What is Digg?67 Comments
- TridenTBoy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+42Imagine the cost...
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -3/+20and your mother wants you to instantly move out of the basement. Cmmon dude. Your 30, it's time.
- merreborn, on 10/12/2007, -5/+20"Imagine the slowness of extended sequential read/writes"
Solid state drives are far faster than magnetic drives. They're also require less power, and are more resistant to physical shocks such as being dropped.
The only thing keeping them from seeing mass adoption at this point is price. - cquinnd, on 10/12/2007, -0/+15We still (used to) refer to 3.5" removable media of 1.4 to 2.8 MB as "floppies" even though they come in a more rigid case than the old paper envelope style of 5.25" and 8" disks.
The "hard" in the term "Hard Drive" used to refer to the rigid metal platters of the early drives in mainframe systems, but there have been platters made with ceramics, glass, other metals and even plastics. So the materials that make up the drive are only part of the definition of what it is... you also have to consider the drive firmware and interface that it uses to connect to the rest of the system. And most hard drives these days come with a significant amount of memory chips already built in as the drive buffer.
In this case, the CPU doesn't need to know it is talking to a bunch of memory chips, it just sees a fixed device that identifies itself as a form of storage similar to other hard drives.. - merreborn, on 10/12/2007, -2/+13The problem is drives are advertised in Gigabytes, but computers measure stoarge in Gibibytes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibibyte - whisk3rs, on 10/12/2007, -2/+12At last. Stateless drive technology catches up with the times.
Only now we can't really call them "hard drives" or "disks" since they're just a bunch of memory chips. Right? - geronimo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8There's a difference between your ubuntu desktop and a server doing a continuous 20MB-100MB/sec read/writes for years. I have been waiting for these puppies for years but I'll wait for serious use before I kick out my hard drives. There has always been a problem w/ solid state drives choking after a certain amount of operations, I hope that is fixed. I want to stack 10 of those things together for a kick ass RAID 10.
- rayman901, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7Imagine 4 of these in a RAID setup :)
- chroko, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8Toms Hardware tested a Samsung SSD drive last year. This chart clearly shows that reads / writes are fixed at 50MB/s / 30MB/s - no matter how much data you're manipulating. Random access or linear reads. In fact, the only bottleneck with this drive is the ATA-66 interface (which they're probably using for lower power consumption):
http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/09/20/conventional_hard_drive_obsoletism/page4.html#benchmark_results
http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/09/20/conventional_hard_drive_obsoletism/page5.html
Boot times are twice as fast - under 12 seconds for SSD vs 22 seconds for the fastest ATA-100 HDD:
http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/09/20/conventional_hard_drive_obsoletism/page6.html
For application performance, it absolutely slaughtered conventional drives:
http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/09/20/conventional_hard_drive_obsoletism/page7.html
But why look at benchmarks when you can wildly speculate? - jet3004, on 10/12/2007, -3/+10Glad it's marketed at such an odd (but even) capacity...
Side Note:
One of my pet peeves in the world of tech is the fact that a 100GB HD isn't REALLY 100GB and a 1TB drive certainly is not 1TB. I know why this is but honestly...Would it kill them to make a drive a tad bit bigger and it ACTUALLY be it's advertised capacity...? - merreborn, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8"-The lack of moving parts makes it far, far more reliable, and much less likely to break"
Doesn't matter. Failure still happens. And when it does, you'd better be ready for it.
"Due to the INSANE r/w/s (read/write/seek) speed of these"
It can always be faster. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5I heard they'll be accepting firstborn and possibly secondborn children as well.
- Klinky, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5People who post about the Gibibyte thing act like it has been around forever. It has not been around forever. It was introduced in 1998 by the International Electrotechnical Commission. However the use of "giga" or "kilo" in relation to a value 1024 has been used in the computer world for decades. There has always been confusion to some extent over if a gigabyte is 1024MB or 1,000,000,000 bytes. Hard disk makers adopted their own version. The rest of the computer industry seemingly adopted the other version. But I am tired of hearing people saying "Gibibyte" is the correct way of saying "Gigabyte", it's simply not true.
