in price; it's just too expensive. The vast majority of users aren't going to spend $30-50/GB on storage just so their programs load a little faster. Flash gets down to ~$1/GB, and you can get 64-128GB flash cards, maybe you have something with broad market appeal. Assuming that hard drives don't get bigger, faster, and cheaper.

 

[SexyK]

Most flash memory cards are slower than hard disks anyway... so what's the point?

EDIT: and you'd kill the flash drives pretty fast if you used them as your primary disk...

 

[BD2003]

Originally posted by: SexyK
Most flash memory cards are slower than hard disks anyway... so what's the point?

EDIT: and you'd kill the flash drives pretty fast if you used them as your primary disk...

Yep, theyre not meant to read and write so often. Most solid state drives are more like RAM than flash ROM.

 

[Googer]

Originally posted by: Matthias99

Originally posted by: miahallen
It seems all SSD on the market are only targeting corporate buyers.

I'd like to see a device that is user upgradable with SD flash memory, seems like it'd be easy to develope, and as SD media increases in size, users would be able to upgrade.

Imaging a PCI bus powered card with varying configurations of 4-16 SD card interfaces. You can currently buy 2GB SD cards for about $65 on newegg. Then have a SATAII interface for fast transfer (maybe even implementing a RAID controller in a higher end version??). If they could develope a basic 4-port version for <$100, you could get 8GB capacity for ~$360, and upgrade ad capacity increases, and prices fall.

Does anyone else like the idea?

Why wouldn't you just buy CF cards with CF->IDE or CF->SATA adapters and use regular disk controllers? People have been doing this for a while; it's hardly a new idea.

I don't see it being a big market item unless flash memory comes WAY down in price; it's just too expensive. The vast majority of users aren't going to spend $30-50/GB on storage just so their programs load a little faster. Flash gets down to ~$1/GB, and you can get 64-128GB flash cards, maybe you have something with broad market appeal. Assuming that hard drives don't get bigger, faster, and cheaper.

Compact flash = 20MB/s
Typical HDD = 40-90MB/s

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: Googer
Compact flash = 20MB/s
Typical HDD = 40-90MB/s

Yeah, but with 1/100th the access time (or better); you're basically running at the interface speed in terms of latency with a flash card on an IDE/SATA interface. I'd take the flash drive any day unless I REALLY needed high STR, since seek times tend to dominate a lot of single-user drive usage pattern. Plus, at current flash card sizes, you'd have to use multiple cards to get any kind of usable capacity, so you might as well run them in RAID0 (which would take away a lot of the speed disadvantage).

It's not a bad idea, except it's stupidly expensive compared to hard drives, and so wouldn't be worth it for most people (and for people with lots of money who NEED very high disk performance, there are even faster alternatives, like battery-backed DRAM 'hard drives'). You could buy SEVERAL pretty nice computers for less than what 60GB of flash drives would cost you, and that still wouldn't be much storage for a lot of people! Write limitations on flash could be a problem, but with internal write leveling, this would only really come into play if you had a VERY write-heavy workload, like using it as a swapfile that was almost continually in use.

 

[coryg]

I use SSD drives for certain applications. These are rugged, high altituded applications that need some storage storage. Cost is very high and speed is typically low, but for RUGGED applications, there are no other viable solutions.