Want faster hard drives?

[spidey07]

HOLY SMOKES! Talk about a breakthru!!!!

http://www.emc.com/about/news/...s/us/2008/011408-1.htm

Because there are no mechanical components in flash drives, they require less power. In a storage array, flash drives can store a terabyte of data using 38 percent less energy than traditional mechanical disk drives. It would take 30 15,000 RPM Fibre Channel disk drives to deliver the same performance as a single flash drive, which translates into a dramatic 98 percent reduction in power consumption in a transaction-per-second comparison.

EMC plans to offer flash drives in 73 GB and 146 GB capacities for the Symmetrix DMX-4 platform beginning later in Q1 2008.

Imagine striping databases across 30 separate flash drives. This stuff is so fast you don't even want cache involved, just straight from the disk.

 

[ViviTheMage]

Isn't this in a few laptops right now?

 

[SunnyD]

So I take it these aren't typical NAND flash devices, otherwise they'd die within a month on a typical computer.

Wasn't it EVE Online that installed SSD's on their main database last year?

 

[loup garou]

Originally posted by: ViviTheMage
Isn't this in a few laptops right now?

These are enterprise level SSDs, but yes, SSDs are available on quite a few laptops already.

Let me see if I can dig up the article on the super fast SSD array somebody built a while back...

EDIT: Battleship MTron

 

[purbeast0]

so how much will those 2 drives probably cost?

 

[BZeto]

Can't flash memory only handle so many read/writes before going bad? Granted the number is probably pretty large I recall the average lifespan was quite a bit less than a standard hard disk drive. This is pretty exciting news though.

 

[SunnyD]

Originally posted by: purbeast0
so how much will those 2 drives probably cost?

Take a look and answer that question yourself.

 

[IceBergSLiM]

Originally posted by: ViviTheMage
Isn't this in a few laptops right now?

yes. dell is shipping SSD now

 

[rivan]

Yep, solid state storage is now a reality, if you have enough zeros on the check.

 

[ViviTheMage]

just have to wait for them to become a reality price for the consumers, like me. I would love to get one for my laptop, or desktop at home.

 

[Joemonkey]

We've got a Dell 420 (or is it a 430? don't remember) here with a 32GB solid state HDD, didn't raise the price TOO terribly much

 

[Anubis]

NICE, cant wait till that 140GB one is somewhat affordable, fing awsome as a boot Drive

 

[randay]

Consumer SSD is unreliable and slow. The performance advantage of SSD is access times, power consumption, and shock resistance. throughput is ass, which is really the only spec most of us will care about.

Industrial SSD is much better, but youre talking thousands of dollars for mediocre amounts of storage.

 

[GagHalfrunt]

Originally posted by: ViviTheMage
just have to wait for them to become a reality price for the consumers, like me. I would love to get one for my laptop, or desktop at home.

They're pretty close to being in the ballpark already provided you don't have high storage demands. I can see this moving to the consumer level VERY quickly.

 

[frostedflakes]

Originally posted by: SunnyD
So I take it these aren't typical NAND flash devices, otherwise they'd die within a month on a typical computer.

Wasn't it EVE Online that installed SSD's on their main database last year?

Due to wear leveling algorithms and other advancements, flash has come a long way in terms of durability. MTron, a large manufacturer of enterprise (and more recently, enthusiast) flash disks, claims a lifetime of >147 years at 50GB write per day for the 32GB models.

Also keep in mind that the larger a flash drive the more bits it has over which to spread wear, so as drives become larger durability is only going to increase.

EDIT: Also considering they're some of the highest performance drives currently available, the MTrons are pretty reasonably priced -- 16GB are as low as $400 and 32GB is $600. Still not cheap by any means, but give it a few years and I bet we'll have 32GB drives in the $100-200 range.

 

[bigrash]

Apple is shipping the Macbook Air with 64gb SSD, but that option costs $1000 more.

 

[Chadder007]

Originally posted by: randay
Consumer SSD is unreliable and slow. The performance advantage of SSD is access times, power consumption, and shock resistance. throughput is ass, which is really the only spec most of us will care about.

Industrial SSD is much better, but youre talking thousands of dollars for mediocre amounts of storage.

How is Consumer SSD unreliable then? I just know that its a tad slow with select drives.

 

[randay]

Originally posted by: Chadder007

Originally posted by: randay
Consumer SSD is unreliable and slow. The performance advantage of SSD is access times, power consumption, and shock resistance. throughput is ass, which is really the only spec most of us will care about.

Industrial SSD is much better, but youre talking thousands of dollars for mediocre amounts of storage.

How is Consumer SSD unreliable then? I just know that its a tad slow with select drives.

build quality\maturity. I figure its because its these taiwanese memory companies trying to break into the consumer SSD market, the tech is just too new. I would wait a few more generations before even considering SSD for any of my personal computers/laptops.

 

[beat mania]

They should just put like 10 SD slots on a laptop and RAID them.

 

[lokiju]

We have a few Dell laptop here at work with them already.

The 32GB ones.

My director has one in his.

Cost $800 extra just for that drive.

 

[Throckmorton]

I want BIG solid state drives to make their way to computers and mp3 players. A hard drive is a bad thing, because you KNOW for a fact that eventually it will fail.

 

[randay]

Originally posted by: Throckmorton
I want BIG solid state drives to make their way to computers and mp3 players. A hard drive is a bad thing, because you KNOW for a fact that eventually it will fail.

EVERYTHING eventually fails. SSD is not an exception.

 

[0roo0roo]

mtron has very fast ssd, even annadtech reviewed some. this isn't new. its just still very expensive. not all of them are fast either.

 

[Evadman]

AnandTech did 2 reviews on a few of the drives you know. Maybe read about 'em here?

 

[her209]

The article doesn't really quantify the MB/s throughput.