Want faster hard drives?

[her209]

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.

Seek time or throughput?

 

[invidia]

Originally posted by: 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.

We are no where near the point where scientists, engineers, and physicists can design a fail-safe, eternal hard drive.

 

[Modelworks]

I imagine througput would be a its main limitation.
You have to connect it to the pc somehow.
So its got to either have a sataII, scsi, or fiber interface.
Those are going to be its limitiations at the very least, unless they intend to create their own standard.

 

[Rubycon]

Originally posted by: spidey07
It would take 30 15,000 RPM Fibre Channel disk drives to deliver the same performance as a single flash drive

Ummm no it would not. Mechanical drives will win big time in those numbers. Just half that many spindles will provide over 1,000 MB/S STR.

Originally posted by: spidey07

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.

The cache will still be faster. Controllers with battery backed up DDR3 cache capacity of a single disk member (up to 300GB RAM) will tromp SSD's. SSD's
excel in shock resistance, lower power consumption, and random access times.

When the price comes down to about 2x of a mechanical drive they will start replacing them in desktop PC's which is definitely welcome. A single desktop
drive on a SATA/PATA controller has anemic performance in comparison. High performance FCAL/SAS arrays, OTOH will remain king for some time.
(until their member disks are replaced with SSD's)

Oh and btw this belongs here.

 

[Muadib]

Threads like this make me want to upgrade my pc.

 

[Howard]

BiT MICRO has had SSDs for years, and even Quantum had their Rushmore line. =\

 

[imported_Baloo]

Flash drives have been available, and shipping in some laptop models, for over a year now. But they ain't faster then hard disk drives. In fact, they are quite a bit slower. Access times are faster, but read and write speeds are much slower, about half what a typical hard drive can do on the outside tracks. Maybe in another year or so they will have improved the technology enough to exceed HDD read/write speeds.


Oh, and the hardware forum is that way -->

 

[spidey07]

Originally posted by: Rubycon

Originally posted by: spidey07
It would take 30 15,000 RPM Fibre Channel disk drives to deliver the same performance as a single flash drive

Ummm no it would not. Mechanical drives will win big time in those numbers. Just half that many spindles will provide over 1,000 MB/S STR.

Originally posted by: spidey07

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.

The cache will still be faster. Controllers with battery backed up DDR3 cache capacity of a single disk member (up to 300GB RAM) will tromp SSD's. SSD's
excel in shock resistance, lower power consumption, and random access times.

When the price comes down to about 2x of a mechanical drive they will start replacing them in desktop PC's which is definitely welcome. A single desktop
drive on a SATA/PATA controller has anemic performance in comparison. High performance FCAL/SAS arrays, OTOH will remain king for some time.
(until their member disks are replaced with SSD's)

Oh and btw this belongs here.

Hey, I'm just quoting from the article. This is a SIGNIFICANT movement in storage. Granted the article is from the manufacturer and it's marketing department so take that with a grain of salt. This is mainly aimed at large storage and performance necessary for high transaction systems.

Moving data fast is easy, changing data fast is not when there's applications involved. From what I heard through the grape vine the drives will run around 15,000 dollars - not bad, 30 times the performance for 15 times the cost.

-edit-
I REALLY wish we had an enterprise computing sub-forum.

 

[kevman]

Originally posted by: 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.

From this article

Longevity/Lifespan

Unlike DRAM, flash memory chips have a limited lifespan. Further, different flash chips have a different number of write cycles before errors start to occur. Flash chips with 300,000 write cycles are common, and currently the best flash chips are rated at 1,000,000 write cycles per block (with 8,000 blocks per chip). Now, just because a flash chip has a given write cycle rating, it doesn't mean that the chip will self-destruct as soon as that threshold is reached. It means that a flash chip with a 1 million Erase/Write endurance threshold limit will have only 0.02 percent of the sample population turn into a bad block when the write threshold is reached for that block.The better flash SSD manufacturers have two ways to increase the longevity of the drives: First, a "balancing" algorithm is used. This monitors how many times each disk block has been written. This will greatly extend the life of the drive. The better manufacturers have "wear-leveling" algorithms that balance the data intelligently, avoiding both exacerbating the wearing of the blocks and "thrashing" of the disk: When a given block has been written above a certain percentage threshold, the SSD will (in the background, avoiding performance decreases) swap the data in that block with the data in a block that has exhibited a "read-only-like" characteristic. Second, should bad blocks occur, they are mapped out as they would be on a rotating disk. With usage patterns of writing gigabytes per day, each flash-based SSD should last hundreds of years, depending on capacity. If it has a DRAM cache, it'll last even longer.

 

[frostedflakes]

Originally posted by: her209

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.

Seek time or throughput?

Probably referring to IOPS (I/O operations per second).

Originally posted by: Baloo
Flash drives have been available, and shipping in some laptop models, for over a year now. But they ain't faster then hard disk drives. In fact, they are quite a bit slower. Access times are faster, but read and write speeds are much slower, about half what a typical hard drive can do on the outside tracks. Maybe in another year or so they will have improved the technology enough to exceed HDD read/write speeds.


Oh, and the hardware forum is that way -->

Depends on the drive. Many have pretty lackluster performance, probably on par with mechanical HDDs (slightly worse for some applications and slightly better for others, so it all evens out). But the MTrons, for example, offer 120/90MBps and 100/80MBps sustained read/write on their drives. Even the fastest mechanical HDDs available (such as Samsung's F1 series with monster 333GB platters) can't sustain reads above about 95MBps. On top of that the access time is orders of magnitude lower than traditional HDDs. And they're only going to get faster and cheaper as time goes on. I'm confident that within a few years we'll see affordable flash drives that are able to nearly saturate an SATAII bus (300MBps). Soon enough I think SSD will be the obvious choice for OS/application drives, and then for those who require more space traditional HDDs can be used for multimedia and other data that doesn't benefit much/any from lower access times and higher throughput.

 

[redly]

haha...I am going through the process of getting SSD quotes.

Here is an example of what I am seeing

2.5in or 3.5in, SATA 60MB/sec read - 45MB/sec write, standard temp grade
16GB - $420
32GB - $710
64GB - $1680
128GB - $3250
256GB - $6840

 

[Throckmorton]

Originally posted by: invidia

Originally posted by: 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.

We are no where near the point where scientists, engineers, and physicists can design a fail-safe, eternal hard drive.

Won't a flash hard drive last much longer or is the read/write limit a problem?

 

[George P Burdell]

In terms of price, the sweet spot for the next year or two is gonna be hybrid drives.

 

[Xavier434]

In any case, this is probably the way of the future. It just needs 2-3 more years before I get involved with it for various reasons. Many of which have already been discussed in this thread.

 

[RichUK]

Originally posted by: SunnyD

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

Take a look and answer that question yourself.

$3,219.99 for 128GBs - That's not bad, I'll have four.

 

[LordSnailz]

Originally posted by: 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.

What do you mean by quality, this are solid state drives, it's not like mag. drives where there's a higher chance of failure with movement, hence the excitement with solid state drives.

Maturity will give you larger drives and faster throughput time ... not sure I understand how you can say they're more unreliable just cause they're new.

 

[randomlinh]

SSD's will be a reality when I see 120GB for under $200.