Solid State Drives?

[Dug]

I didn't know Bitboys moved into the storage market... Why do all the product specifications have asterisks, or preliminary next to them? I couldn't find a mention of any of their products that wasn't on their website. That and it appears that the fastest drive they have that uses a "standard" interface is UW SCSI which is only 40MB/s, not 230MB/s. For $60 I can get an ATA drive much faster than that that will perform better in Photoshop and video editing.

*=Specifications subject to change without notice
I don't know why don't you ask them? Maybe they haven't released it yet.

And don't compare them to Bitboys. At least they have a customer base that they have sold to before which is hell of a lot more then you can say for Bitboys.

Early flash disk, solid state disk storage E-Disk® SSD SCSI, IDE/ATA, and Fibre Channel technology adopters include Agilent, BAE Systems, BarcoView, BF Goodrich, Bechtel, Boeing, Caltech, Compaq, NEC, Daimler Chrysler, Dell, Ericsson, Elta, Hitachi, GTSI, FLIR, France CNES, Fujitsu, General Electric, General Dynamics, Harris, Honeywell, IBM, Intel, Israel Aircraft Industries, International Monetary Fund, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, Litton, L3 Communications, Lockheed Martin, Matsushita, Mitsubishi, Motorola, NASA, National Instruments, NATO, Nippon, NKK, Nokia, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, Saab, Samsung, Sandia Laboratory, Solectron, Sony, Toshiba, TRW, T-Systems, Thales, MIT, UC Berkeley, Transneft, and US Air Force, Army, Navy, and Marines
Partners include- Oracle, IBM, Sun, etc

And no its not something you could afford. Maybe you should look around the site some more like news and events and company milestones.

 

[pulse8]

Originally posted by: Pariah
"Solid state drives, while at this stage would be VERY expensive for this amount of storage, they could definitely be taken advantage of to its fullest capabilities in this manner."

Using SSD for video editing would be dumb for a number of reasons. Cost for one makes it completely impractical. 2, even if they were $5 a pop they would still be a terrible idea because they don't make them for recent storage interface standards. What you described above is pure throughput. When you're limited to UW-SCSI, it doesn't matter how fast the drive is capable of transferring data. Even if they made U320 SSD drives it still wouldn't be a practical solution for video editing. For $4000 I can build a SCSI RAID array that will exceed U320 throughput at the slowest parts of the drive and have over 200GB of storage that can hold about an 100 minutes of uncompressed DVD resolution video with audio. Anyone want to guess how far into the 5 digit range 200GB of SSD storage will cost? Using a drive capable of GB/s transfer rates won't yield any performance advantage when it's the interface dictating performance. The benefits of SSD and where mechanical drives cannot compete under any conditions is in high random I/O environments which video editing is not a part of.

Where did I state that they should start using it now? Of course it's too expensive to use now, that's probably the key factor they don't even think of it. Of course they don't make them for recent storage interface standards because they are probably only used now under special circumstances.

I never said they should start implementing these in every Avid system immediately. I'm just saying that when the technology for this matures, video editing will be one application that will take advantage of it. I wasn't claiming people should use it now I was merely pointing out an industry that could use this technology when it matures, which was contrary to ai42's idea that there aren't any applications that could use this technology.

 

[Pariah]

And I disagree that it will ever be useful in video editing. Regardless of the interface it can be maxed out using mechanical drives. There is no performance benefit moving to SSD for video editing.

 

[Alptraum]

Yeah, I don't see them becoming mainstream anytime soon. They have had special uses for years though. This one comp company I worked for in the early '90s (maybe 91ish I think) sold them. I think in the year or so I was there we sold 5, lol. And I do believe it was for some sort of AV operation. I can't remember specs all that well anymore but I think it was something like 20 or 40meg drives for around 5k each. For people that truly need that kind of speed they will always buy. For %98 or %99 of users they wont need it or be able to afford it even if they want it. But for a small group of people that not only need it and can afford it SSDrives are as viable now as they were 10 or more years ago.

 

[pulse8]

Originally posted by: Pariah
And I disagree that it will ever be useful in video editing. Regardless of the interface it can be maxed out using mechanical drives. There is no performance benefit moving to SSD for video editing.