- geronimo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4ipod shuffle has it.
- fuzzball963, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Battery life would also be stupidly high with this thing as well. The hard drive is one of the biggest culprits of energy waste in a laptop next to the screen.
"Dreams of a Macbook Pro with a 125GB solid state drive to replace his 100GB drive" - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -3/+6Having these in a raid would almost be pointless.
-The lack of moving parts makes it far, far more reliable, and much less likely to break
-Due to the INSANE r/w/s (read/write/seek) speed of these, performance-based raid's would only really matter when we can use all of the available bandwidth on one channel, spreading it out evenly across 2 won't make it any faster. (although the r/w/s times could be cut in half, it's probably already at 4-5ms) - Arramol, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I hear it's buy-one-get-one-free when you pay in souls.
- wush, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5I guess all storage manufacturers need to be forced in to using the real GiB unit. No one is going to take the first step as they'd likely be at a disadvantage if competitors didn't follow.
- EdgeOfEpsilon, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3No. This likely uses flash memory, which is no-volatile (it retains data even with no power).
- Firehed, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Indeed, the damned curse of binary versus decimal notation. I'm still looking for a hack so the filesystem will report actual gigabytes (as opposed to the gibibytes it currently shows) so it at least *looks* bigger. I really with they'd do that with CD/DVD burning software, because pulling together 4.7GiB of data to burn only to discover that the disc really only holds 4.4GiB or so gets old quick. Thankfully, RAM manufacturers don't do this (or, rather, they advertise the size in GiB which is what the OS uses) - hopefully this will also be the case for these drives too. Not that I care seeing that I'll end up with nonexistant seek times and notably better battery life.
- matt0ne, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3So what are the advantages of solid-state drives with day-to-day use? Would you have a quicker read-write speed etc? What would be the equivalent in a regular HD?
- childprey, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Nano is using it as well
- bblades, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3There will be hybrid drives way before there are solid state only drives. For instance having a 250gb drive with 50gb of that being solid state. There will probably be applications out there that optimize your disk space so that all your non essential stuff runs off of the traditional harddrive while applications and your os run off the solid state portion.
- heavensblade23, on 10/12/2007, -3/+5They're not actually that much faster at the moment. Some tech site did a Windows install on a solid state drive and while it cut the load time down by like half, it still took 45 seconds to load the OS.
- ktonini, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I'll take two.
- jamend, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3SSD drives have good access times (obviously) but only mediocre read/write speeds, so RAID 0 would still be beneficial. Actually, one of the problems with RAID 0 is that it increases sustainable throughput at the expense of access time, so having negligible access times would be an advantage of SSDs.
- cquinnd, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2If you mean we might move up to a point where SSD or memory is the standard for boot and system access, and HDs are moved to secondary storage and archival usage, that has already been happening for years on the large scale (Look at Google, and how they have massive data-farms of drives, but try to get most of their hits from searches already loaded into memory).
I wouldn't mind in a year or two, booting from a decent sized SSD, and having a TB drive or two on hand for backup, media editing/serving, and game files.
This development might also help the growth of hybrid drive technology.
- Ahnteis, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Something might soon pass a WD Raptor for *consumer* system drives? Cool!
Now if only they can get some cheap 1TB + drives for media storage. - kohan69, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Shouldn't the costs be less in the long run?
There are no mechanical parts, the only thing that's a barrier is the manufactouring costs for memory chips, but in progress of these drives, they will be MUCH cheaper $/GB than old drives. - cquinnd, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2No, the hybrid drive designs I have seen were all based on SATA standards, running on a generic laptop. The only difference was the need to have support in the operating system to take advantage of the redundancy allowed for by the built in flash. It might be possible to simple access that part of the hardware as a seperate storage space altogether.
