Solid State Drives

[MinorityReport]

The saturation of mechanical driven hard disk drives is slowly approaching.

The disk/ the platter/ the arm/ the motor all these moving mechanical parts put a perfomance barrier to HDD's which seems to have been constant over last 5 years.

What about RAM or solid state drives with no moving parts ? Last I heard IBM had an expensive one for 1-2 gig.

Is this the future for storage ? How expensive will it be ? What about heat and thermal radiation ? What options do we have now?

Perfomance wise there is no comparision. With Ram prices getting cheaper and cheaper everyday, maybe a 20 gig sub $500 solid state drive is not too far ...

I am just curious .. I want to put together a real fast machine and if any solid state HDD's are feasible solutions. Thanks

 

[Smilin]

Funny you should ask. I just read a review of one. It was $699 with no memory. It will handle four sticks (up to 4gb). It plugs into a PCI slot and has it's own power cord.

Not sure where the link is. I think I was on shacknews when I stumbled on it.

It's fast alright, but not as fast as you would think. It's limited by the PCI bus.

 

[Scootin159]

Originally posted by: Smilin
Funny you should ask. I just read a review of one. It was $699 with no memory. It will handle four sticks (up to 4gb). It plugs into a PCI slot and has it's own power cord.

Not sure where the link is. I think I was on shacknews when I stumbled on it.

It's fast alright, but not as fast as you would think. It's limited by the PCI bus.

One major problem with that one....it's not bootable...and limited to 4GB. Not really very practical, anyone who could use that might as well just get 4GB of RAM in their main memory.

I have heard of 20GB solid-state drives, but they are $1000's.

And rotating disks get faster with every new generation. There has been an obvious speed increase over the last 5 years.

 

[vinosuaf]

IBM is working on this thing called millipede which isn't a magnetic based hard disk drive but a disk drive nonetheless. It's based on the ability to indent into a thin polymer film using a atomic force microscope (AFM) tip. The points of these tips are a couple hundred angstroms across (1angstrom = 10^-10 meters). The system, to my understanding, uses a mems or nems type system such that the AFM tip can be pushed into the polymer disk. There is an array of these tips cantilevered so that 1024 of them can be working at once. The polymer layer can erase the bit by being heated removing the indentation. A system like this has significantly higher areal density that a standard GMR based hard drive does. It's known as millipede and you might be able to find some information on it at ibm's research webpage in a journal or something. The research division homepage is http://www.research.ibm.com

 

[rayster]

Quantum makes a series, or at least used to make one, that was a solid state disk with a Bernoulli drive hung off the back. When you wanted to shutdown the disk would dump an image onto the Bernoulli, on boot the Bernoulli would load the image first, so you could boot from it, just not that quickly. They have/had 6ns access times, and Quantum had all these whitepapers that said with these drives your CPU became the computing bottleneck rather than data access. Saw them at work in a db server a friend of mine had for some government deal, in a RAID5. Unbe-freaking-lievably fast... I remember the 3.2GB was $28K.

 

[MinorityReport]

I remember the 3.2GB was $28K

eeeeeeshhhhh

That ends my quest for solid state drives .:|

 

[ProviaFan]

Originally posted by: rayster
Quantum makes a series, or at least used to make one, that was a solid state disk with a Bernoulli drive hung off the back. When you wanted to shutdown the disk would dump an image onto the Bernoulli, on boot the Bernoulli would load the image first, so you could boot from it, just not that quickly. They have/had 6ns access times, and Quantum had all these whitepapers that said with these drives your CPU became the computing bottleneck rather than data access. Saw them at work in a db server a friend of mine had for some government deal, in a RAID5. Unbe-freaking-lievably fast... I remember the 3.2GB was $28K.

I read a while back about some "Rushmore" series that Quantum made (IIRC), but after some extensive googling didn't turn up anything at all, I figured that they were probably discontinued or something.

