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TB-Sized Solid State Drives Announced

Posted by Zonk on Fri Nov 16, 2007 10:45 AM
from the soon-to-be-implantable dept.
Data Storage IT Technology
prostoalex writes "Several companies have announced solid state hard drives in excess of one terrabyte in size. ComputerWorld describes one from BitMicro that's just 3.5". Their flash drive will support up to 4 Gbps data transfer rate. From the article: 'SSDs access data in microseconds, instead of the millliseconds that traditional hard drives use to retrieve data. The BitMicro E-Disk Altima 4Gb FC delivers more than 55,000 I/O operations per second (IOPS) and has a sustained data transfer rate over 230MB/sec. By comparison, a fast hard drive for example will run at around 300 IOPS.'" Ah, the speed of tech. Seems like only last month we were talking about 500GB drives.
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Nick Breen writes "Are solid state drives becoming a reality? Loyd Case over at ExtremeTech has written an article concerning the current state of SSD with a comparison between a Samsung 64GB SATA and a Super Talent 32GB SATA. While they showed impressive speed rates when placed against a hard disk drive, the occasional sporadic statistic (and high cost) indicate they're not quite ready for the mainstream. Dell and Alienware have been shipping laptops with SSDs for months now, and Apple may be rolling out one of their own next year. Is the time of the solid-state drive almost at hand? Does anyone have any first-hand, practical experience with SSD?"
Submission: 1.6 TB solid state drive unveiled by prostoalex (308614)
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  • Ah, the speed of tech. Seems like only last month we were talking about 500GB drives.
    We also discussed 640GB PCIe cards [slashdot.org] with sustained data rates of 800Mb/sec for reading, 600Mb/sec for writing and 1,000,000 operations per second.

    The Texas Memory Systems datasheet claims 24 GB/second of random sustainable data bandwidth which is much higher than the Fusion IO card but it looks like they are serializing this possibly across multiple drives. They also claim higher (3.2 million) operations per second.

    The BitMicro drive is groin grabbingly amazing in size but claims only 55k operations per second & sustained data transfer rate over 230MB/sec.

    So what I would wager is that PCIe might provide more throughput than SATA but don't quote me on that. I'm interested to see where this goes & also curious to see whether we continue dumping drives on channels like the Texas Memory solution or if it just goes back to a server with a ton of PCIe slots on it and hot pluggable card swapping for 'drives.'

    Worth revisiting is the fact that Fusion IO claims to be releasing the cards for sale next month. As we all know, sometimes it's just a case of who gets to market first that wins in the technology world.
    • The BitMicro drive is groin grabbingly amazing...

      Ouch!

    • Re:Don't Forget Fusion IO's PCIe Card Drive (Score:4, Informative)

      by Gr8Apes (679165) on Friday November 16 2007, @10:58AM (#21379579)

      The Texas Memory Systems RAMSan requires 2500W of power.

      For the BitMicro SSD: 230MB/s >> 800 Mb/s card, and 55K IOPS >> 300 IOPS for todays hard drives.

      It sounds to me like the BitMicro is a clear winner, especially considering that today's fastest HDs deliver about 300 IOPS and a max of about 40MB/s sustained data transfer. You can RAID the drives to increase performance, but I imagine the same will hold true of the SSDs. The only issue is price. The Texas Memory System is out of the question - it makes an Intel P4 Extreme look like a power miser.

    • Re:Don't Forget Fusion IO's PCIe Card Drive (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Junta (36770) on Friday November 16 2007, @11:34AM (#21380057)

      The Texas Memory Systems datasheet claims 24 GB/second of random sustainable data bandwidth which is much higher than the Fusion IO card but it looks like they are serializing this possibly across multiple drives. They also claim higher (3.2 million) operations per second.
      The Texas memory product is cramming a bunch of ram in 24U and putting a whopping 25 minutes of battery backup. If you disconnect power for more thon 25 minutes, the only thing left is whatever was committed to 'real' peristant storage. They provide Infiniband and FC ports, so it's more akin to an EMC or Engenio storage controller than a hard drive. 1 TB/24U is actually kind of sad when hard drives can easily yield 3 TB/U nowadays. There is a place for this (ramdisk performance is pretty nifty), but it's not even remotely relevant to anything a normal person would think of when they hear SSD (they picture a drive intended to connect directly to a system some how, not participate in a SAN directly.

