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Ultra Fast Disk Drives With No Moving Parts
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Mon Aug 16, 2004 08:52 AM
from the shake-it-all-you-want dept.
from the shake-it-all-you-want dept.
saccade.com writes "Let's face it, the slowest part
of PC's today is the disk drive. Bit
Micro has come up with a nifty solution - flash memory based
disk drives available in typical
disk
form-factors. These e-disks are electrically compatible
with ATA, SCSI, etc. but run orders of magnitude faster - access
times down to 40 usec and transfer rates over 100 MB/sec. What's
the catch? Cost. Currently going for just under $1K/G, a 30G model
I recently held in my hand was worth much more than my car. However,
as flash memory prices drop, so do the price of these drives.
Within the decade the spinning hard disk may go the way
of the floppy and CRT."
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Not that new. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Not that new. (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Not that new. (Score:3, Insightful)
Just SAY IT - a whooping 1,000 $ for 1 crappy GB! No thanks I'll stick with my s-ata, and if that gives me any more issues, I'll get rid of that too, and use IDE
Re:Not that new. (Score:5, Insightful)
They also have industrial uses. They get used in places where the gyroscopic effect of a normal drive would be undesirable, or the vibration caused is undesirable.
Personally, I don't think the price will come down that much. FLASH devices (the actual chips) are used in a ton of places. In the past there have been shortages of the devices, and IIRC the cell phone manufacurers are the largest buyers of them.
Parent
Re:Not that new. (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Not that new. (Score:5, Interesting)
memory chips require many expensive and hazardous chemicals to manufacture like fuming sulfuric acid for dissolving the photoresist inks and hydroflouric acid for etching the circuits. These chemicals have a large environmental regulation cost associated with them that's not going to go down any time in the forseeable future and is entirely outside the control of any manufacturing process.
Parent
Re:Not that new. (Score:4, Interesting)
ANY process? I think that was the point - if someone can come up with a new process, we could reduce costs. The more these are used, the more incentive there is to research new processes.
As far as I can recall, there ARE people working on alternatives to memory as we know it.
The same thing happened with LCDs, as pointed out - CRTs have a bottom line cost - the cost of the components have a bottom line that means that LCDs should, at some point, be cheaper - the processes are still be refined and improved, and there's not a whole lot of leeway anymore with CRTs.
Parent
Re:Not that new. (Score:5, Interesting)
Without giving away too much (and getting fired in the process) there is a whole new tech on the horizon. It still uses all the nasty chemicles, but in traditional flash memory, the chip is broken into three major components:
charge punps (to provide the 9.5-12 volts required to program the chip from the punny 1.8 - 3.3 volt supply
the control circuitry (basically a mini CPU)
the flash array
all these elements are "flat", that is they are one structure deep. This new tech coming up, if someone can perfect it, uses multiple layers to make the flash array several layers deep. Thus you could (in theory) shrink your die size while increasing the memory density.
-nB
Parent
Multi-layer devices. (Score:4, Interesting)
This turns out not to help much. Multi-layer chips add mask steps roughly in proportion to the number of layers. While you save on the cost of wafer area, your processing steps cost a lot of money too, so you rapidly reach a point of diminishing returns. Building multi-layer devices also requires making transistors on epitaxial silicon layers, which generally have far worse performance properties than the monocrystalline wafer (even SOI processes generally work by building devices on a silicon wafer, and either flipping the chip and back-etching or using a buried oxide layer, as opposed to depositing a silicon film).
3D chips have been a holy grail for density reasons for decades, but they turn out to be expensive to manufacture and poorly-performing for the reasons noted above, and for microprocessors, at least, they're now a pretty much obsolete solution, as heat generation is what limits chip performance (and a multi-layer chip gives you that much more heat generation per unit area).
If your company can pull it off in a useful way for storage, they'll deserve kudos, of course.
Parent
Re:Not that new. (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, what's so different from this and just using a standard CF card? You can get 1GB of CF for under $150. It should be fairly simple to put together a "CF-raid" drive for way less than $1K/GB.
