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Seagate to Offer Solid State Drives in 2008
Posted by
CowboyNeal
on Thu Aug 23, 2007 07:03 PM
from the takes-a-lickin' dept.
from the takes-a-lickin' dept.
Lucas123 writes "Seagate will introduce drives based on flash memory in various storage capacities across its range of products including desktop and notebook PCs, according to Sumner Lemon at IDG News Service. The drives are expected to consume less power (longer battery life), offer faster data transfer rates and be more rugged than spinning disk, which has moving parts that can be damaged from an impact."
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Seagate to Drop IDE Drives by Year End 566 comments
ianare writes "Seagate plans to cease manufacturing IDE hard drives by the end of the year and will focus exclusively on SATA-based products. Seagate is the first major hard drive manufacturer to announce such plans, though others will likely follow suit. That's not to say support for the 21-year-old PATA standard is going to vanish overnight; similar to how ISA slots were available long after most of us had ditched our old ISA peripherals."
[+]
Your Rights Online: Seagate May Sue if Solid State Disks Get Popular 242 comments
tero writes "Even though Seagate has announced it will be offering SSD disks of its own in 2008, their CEO Bill Watkins seems to be sending out mixed signals in a recent Fortune interview 'He's convinced, he confides, that SSD makers like Samsung and Intel (INTC) are violating Seagate's patents. (An Intel spokeswoman says the company doesn't comment on speculation.) Seagate and Western Digital (WDC), two of the major hard drive makers, have patents that deal with many of the ways a storage device communicates with a computer, Watkins says. It stands to reason that sooner or later, Seagate will sue — particularly if it looks like SSDs could become a real threat.'"
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I wonder what Flash capacity growth (Score:4, Informative)
If we had the rate of growth in conventional drives that we had a few years back, we would almost certainly be looking at multi-TB drives right now.
Re:I wonder what Flash capacity growth (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I did some quick google searching and found articles dated 2005 announcing that flash storage had reached the 2GB mark and hard drives had reached the 500GB mark.
Yes, But what is the best File system ? (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
No. Why would it? If you're using a RAM-based medium, any block is read with essentially identical speed. So if you're using a mechanism that's optimized for mechanical storage, or using one that just allocates blocks sequentially, or one that allocates them completely randomly, or one that tries as hard as possible to *slow down* reads from hard disks, it all makes no difference. From a RAM-based system, they'll all work equally well.
Re:Yes, But what is the best File system ? (Score:4, Informative)
The lower cost units tend to be better, perhaps only because they are smaller or compliant to my filesystems. It may be worth noting I colour code the usb sockets to avoid mistakes. It is really easy to mess up, so always having a copy on a real hd is very comforting. Since the sticks are ROM and written once per development cycle, they will never wear out electricly. (The USB sockets will go much faster.) I think we all know what happens if you use dos. This is my experience and these things are developing rapidly. They are as fast as ordinary SCSI drives (they are SCSI drives) and indeed somewhat more stable. Expect a hot product from Seagate.
Parent
Noise (Score:5, Insightful)
I can't wait for ssd's. Every hard drive I've owned has been noisy and they drive me nuts.
As for durability... hrmm... maybe in its current state, flash doesn't last that long. But, the potential has got to be better than a constantly-spinning platter of disks. I've never had a RAM stick, or flash card die on me, but I've lost many hard drives.
Also, I think there may be greater potential for memory density. Spinning platters inevitably have wasted space, forming a cylinder in a rectangular prism.
I'd be interested to see the effect of SSD's on prices of normal hard drives. Normal HDD prices have been plummetting rapidly over the last couple of years - I wonder if the lure of flash will push them down further.
I think with capacity being so important, price/MB will be a big determining factor in getting flash into enterprise storage. I think the desktop, and (obviously) laptop markets will lap it up first.
How will this affect hardware architecture? (Score:5, Interesting)
Will it move choke points elsewhere on the system?
I'd like to know what other practical benefits such would have other than lower power consumption and durability.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Will it move choke points elsewhere on the system?
I'd like to know what other practical benefits such would have other than lower power consumption and durability.
1. Yes, at least so far the fastest I've seen is 90MB/sec sustained read with a 150MB/s SATA interface and if that became a problem they could move to a SATA2 interface and get up to 300GB/sec (NB: Since flash don't have cache, there's no point in going to SATA2 unless the fl
Limit on writes... (Score:5, Informative)
It's not all that bad. If I remember correctly, most flash memory can take 100,000-300,000.. according to wikipedia:
"while high endurance Flash storage is often marketed with endurance of 1-5 million write cycles"
I did a small research project (informational) on flash stuff recently for school, I believe solid state hard drives back in June or so were said to have about 2 million writes.
2 million writes per sector. You can always move the information around, and algorithms are being written to do that.