      The BitMicro drive is groin grabbingly amazing in size but claims only 55k operations per second & sustained data transfer rate over 230MB/sec.
      And it *actually* is flash based storage, meaning it can fairly be called persistant storage. Of course, the clear hint is there when they talk IOps and only mention FC connection that they are targetting only deep pockets with the product as of this press release or whatever. 55k operations and 230 MB/s is ludicrously insane performance for a single drive relative to current spinning disks. You can fit 144 of these into a 24U space and have a theoretical aggregation that exceeds the ram based system specs. Of course, RAM should be able to trounce it so the limiting factor is a controller setup to push the IOPs and throughput, so both solutions would probably perform comprably.

      So what I would wager is that PCIe might provide more throughput than SATA but don't quote me on that. I'm interested to see where this goes & also curious to see whether we continue dumping drives on channels like the Texas Memory solution or if it just goes back to a server with a ton of PCIe slots on it and hot pluggable card swapping for 'drives.'
      Well, considering that SATA controllers at best currently use PCI-e as the method to communicate with the chipset, PCI-e slots better be capable of better than SATA... Ok, it's over-simplyfying, a 1x PCIe first gen slot yields about 2.5 Gb/s or so, and a SATA II port is 3.0 Gb/s, so a single lane PCI-e slot would be slower than a SATA port. However commonly PCIe appears in 4/8/16 lane configurations, I assume you meant 880 MB/s, which would point to PCIe 4x slot sort of throughput, which makes sense, it's not unreasonable to expect at least a 4x lane slot to be free, requiring anything more could waste limited hardware resources.

  • Clarification to the Summary required. (Score:5, Informative)

    by AmIAnAi (975049) * on Friday November 16 2007, @10:48AM (#21379417)
    The TMS link is for a 9U rack of non-volatile DDRRAM, consuming 2.5KW and weighing up to 720lbs, so not quite suitable for the desktop.

    The BitMicro article goes on to say that the maximum capacity in a standard 3.5"x1" format is 640GB, so requiring around 2.5" for the full 1TB.

    This is Slashdot, so we don't expect facts in the summary to be correct. However, this is still amazing progress.
    • I don't see any factual errors, maybe too much is left for the reader to assume. That first item is still solid state drive, even if it's not flash.

    • Re:Clarification to the Summary required. (Score:5, Informative)

      by dpaton.net (199423) on Friday November 16 2007, @11:00AM (#21379601) Homepage Journal
      The TMS link is for a 9U rack of non-volatile DDRRAM, consuming 2.5KW and weighing up to 720lbs, so not quite suitable for the desktop.

      It's actually 24U, and it consists of (what appear to be) 8 3U racked computers that each manage 128GB of RAM storage for the network, and have a 4 drive hot-swap array for backup.

      Source: http://www.texmemsys.com/files/f000225.pdf [texmemsys.com]

    • It's a Ram Disk. (Score:5, Informative)

      by camperdave (969942) on Friday November 16 2007, @12:11PM (#21380555) Journal
      a 9U rack of non-volatile DDRRAM

      So, it's a giant ram disk with either flash or hard drive backup.

      Will I lose data if I lose power to a RamSan?

      No. The RamSan-300 and RamSan-400 systems are equipped with redundant batteries and four internal hard disk drives. When external power is lost, the batteries will power the system under full operation for five minutes (this is just in case the power outage is temporary). After five minutes, the system will turn off Input/Output for the system and complete backing up all data that is in memory to the internal hard disk drives. Even if the system is fully loaded with memory, backing up to the internal disks will take no more than 12 minutes to back up. The batteries in the system are N+1 redundant, which means that there is enough battery capacity with just two of the three batteries to power the unit and complete backup after external power fails. The hard disk drives in the system are RAID protected which means that even if a hard disk drive fails, the other disk drives will be able to backup the system in the event of power outage.

      No. The RamSan-500 systems are equipped with redundant batteries to power the DDR cache long enough to flush the DDR cache to the Flash memory RAID. Flash memory is inherently non-volatile and does not require power to save data.
      http://www.superssd.com/faq.htm [superssd.com]

  • In other news (Score:5, Funny)

    by moogied (1175879) on Friday November 16 2007, @10:49AM (#21379433)
    Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Washington Mutual, and Chase all annouced there new "PC Home Equity Loans". Averaging at 5.8% APR(OAC) you can take out a home equity loan for the purpose of purchasing a 1TB SSD.

