You’re just waiting for that clock to tick over to 5:00, right (well, you West-coasters anyway)? When I was a 9-to-5er, I had the same compulsive time-checking starting a little after 4, especially on Mondays and Fridays. Well, here’s something to tide you over until it’s safe to leave — something you might have to pick back up at home, since it’s a bit technical and lengthy.
The SSD revolution is moving along as we speak, a sort of slow revolution that will take many years to replace our trusty mechanical hard drives. Cost is one issue, but that’s changing, and the other is the idea of SSD wear and tear. You may have heard that consumer SSD drives have memory cells (which hold the 1s and 0s in SSDs) that wear out after 10,000 discharges. This leads to a sort of data fragmentation which can be damaging to both capacity and speed. In practice, that can be many years, but how the cells wear down, when, and how to minimize it is a serious area of research. Configuring the drive controller differently can lead to huge increases in performance, major lengthening of mean time before failure, and all that. Anand covers a lot of these issues in detail in this monster of a post.
This is something we’ve seen in super-high-end storage systems, but is now being implemented on a enthusiast consumer level. The OCZ Colossus, within its featureless 3.5″ enclosure, sports two RAIDed SSD drives mounted to a single PCB. You can bet it’s going to be fast, though the RAID controller is apparently rated to “only” 260MB/s. With two drives (or four in the Colossus 4X), you’d think they’d easily hit that, but you’d also be right to expect more from a configuration like this.
Although engineers continually devise new ways to conquer obstacles previously thought insurmountable, in the case of solid state storage, we may actually be approaching a point where the current theory just doesn’t work.
The size of cells in memory arrays is getting so small that each one now holds just 100 electrons. That means that an array based on current theory can only get 100 times bigger before it hits its absolute maximum — one electron per cell — and even that is ridiculous.
We’re seeing SSDs popping up more and more, in plain drive form or included with high-performance laptops.
There’s lots of news to sift through and it’s easy to get lost and wonder “Are any of these stupid things different from each other apart from capacity?” And the short answer is… yeah. But imagine I’m saying that while looking skeptical and making a “ehh” motion with my hand.
Intel has been the go-to guy for SSDs these days. While others are trying to bring the cost down or kick up the performance so high it costs a couple thou, Intel has been the one filling storage space in high-performance servers due to the drives’ reliability and high speed. But lovable memory maker Corsair is pushing out some drives that may hit Intel below the belt.
SSDs are fast, enduring and expensive. The G Drive mini is no exception; 120GB of solid state storage built into an all-aluminum enclosure priced at $599. Let us see what else can be expected from this small and reliable storage device
So we all know that SSD drives are fast, but how do those numbers translate into the real world? And what would happen if you had unlimited funds and wanted to build a 24-unit RAID to see exactly what they can do?
There’s an interesting community-powered Q&A that’s just been posted over here at HardOCP in which their forum members were invited to ask questions of an Intel SSD engineer. There are many interesting questions asked and answered, regarding power consumption, which OS or file system to use, whether there are “grades” of flash, and more.
It’s kind of technical at times, but here are a couple points I thought were particularly interesting:
Miniaturization is one of the driving forces in the tech world, not just in the size of your media player or whatnot, but in the size of the nano-scale components that make it up. Processors, for example, are approaching the barrier of quantum effects on their transistor units, and are having to work around it. Similarly, flash memory makers are going to be hitting a wall a few years down the line and are looking for the tech that will take them over it. Graphene may be the answer they’re searching for — or not.
That’s a lot of gigs! Until just now, 256GB was the upper limit on SSD capacity, and chances are it’s the size you’ll be getting in your laptops and such over the next year — they’ll be available in April but probably super expensive. Toshiba, however, has decided that 256 is not enough, and has doubled the capacity of its 2.5″ drives to a massive 512GB, which rivals HDDs in size, if not in price. I have to say, the read and write speeds aren’t looking too shabby, either.
The 1.8″ form factor drives have been bumped to up to 256GB, which means you may be seeing some seriously spacious media players soon (likely expensive as well). I’ll be checking this out personally at CES in January.
[via Akihabara News]
This incredibly fast storage solution from Fusion-io is made for servers, but could easily be repurposed for home use, if you’re interested in spending a few grand on the setup. The idea is actually very simple: it’s a NAND storage array that connects via PCIe. In most computers your PCIe slots are taken up by graphics cards, since they’re the only pieces of hardware that need the kind of throughput provided by that interface. Well, servers don’t need video cards and a PCIe interface allows for some seriously high bandwidth hard drive access.
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Hey, look at this deal! You can see what all the SSD fuss is about for just thirty bucks after a $60 mail-in rebate.
Tiger Direct has the 32GB OCZ SATA II 2.5-inch solid state drive for $89.99 with a $60 mail-in rebate. The rebate deal is good until 11/30 – that’s tomorrow — so you’ll have to be relatively nimble if you want to see that $60 ever again.
The rebate applies to higher capacity OCZ SSDs as well, but it’s $60 across the board so the 32GB drive is the best deal.
OCZ Core Series 32GB SATA II 2.5" Solid State Drive [Tiger Direct via dealspl.us]
Like Seagate, Western Digital doesn’t see a market to enter in the form of SSDs right now. They’re open to it, and eventually will make their mark, but at the moment it’s not compelling to them. I love this quote from one of their head marketing guys that makes it sound like the company runs on clockwork:
Western Digital enters markets that exist, announces products when they are available, and runs a tight model with opportunities greater than resources such that we take a controlled, methodical, sequential, incremental approach to product portfolio expansion.
Mr. Rutledge then rakishly added, “In bed.”