But, with all that, seems like hybrid drives would be the way to go right now.. after all, there's no limit on READING from solid state drives, just writing.
Re:Would benefit from user education, OS optimisat (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
1. In my experience, flash memory can sometimes fail totally. This may be due to it being often removable, and accessed in rather non-robust ways, (USB ports, card readers). Hence (presumably) gets nuked by static etc. My attempts at recovering such 'dead' flash devices have not been great, so far. When it's dead, it's dead...even re-format does not work sometimes.
Presumably, internal flash 'disk drive replacements' would be rather more robust.
2. When flash drives
Flash + Low-speed HD = Best of Both (Score:5, Interesting)
Here's a White Paper (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
To summarise:
8 million writes before failure. Failure occurs during write or erase. Stored data does not get corrupted.
64gb would take 20 years to fill if the same byte was overwritten one million times.
I hope the rest of the Slashdot ill-informed take note.
Are hard drives the tape drives of the future? (Score:5, Interesting)
Now that flash is reaching the point where we can contemplate using it for the primary non-volatile storage niche, we may see hard drives being displaced into the backup/bulk storage/archiving niches. If so, expect to see increasing emphasis on ways to hot-plug hard drives into your computer, and increasing emphasis on price/GB and decreasing emphasis on performance and possibly per-drive capacity.
We'll really know we've reached this point when hard drives are used as a medium for delivering software.
Here and now (Score:5, Interesting)
3 IDE-CF adapters cost me 8$ including shipment on ebay last week. My game box runs of a 16GB CF card (200$ - new - on ebay, available for months now) with vista (yes, vista on a 22MB/sec CF, though I've gotten it there via ghosting rather than via a regular install), and my living room PC runs XP off a 2GB CF card that cost about 25$ new (again, ebay price, store prices typically a tad higher).
Yes, 20MB/sec is less than the 50-70MB/sec read speed an average harddrive gives, but that is offset by near-zero seek times.
If under windows, make sure you turn off:
* SWAP
* ntfs Access time writes (fs tuning utility, one command from shell, or a reg key)
And if you want to be even more thorough and flash-friendly:
* 8_3 filename writes (in ntfs every file has two filenames one that is backwards-compatible to 8_3 naming. No need to waste CF writes on that)
* Any software that routinely writes stuff to disk.
If you're fanatic, do:
* Event logger
* Indexing
If you want >16GB, you can buy several, then use LVM/dynamic disk/multiple partitions depending on your OS to use that.
I just have the core 16GB (about 8GB occupied) on the game box, and do the rest of the storage (aka keep the Program Files directory) on the RAID5 fileserver over Gigabit LAN, which gives me about 40MB/sec read and write, which is IMHO sufficient. Were I not to rely on that, I'd get another two 16GB cards on a CF-IDE adapter, plonk a RAID0 on them and voilla (assuming you can get windows to make dynamic disks of removable storage, which the CF cards are still recognized as, even when on the IDE bus), which I am by no means certain.
If you're on Linux, no problem there. anything and verything can be raided and LVM'd at will.
A RAID0 of these would cost 400$, give 32GB and give about 40MB/sec performance.
So no need to get overly excited with SSD. They're just an overpriced nicely bundled version of what is already cheaply available, kinda like external harddrives. And they'll keep on being that for a while yet.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Addonics CF-IDE [addonics.com].
Larry
Re:Warranty? (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Not trolling, I just havent ever seen hard stats on current flash/solid state durability over time recently.
Re:Warranty? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Warranty? (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Warranty? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It's true - Flash drives spread written data out (Score:3, Informative)
Between this, massive storage capacity (think: 'dilution') and what will surely be engineering improvements, flash drives should prove to be very reliable.
I for one, welcome out solid state overlords.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Warranty? (Score:5, Informative)
Take a 40GB hard drive, and pretend it's Flash memory. If you wrote 40GB worth of data to it every single day (with the circuitry inside a drive to spread writes out over cells evenly), then you would average 1 write per day across each cell. Flash memory can be written to a minimum of 10,000 times before dying, most is even more reliably by an order of magnitude (100,000 writes). Assuming we have crappy 10,000 write limits, we could write 40GB to the drive every day for 10,000 days, or 27 years, before failing is an issue.
Looking at the 40GB drive in one of my machines, the total writes in its uptime comes to about 800MB, which is a shade under 24 hours uptime. That's 800MB worth of writes in a day, 50 times *less* than writing 40GB to the drive every day, so a 40GB flash drive at my current usage rate could be expected to last 27 * 50, or 1350 years.
A lot longer than I have to worry about. The numbers are going to differ for some people, but the initial stats work out - few people would write to every cell every day, and even then that's decades worth of use.
Parent
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
How do you know that the drive will evenly distribute writes per cell?