  • This is not a drive... its an array (Score:4, Informative)

    by segfaultcoredump (226031) on Friday November 16 2007, @10:52AM (#21379487)
    The linked to press release for TMS systems are not a single drive. They are a half rack sized array. Dont try and put one in your desktop anytime soon.
    Their systems have been in use for years by folks who need speed at any cost.

    Now, the BitMicro drives... those look interesting. I wonder if I can slot them into my StorageTek 6140 :-)

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by vidarh (309115)
      The key being "any cost". I talked to them at one point, and was quoted a price for one of their devices that was about as much as my company pays in hardware lease, bandwidth and power for hosting 4 racks worth of high end servers for a year...

  • And again... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by SharpFang (651121) on Friday November 16 2007, @11:00AM (#21379599) Homepage Journal
    ...how does it compare to capacity equivalent in SD cards plus RAID/reader glue logic piece of hardware?

  • the bus will be the bottleneck (Score:3, Insightful)

    by petes_PoV (912422) on Friday November 16 2007, @11:06AM (#21379681)
    To get the best performance out of these things we need to move away from IDE/SATA architectures and have the storage directly on the PCI or PCI-E bus.

    Once that happens, PCs will really start to get useful!

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Kjella (173770)
      Right now, even the best prosumer SSDs aren't close to matching the SATA2 interface speed of 300MB/s. Their access time is already minimal (I saw 0.2ms in a test for one disk). Remember that there's a lot of headroom in the SATA interface that isn't used except for buffer bursts today. So I don't really see the point. Having an standard connector and making them drop-in replacements for HDDs sounds to me like the logical way to go...
    • The performance of the BitMicro SSD isn't even up to a SATA-II 3.0 Gb/s speed. And to top it off, they only seem to support FC, which is currently commonly 4.0 Gb/s and moving toward 8.0 Gb/s. If you have more than one drive, yes, you'll exceed 3.0, but you'll also be using more SATA ports, so in the aggregate, still staying below the SATA standard limits. Maybe a different standard will come, but for now, SATA is perfectly capable. The likes of PCI-e has not been extended in a standardized way to allow

  • Very nice (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Bullfish (858648) on Friday November 16 2007, @11:08AM (#21379713)
    But for now the cost isn't worth the performance differential. With enough ram, generally you aren't hitting the hard drive too often except for a few tasks. With 64 bit computing, you get to have even more useful ram. When the price of solid state drives is competitive with hard disks, I'll pay attention.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by itsdapead (734413)

      When the price of solid state drives is competitive with hard disks, I'll pay attention.

      Hah. When I were a lad you could get a 7 MEGABYTE Winchester Hard Disk for a mere £3500 (what, about $5000?). (Source, 1981 copy of Personal Computer World).

      That's about £10k in modern money (according to this calculator [thisismoney.co.uk] - a.k.a. $20k dollars (or $10k at Microsoft/Adobe screw-the-Brits rates).

      Now, if you think that 1981 was, like, ancient history then GET OFF MY LAWN! If the usual growth rate applies, 1TB

  • ReadyBoost, et al (Score:5, Interesting)

    by inKubus (199753) on Friday November 16 2007, @11:12AM (#21379765) Homepage Journal
    These could be used with some sort of intelligent prefetch (ala ReadyBoost [wikipedia.org]) with good results. I know they use them currently in high-performance systems to swap out table indexes and the like. Since the indexes are relatively small files--but there are many of them--seek time becomes the bottleneck, rather than throughput.

    I've heard about doing this in Linux by mounting a USB key and using it as extra swap. Here's how in Ubuntu (from http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=395435:

    1) Plug the USB drive in your USB connector;
    2) If Ubuntu automount the device (usually in /media/usbdisk), umount the device (ie., sudo umount /media/usbdisk);
    3) sudo mkswap /dev/sda1 (assuming /dev/sda1 is the correct device for the connected usb device)
    4) sudo swapon -p 32767 /dev/sda1

    "cat /proc/swaps" to check if everything is ok; on my laptop I get the following output:

    Filename Type Size Used Priority /dev/hda4 partition 2353512 116 -1 (standard HD swap partition) /dev/sda1 partition 1981928 123900 32767 ("ReadyBoost"-style pen drive)

    Quite obviously, performance is not the same as with real additional ram; however, I feel REAL gain in speed while using eclipse+tomcat+mysql for development on my laptop (which is equipped with just 512MB ram).