- eLbot, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Seeing as we’re showing off the biggest, may as well show off the fastest:
http://www.curtisssd.com/products/drives/hyperxclr/
Personal favourite SSD guide: http://www.storagesearch.com/ssd-buyers-guide.html - MadOgre, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2I want one... but not for 5 Grand.
- flamingmb, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2"and might be shipping about six months from now......." at a price of $5000.
this thing is going to cost so much. - jamend, on 10/12/2007, -3/+4Manufacturers are using the "real" GB unit. Windows and other operating systems are using GiB while still calling it GB, so they are at fault (unless you want to blame SI).
- 13thfloor, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2No moving parts. That should also mean better battery life for a laptop.
- geronimo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1it would be phenomenally faster. Think of going from 5ms - 10ms to 15 microseconds(RAM speed), 250 x's faster.
Turn it on and everything is booted within seconds. - slayerab, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2There's a difference between your ubuntu desktop and a server doing a continuous 20MB-100MB/sec read/writes for years. I have been waiting for these puppies for years but I'll wait for serious use before I kick out my hard drives. There has always been a problem w/ solid state drives choking after a certain amount of operations, I hope that is fixed. I want to stack 10 of those things together for a kick ass RAID 10.
Totally understand what you are saying and it seems that these flash drives would only make sense using in laptops, i mean how often do you have the chance to drop a server when carrying it to from one classroom to another? - ridinlow, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1damn that swan is ugly...
- Namtaru, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1edit: too slow
- khyberkitsune, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Here's what I wanna see, now.
With drives like this, and lightweight, I'd like to see a small daughterboard riser for a bunch of these to plug into near the front of the mobo in relation to the mounting inside the case.We could make our cooling requirements lower and we could ake the computer more compact.
I wish I had the sobriety to give you a better mental picture. Sorry, guys. - EdgeOfEpsilon, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1My MacBook takes about 15 watts (that's multiplying the current A*h by the voltage and dividing by the estimated battery life). HDDs only take around 2-3 watts. As you mentioned, the screen is a much bigger culprit, at about 6 watts. Some of that's the backlight (80% of which is absorbed by the color filter), and some is the active matrix LCD. So battery life will be better with this, but not fantastically so.
Now, SSDs, OLED / e-paper screens, and 45 nm process? Hellz ya. Get those nano-fiber capacitors in there instead of Li-Ion and we could charge it up in minutes, and use it for 12 hours. - stockjones, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Very cool hope this continues in the direction of desktop PC's No moving parts no platters, just memory baby.
- kohan69, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1You're wrong.
Hybrid drives can only be used in proprietery systems due to hardware compatibility. - ellisgl, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Fast? 200 MB/s? HA! Check this out!
http://www.superssd.com/products/tera-ramsan/
Of course I would just settle for this:
http://www.superssd.com/products/ramsan-300/
Of course a 16GB unit starts off at 28K.. - cquinnd, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1kohan69
Whether it is platters or memory chips, the rest of the components that make up the hard drive, the assembly process, and the testing of devices still adds costs over and above the intial materials. Platter-based Hard drives are also built with a certain amount of redundancy to account for bad sectors and other defects; which may not be the case for solid state manufacturing. - grumpyrain, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Also form factor. There is no reason it needs to be in the shape and size of a lappy hard drive apart from the fact that they already have a hole that shape in current designs. But seek time (the time it takes for the disk to return the first byte) is the real advantage. Cost for that size is the disadvantage, although eventually they will be cheaper at that size (a 1GB flash drive at retail is cheaper than it is possible to manufacture a 1GB hard drive).
- CarlosReyes, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Could you put like, lets say, 20 of these in a RAID setup.. i mean, they are pretty small, I bet they don't use as much power...
- aserer511, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Do these SSDs tend to eat memory because they have to be constantly powered?
- Yoshi39, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1From the RamSan-300 site:
"The World's Fastest Storage™"
How can you trademark that! - ahhell, on 10/12/2007, -3/+3Smeagel was wrong....THIS is the true Precious.
Me wantsssss it. -
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