You haven't stated anything about performace benefits, or lack of performance benefits, except for it's relation to current technology and price. Try editing a 2 hour movie in an uncompressed HD format with 6 video tracks and 12 audio tracks and see how many drives you need. It can be done with current hard drives, but no one does it because you'd need waaaaay too many. So, you downgrade the quality and then begin the offline process.

At some point it will become more cost effective to use one very large solid state drive and you can run all of those tracks off of one drive instead of 2 or 3 dozen. This is of course only if the technology goes in that direction.

If you'd rather do it with the 2 dozen drives, then be my guest. I'd rather not.

 

[Dug]

BiTMICRO's next generation of E-Disk flash drive controller chipset will have a 320 MB/sec internal FlashBus? bandwidth -- which will be unrivaled in the industry. This will enable E-Disk solid state flash drives to saturate IDE Ultra ATA 133 (UDMA 133), Serial ATA, Ultra 320 SCSI, iSCSI, InfiniBand and 2 Gbit per port Fibre Channel device interfaces.

The new generation E-Disk solid state storage device will deliver an industry record breaking sustained random read/write transfer rate of at least 230 MB/second and more than 50,000 random input/output per second (IOPS). Each device will be offered with up to 155 GB solid state storage capacity in 3.5-inch hard disk drive (HDD) footprint. First customer shipment is scheduled for 2003.

Also they just release their 3a66 IDE drive and the fiber has been available-

E-Disk® 3F2(4) 3.5" 2Gbit Dual Port 68 MB/sec 400 MB/sec 42 usec 12,500 512 MB - 77824 MB

That 68MB/sec is sustained random read and writes which you don't see with mechanical drives. They are usually quoted as sustained sequential reads.

Not saying its the best for av but the random read and writes an iops would help tremendously in everything including Photoshop.

 

[Pariah]

"Try editing a 2 hour movie in an uncompressed HD format with 6 video tracks and 12 audio tracks and see how many drives you need."

You're picking out freak cases, which are rare at best. But you still seem to be missing the point, that it is irrelevent how you max out the bandwidth, the end performance will still be the same.

"If you'd rather do it with the 2 dozen drives, then be my guest. I'd rather not."

You can max out U320 with 6 drives. I've seen plenty of video editing bays with that many drives.

I've read the releases Dug. They're phantom products right now. 2003 could be 14 months off. Regardless, these aren't practical products for the applications being discussed and by the time they are (if ever), something better will probably be upon us.

 

[pulse8]

You're picking out freak cases, which are rare at best. But you still seem to be missing the point, that it is irrelevent how you max out the bandwidth, the end performance will still be the same.

The end result will be the same, but you're missing the point of progressing technology. You're also missing my point that this is speculation of what could be accomplished in the FUTURE. I'm not picking out freak cases I'm taking something that many editors would like to be able to do and saying that future technology will allow them to do it.

These editing bays you've been in, what were they cutting? Were they offline editing bays or online editing bays? If they were offline, then they don't need the same speed requirements because they edit at low quality settings in order to fit everything on the drives and to make them run better without having to buy higher quality, faster drives.

You seem to be restrictive for some reason in comparing this with current technology. You keep saying that video editing can be maxed out with current drive technologies, but you're missing the whole idea of video technology progressing and the ultimate switch over to high definition video. I'm not trying to compare it to current technology, I'm just trying to say that if the technology matures, a solid state drive will ultimately be the ideal choice. You're either living inside a world where technology doesn't progress or you're ignorant as to what really goes on in the editing process.

 

[Pariah]

"You seem to be restrictive for some reason in comparing this with current technology. You keep saying that video editing can be maxed out with current drive technologies, but you're missing the whole idea of video technology progressing and the ultimate switch over to high definition video."

I don't worry about tomorrow's technology, when today's can already do it just as well. Sure I'd love to see petabyte drives with instantaneous access and infinite bandwidth in the smart media sized format, but that's so far off in to the future that it isn't worth debating. There is no indication that SSD is the future, so I don't see the point in discussing it. I doubt we'll see anything replace the current mechanical drives in the mainstream for probably another decade or more, there is plenty of room left for technological advancement in the field. By the time it does happen, I think it is very unlikely that SSD will be it.