Seriously, though, it looks as if spinning hard drives are going to be around for a good long time yet for certain price points; although we think of them as being volatile and archaic, they’re really unbelievable little machines and I don’t blame companies like WD and Seagate for wanting to protect their investments.
Just a few months after letting loose their 128GB SSD, Samsung is joining Micron and Toshiba in the exclusive Quartergig Solid club in South _____shire (that’s for all the Austen fans). The new drive boasts read speeds up to 220MB/s and writes up to 200MB/s, which makes it half-faster than the Microns and way faster than the Toshibas.
Expect to see these all over the place soon.
So SanDisk has said they’ve got a technology called ExtremeFFS that will increase random SSD write speed by like a million percent. Sounds great, right? So what is it? Well, what they do is take all the stuff that’s going to be written on the SSD and instead of trickling it to the disk at the maximum random write rate (very slow compared to sequential writes), it writes it to “virtual storage,” assumed to be RAM, and then writes it to the SSD at the maximum rate it can go.
Wait, did I read that correctly? Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t this entire “technology” just a bigger cache? The write speed is not improved at all, it’s just tricking the OS into thinking it’s writing onto the SSD as fast as it is writing onto RAM. I guess that kind of makes sense, but it’s a bit misleading, and seems like it would be pretty taxing on the RAM.[I stand corrected] The technology does have some other benefits, however (NAND channel independence is good), and it doesn’t appear to harm anything, so I guess this is good news.
Update: I believe I misinterpreted this! It decouples the physical and logical location of a piece of information, so that when data is physically written, it is written to the location that is fastest and easiest for the SSD — based on free blocks and anti-wear-and-tear algorithms — and the information on the physical location is kept in “virtual storage,” and the OS can’t tell the difference because the shuffling is done at the controller level.
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One of the biggest obstacles in the uptake of SSDs is the price, as I’m sure you, sir, are well aware. We keep hearing about the benefits of SSDs, but how many of us have flash-based storage outside of our mp3 players? It’s just not cost-effective — yet. Predictably, Samsung wants to change that.
They’re introducing a line of low-capacity SSDs that are “highly cost-efficient to manufacture.” There’s a catch. They’re not very high performance, and in fact the lower capacity you go with, the lower the write speeds: 32GB, 70MB/s. 16GB, 45MB/s. 8GB, 25MB/s. Ew! Still, Samsung came out on top of the latest roundup, so at least we’re getting the worst from the best. No pricing was mentioned, which bodes ill for your wallet.
The guys from Tom’s Hardware have a lot of time and solid-state drives on their hands. They compiled a list of 14 SSDs and compared them. In the end, they feel (just like I do), that SSD isn’t really the best choice right now. The technology is still too new and expensive, so the benefits do not justify the cost — yet.
If you’re dying to know and really don’t want to read the whole thing, let me save you some time. All of them are pretty evenly matched. The only difference is that some of them are faster at reading/writing and others are more energy efficient — but never by that much.
The only one Tom’s Hardware thought was really worthwhile was Samsung’s 64 GB SSD SATA-2 drive, which was the complete package at a reasonable cost. I hope the 128GB ones perform as well.
Remember the RAM-SAN 500, that flash RAID array that basically is the fastest thing on the earth right now? Well, if you’re a special effects artist or run a huge, high speed media database or something, you might need a little more space than they have available. So what do you do? You stack eight of them on top of one another and you run that thing as one hell of a high-speed storage solution.
It goes at 800,000 I/Os per second, has 12GB/s of bandwidth, and uses only 2.5KW of power – that’s about three high-end power supplies’ worth.
Don’t have quite that amount of scrilla? Well, you can always pick up the more budget solution, but it’s only 6.5TB of high-speed flash memory. Normally I’d flip my bit over something like that, but after seeing that RAM-SAN array, everything else seems to have gotten its volume turned down a bit.
When you have something as modular as a PC, with all its little bits individually replaceable but still interdependent, it stands to reason that advances in one area might necessitate changes in another. Better video cards demand faster interfaces; thus, PCI Express x16. Faster processors and motherboard functions require more power; thus, more pins on the connector. Now, SSDs are taking over the storage space and your hard drive controller deserves a critical look. After all, the setup and drivers are based on 20 years of working with the limitations of spinning platters, a certain kind of sequential reads, and so on.
Indilinx has been working on (and has finalized) a new controller specifically for SSDs. The new architecture, called Barefoot, has allowed them to reach speeds of 230MB/second, which is twice what a single unit could do last I checked, and getting on towards as much as four could do in RAID-0. Although Memoright and Texas Memory’s RAM-SANs are technically faster, it’s worth noting that both (especially RAM-SAN) are extremely expensive. The Barefoot modules should be more scalable and will get the best out of any SSDs you have lying around up to 512GB. Sounds good to me.
You like that graphic? I pulled out all the stops.
It’s that time again. Time to break records in rapid succession! The plainly named Texas Memory has created a monster of epic performance. The RamSan-440 uses DDR RAM in RAID configuration to reach speeds completely unheard of — even in semi-enterprise solutions like the Memoright MR25. With the capability to sustain 600,000 inputs/outputs per second, a max datarate of 4500MB/s, and a capacity of 512GB, this beast is reducing every record around it to a fine silicon paste.
Of course, 512 gigs of memory (648 actually, with NAND memory making up the difference and providing backup and error correction) and the controllers to make all that happen are going to run you quite a bit of scratch. You have to go through a whole rigamarole to get a quote, and when you do, it’ll knock your teeth out. I don’t think they’d want me to reveal it, but let’s just say that just for the base unit price, you can’t count the figures on one hand. [via DailyTech and eWeek]
Update: Corrected the memory types — it’s DDR primary, flash secondary. (thanks to the RamSan folks for keeping me honest)