You don't. But what we do know is that if you take a balanced 6-sided die and roll it a large number of times, the distribution of faces to come up will be uniform. That is, each face has an equal chance of being selected. So if we randomly choose a sector and write to it, the wear over large numbers of writes will be uniform over all sectors.
Its more likely that some cells may remain untouched, which other cells may get written or
Re:Warranty? (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Warranty? (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
You can easilly buy wiring/form factor adaptors that take a CF card and fit into a laptop drive bay (though admittedly laptops moving to sata will make this harder). You can then install any OS you like (space permitting but you can easilly buy 16 gigabyte CF cards which should be enough for XP and I suspect if you look arround you can buy ones big enough for vista) with no driver issues at all since as far as the motherboard is concerned it is a standard IDE dr
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
In your example, yes, CF will get the job done for now, but flash transfer rates are increasing rapidly, latencies are decreasing rapidly and we should be seeing SSDs by the end of next year that contain purpose-built components designed for high speed, low parasitic loading and low latencies. Ev
Re:Warranty? (Score:5, Informative)
All modern flash drives use write levelling to ensure writes
are evenly spread across the device.
This article [storagesearch.com]
takes those numbers and using a hypothetical "write logger" app that
continually writes, estimates an average life of 51 years.
MTron specs [mtron.net] for their SSDs estimate:
So lets lay this one to rest. SSDs are worth it.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Every time a story comes up on /. about SSD, this is invariably the first question in the comments. Seriously, I've seen like seven of these now. Yes, the writes are limited... but with efficient algorithms to spread the writes correctly, and operating systems that are aware of the media, we are talking 10-20 years before it becomes an issue.
No company would want the nightmare of releasing a product that is going to fall apart in 2 years. It would tarnish their reputation forever. Think of the notorious I
Lifetime (Score:2)
Most of these systems will be using wear levelling to prevent the certain flash regions being happered too hard. Any system that does not use wear levelling will break down pretty quickly.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
THen Why not ordinary RAM on top of a normal drive?
When I first bought a hard drive it had less capacity than all the RAM on this computer, and it was a big drive. The salesperson laughed at me thinking there was no way to fill it. And I paid more for the drive than I paid for this RAM by a factor of 2 or 3.
UPS + RAM + disk drive - cache all the stuff you use a lot in RAM, and it's all good. I suppose even Flash can be used for the Program Files and Windows folders.
Re:Warranty? (Score:5, Informative)
I can't give exact figures, but I've seen comparisons showing a reasonable life span (>20 years @ 100GB of writes/day) - some of the numbers are even comparable to those of spinning/mechanical hard drives. Considering how often mechanical hard drives seem to fail, it doesn't seem that there will be any major roadblocks in terms of reliability.
I know what I've written is mostly qualitative (apologies on that), but I know the research into how to mitigate the problem of life span has truly advanced in the last few years as interest in SSD has increased. Jim Gray of Microsoft Research fame, predicted that SSD would replace mechanical drives not far off from now. Check out his paper "Flash Disk Opportunity for Server-Applications" for more on that.
SixD
Parent
Re:Warranty? (Score:4, Insightful)
But it's better than having to park my hard drive heads every time before I shut down. Sometimes I forget, and then that data is corrupt. Maybe one day Hard Drives will park themselves at shutdown.
Reference;
http://groups.google.com/group/net.micro.pc/brows
(Tone:Sarcastic/Funny)
Parent
Re:Lifespan? (Score:4, Informative)
Cost is still a major issue though. The article only has one number in it, that densities will go up to 160Gb. Do you think they'll take a cheque for that, or you do you have to spread and touch your toes in person?
Parent
Re:Countdown to new iPod version... (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Flash/RAM Drives? (Score:4, Informative)
Possibly because you weren't looking. For all I know, they still exist, but the vendor we got one from went out of business a few years ago. They sold full-length PCI cards packed with 8GB of SDRAM -- and they had larger models -- that presented a SCSI interface to the system and, with the appropriate driver, could mirror to a magnetic drive. The cost was stratospheric, and our storage needs soon outgrew the available space. We also found that not as much of our processing was I/O-bound as we thought. Other than that, it worked great. Given enough money and a motherboard with a sufficiently large number of PCI slots, it might be the ideal solution for certain niche applications, but the cost and size constraints otherwise make them a poor substitute for magnetic drives in most cases.
That said, it was pretty cool to be able to reformat the "drive" in a few seconds.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
So please stop spreading the myth that SSD drives should somehow be inferior to re
Re:Solid state (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Each block has, infact, a bit more storage than the amount exposed. There are error-correcting checksums and stuff, allowing the drive to detect (and sometimes correct) errors, among these are, typically, a counter saying how many times the block has been written to.
If the drive notices that one block has a lot more writes than the average block, it can swap the contents of those two blocks int