Bitmicro makes various kinds of SSDs up to around 150GB or so. They connect via IDE, SCSI, or fiber channel interfaces. Unfortunately, I've never seen where you could buy one anywhere, so I have no idea what the prices are.

 

[Smilin]

Originally posted by: Scootin159

Originally posted by: Smilin
Funny you should ask. I just read a review of one. It was $699 with no memory. It will handle four sticks (up to 4gb). It plugs into a PCI slot and has it's own power cord.

Not sure where the link is. I think I was on shacknews when I stumbled on it.

It's fast alright, but not as fast as you would think. It's limited by the PCI bus.

One major problem with that one....it's not bootable...and limited to 4GB. Not really very practical, anyone who could use that might as well just get 4GB of RAM in their main memory.

I have heard of 20GB solid-state drives, but they are $1000's.

And rotating disks get faster with every new generation. There has been an obvious speed increase over the last 5 years.

It's quite bootable. What makes you think it wouldn't be?

 

[Scootin159]

Originally posted by: Smilin

Originally posted by: Scootin159

Originally posted by: Smilin
Funny you should ask. I just read a review of one. It was $699 with no memory. It will handle four sticks (up to 4gb). It plugs into a PCI slot and has it's own power cord.

Not sure where the link is. I think I was on shacknews when I stumbled on it.

It's fast alright, but not as fast as you would think. It's limited by the PCI bus.

One major problem with that one....it's not bootable...and limited to 4GB. Not really very practical, anyone who could use that might as well just get 4GB of RAM in their main memory.

I have heard of 20GB solid-state drives, but they are $1000's.

And rotating disks get faster with every new generation. There has been an obvious speed increase over the last 5 years.

I just read a review of it & it said so.....I'm assuming that they just used the specs from the manufactuer...although I didn't actually do any research on my own...do you know otherwise?


It's quite bootable. What makes you think it wouldn't be?

 

[Tweakmeister]

MaximumPC (then called Boot...wow that ages me, that's when AMD first came out with the K6!)

Anyway, they had an article on a "Silicon Image" (?) made solid state drive. It was 20gb then and about $20k in price hah.

I think they are out of business. If you are like NSA and have your own fab then you can cook these things up all day

 

[Howard]

I believe this is what you are looking for.

Plugs into its own PCI slot.

 

[Reel]

Originally posted by: Smilin
Funny you should ask. I just read a review of one. It was $699 with no memory. It will handle four sticks (up to 4gb). It plugs into a PCI slot and has it's own power cord.

Not sure where the link is. I think I was on shacknews when I stumbled on it.

It's fast alright, but not as fast as you would think. It's limited by the PCI bus.

if its the same thing i saw, it was on slashdot (http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/11/09/2037208&mode=thread&tid=137).

To cut to the chase, here was the review on the Rocket Drive: http://www.3dretreat.com/reviews/rocketdrive/

 

[dejitaru]

if its the same thing i saw, it was on slashdot (http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/11/09/2037208&mode=thread&tid=137).
To cut to the chase, here was the review on the Rocket Drive: http://www.3dretreat.com/reviews/rocketdrive/

$3000 for 2 gigs? Can somebody say RAM disk?

IBM is working on one which rotates microscopic magnetic rings (or something like that), which are then held in place. This eliminates the need for battery backup. I want to see something like that in my Palm Pilot.

 

[ProviaFan]

Originally posted by: dejitaru

if its the same thing i saw, it was on slashdot (http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/11/09/2037208&mode=thread&tid=137).
To cut to the chase, here was the review on the Rocket Drive: http://www.3dretreat.com/reviews/rocketdrive/

$3000 for 2 gigs? Can somebody say RAM disk?

IBM is working on one which rotates microscopic magnetic rings (or something like that), which are then held in place. This eliminates the need for battery backup. I want to see something like that in my Palm Pilot.

If it's fast enough, I may want one for my desktop system.