Parent
Re:Not that new. (Score:5, Insightful)
Why the hell would we stuff this onto the IDE interface? This would be a great opportunity to drop that interface entirely.
Parent
Re:Not that new. (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Compact Flash is already IDE. (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Not that new. (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Not that new. (Score:5, Informative)
One thing worth noting.... flash parts don't last forever. If you write to the disk constantly it will die in a lot less time then the average standard magnetic hard drive.
However, reading doesn't inflict the wear so feel free to read all you want from your flash part...
Parent
Is this an ad? Or what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Quality? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Quality? (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
End User upgradable (Score:4, Interesting)
Life time? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Life time? (Score:5, Informative)
QUESTION: What is the lifespan of the E-Disk® flash drive if wear-leveling algorithm is not utilized? How much improvement will BiTMICRO's wear-leveling algorithms make to this number?
ANSWER:
The wear-out life of an E-Disk® flash drive is directly proportional to the number of flash memory physical blocks in the device. The greater the number of flash memory blocks in the flash drive (and therefore total capacity), the longer the wear-out life of the device. As an example, arithmetic computation will show that a 34GB E-Disk flash drive fitted with flash chips rated at an endurance limit of 1 million erase/write cycles will have an endurance life of 1,024,000,000 seconds (or 32.47 years) when written continuously at 34MB/sec (or 2,937.6GB Erase/Write per day). This is the worst possible scenario where all I/O is 100% write and caching is disabled. E-Disk erase/write endurance can be more than 15 times the computed value if the multiplier effects of full associative caching and the results of BiTMICRO's accelerated erase/write endurance verification and testing are included.
Parent
Re:Life time? (Score:5, Informative)
As far as "Within the decade the spinning hard disk may go the way of the floppy and CRT" goes, I guess that means that there will be other/better/different choices than spinning platters, but they'll still be more expensive and spinning platters will still be the norm. Looking forward to the status quo, I guess!
Parent
Yet again (Score:4, Insightful)
Limited lifetime? (Score:5, Informative)
Within the decade the spinning hard disk may go the way of the floppy and CRT
As an aside, my CRT is still firmly wedded to my desktop, and won't budge until flat screen technology has caught up. It's come a long way, and may be good enough for less demanding applications, but it's got a way to go before I have a flat screen on my desk...
Re:Limited lifetime? (Score:3, Informative)
Wouldn't it be cheaper... (Score:5, Funny)
Floppies are dead? (Score:5, Insightful)
Are we done yet with the whole 'floppies are dead' stories? I regularly use floppies because it's easier to plop in a floppy, copy one file and pop out the floppy than it is to put in a USB drive, wait for your pc to recognize it (don't know about Macs), copy the file then have to correctly disconnect the USB drive
What about those machines which don't have USB drives or who aren't on a network? What then? Floppies will be around much longer than anyone thinks and for good reason.
Yes, floppies are dead. (Score:3, Insightful)
What about those machines which don't have floppies?
Seriously, I haven't put a floppy into a machine in the last 6 years. They're totally unnecessary nowadays. They're about useless for transporting documents for the simple reason that the majority of useful documents exceed the size of the floppy nowadays.
And USB drives are much cooler t
Re:Floppies are dead? (Score:5, Funny)
What country do you live in? Machines without USB? Not on a network??? You're not making any sense here man! I have something hectic to tell you: The year is not 1994. It's actually 2004. Yes, you've been in a coma for 10 years.
Parent
Re:Floppies are dead? (Score:4, Insightful)
1. Time It takes my WinXP Pro laptop about 5 seconds to recognize the USB drive and allow me to explore its contents. Likewise, "Safely removing the hardware" takes 5 seconds, tops. So we're talking 10 seconds total for mounting/unmounting. Floppies take at least 2 seconds to be recognized, though granted dismounting is instantaneous. Advantage: floppy, by 8 seconds.
However, there is another huge issue I think you are neglecting:
2. Size While that floppy might be 8 seconds faster, I hope whatever you're planning on transporting is less than 1.44 MB. Nowadays, there is very little I transport that would fit on such an incredibly small storage medium. A 256 MB USB key can hold as much data as 178 floppy disks, and fits on my keychain.
Finally, a caveat regarding your "time" complaints about USB: it takes much longer to write 1.44 MB to a floppy disk than it does to write that same 1.44 MB to a USB drive. So your 8 second mounting/unmounting delta is rendered utterly moot.
Parent
Funny (Score:5, Funny)
Man, the Bottleneck (Score:5, Insightful)
No, the slowest part of PC's today is the user interface. The rate at which a user enters data (via keyboard/mouse) is a fraction of the rate at which a user thinks. (Your mileage may vary, of course.)
-kgj
Re:Man, the Bottleneck (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Nothing happening then. (Score:5, Insightful)
You mean it'll still be the default option on most new PCs and in use by ~90% of PC users?
Famous eternal predictions (Score:3, Insightful)
For how many decades now has this been predicted? Holographic memory, battery backed RAM, yada yada yada. Methinks rotating storage will be around for more than the rest of the decade.
shhh dont mention the disks lifetime (Score:3, Interesting)
100,000 writes isn't gonna last long in todays bandwidth intensive video/mp3 world
no moving parts and non-magnetic media is a worthy goal but until we can cure terrible storage lifetimes they wont be much use if i have to worry about the mess backups of backups, as we know from sci-fi all it takes is a big EM burst from the sun and everything you and i have done is gone !
future generations will look back at us and say "they used to store it on WHAT !?"
WHy not integrate with the motherboard then? (Score:5, Insightful)
RAMdisk solution (Score:4, Interesting)
Of course, this assumes you're working on a stable OS with decent tools and good memory management. If you're not, you can be.
What about disk prices? (Score:5, Insightful)
Problem with number of writes. (Score:5, Interesting)
I know that 10000 writes seems like a lot, and perhaps it is. Anyone knows how this figure looks for normal harddrives?
Still it seems to me that the limited number of writes sets the biggest limitation.
floppy (Score:3, Interesting)
How reliable? (Score:3, Informative)
Always beware of "X is dead!" in the media (Score:5, Insightful)
Within the decade the spinning hard disk may be capable of holding terabytes, or even petabytes, on a single platter. And it will be orders of magnitude cheaper than solid state storage as we know it. I doubt that hard drives will go the way of the dodo anytime soon.
Just as a comparison, look at how many backup solutions still use tape media (and use it very effectively and cheaply, I might add).
Nah...The Slowest Part Is The... (Score:4, Interesting)
Technically, a printer is a peripheral, not a part. Whatever. All printers are evil: Too slow, too big, too expensive, too quirky. Ackk.
The problem with hard drives (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know much about flash memory technology or the reliability associated with it. I don't give a hoot how fast it is. If it's solid state (no moving parts) and can guarantee me it won't one day decide to utterly destroy itself, I'm sold.
Where flash is going (Score:5, Informative)
That problem can be reduced by padding devices with large amounts of RAM (write caching). But the breakthrough is coming soon, with new flash technologies that are better designed for continual writes (without compromising speed). From what I've read in IEEE Spectrum, the better technologies suited for mass storage are in research labs right now, meaning maybe 5 or 10 years til market.
SSD is an old idea (Score:5, Interesting)
I looked into SSD for a database at one point. But I found that you can get almost the same performance by using lots of drives in a fast RAID setup. Striping the content over multiple disks does wonders! And its much cheaper.
E.g. look at something like a 12 disk setup with RAID 5+1. You got a full mirror, and essentialy 4-8 times the speed of a single drive. So you are already close to the 'order of magnitude' they SSD drives claim.
floppy dead? (Score:5, Funny)
yes, I know that it would cost more and we would still have moving parts. It's also slower.
But just imagine a room with ~21300 FDD (30 gigs) stacked to the ceiling blinking and spinning like mad.
The floppy is on the way out? (Score:4, Funny)
MRAM disks, anyone? (Score:5, Informative)