    To turn it off, type:

    "swapoff /dev/sda1", assuming /dev/sda1 is the correct device.

    Obviously you are going to be write limited due to the physical limitations of the flash disk, but reads will be very fast. ReadyBoost will keep a table of files that get read a lot, but written infrequently and then cache them on the flash device. It would probably be possible to do this at the disk driver level in linux with a fast database like BDB, keep a table of the last 1000 files read, if there's a write, remove them from the table. Then move those files up to the flash drive as a disk cache... there may be something like this already, like the Google Prefetch [google.com] project that's in the works.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by mikiN (75494)
      Interesting idea, but somehow I can't escape thinking this is like mashing up an iPod in a blender because the resulting grey powder looks nice in the mock-up fireplace for your Christmas stall.

      Unless there have been some really important changes in the performance of Flash memory, using it as swap would be like the second worst possible scenario in terms of it's life expectancy (using it for main memory would be the worst). Just how long is a typical Flash chip with a guaranteed average of 1 million write
    • Apparently this works on Windows XP too: http://www.windowsxlive.net/?p=1337 [windowsxlive.net]

  • One terrabyte! (Score:4, Funny)

    by ArAgost (853804) on Friday November 16 2007, @11:13AM (#21379771) Homepage
    Finally! One terrabyte! I was hoping to get more than mere giggabytes (or, even worse, meggabytes) for SSD. I still remember the epic moment when SSD reached killobytes, after years struggling with just some bbytes.

  • Infiniband (Score:3, Informative)

    by NetJunkie (56134) <`moc.liamg' `ta' `hsan.nosaj'> on Friday November 16 2007, @11:23AM (#21379919)
    The big feature here is the included Infiniband support. Without digging real far in to the specs if this array supports RDMA it would make a very nice shared memory array for a grid type implementation.

  • TB-sized? (Score:5, Funny)

    by peacefinder (469349) <[moc.liamg] [ta] [ttiwed.nala]> on Friday November 16 2007, @11:27AM (#21379963) Journal
    Is it really a good idea to make a hard drive the size of mycobacterium tuberculosis? I'm just sure I'd lose it before I figured out how to plug it in.
  • I'm glad news of solid-state drives is getting more common. Disk seek times have been the number one cause of annoying delays on my desktop systems for several years now, and I certainly don't have exotic hardware. Perhaps I can ditch my plan for a Solaris box in the garage and diskless clients and just wait a year or two for >100GB $400 solid-state disks.
    • You might not wait long: Newegg is selling 16GB of Flash for less than 130$ (in CF,USB and SD).
      This means you could build a little >100G RAID of those for 800$ or so.
      And I believe the prices go down really fast (I paid 70$ for 2G in May 2006 and thought it was a good deal. Now I could get 8G for that price).
      I guess you will get your 100GB flash before September 2008 :-)
      Enjoy!

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Tom Womack (8005)
      It'll take only about a year or so; Samsung 8Gbit Flash chips are $9 on the spot market at the moment.

      Though the interface for connecting eighty of them onto a single SATA channel wouldn't be completely straightforward just from the point of view of I/O pins; each chip presents eight data pins and nine control pins, so you need a total of about 1500 pins on the disc-controller ICs.

      For the early market you'd probably use FPGAs, you'd need six XC3S400A in one of the larger packages to get enough I/Os, which w

  • Quick Erase? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Jah-Wren Ryel (80510) on Friday November 16 2007, @11:35AM (#21380073)
    Many of the predecessors to these models were aimed at military applications and contained a really cool feature - instant erase. They could erase themselves very quickly (seconds) to a level believed to be reasonably secure from recovery.

    I would like to see that feature incorporated into these consumer level drives. You never know when you might need to ditch that terabyte of pr0n in a hurry...

    • Re:Quick Erase? (Score:5, Funny)

      by LighterShadeOfBlack (1011407) on Friday November 16 2007, @11:44AM (#21380187) Homepage
      Right, because when your house gets raided and the police see you erased your hard drive they just turn around and say "well played". 'Obstruction of justice' ringing any bells?

      Not to mention the British police will assume it's just encrypted and you'll get 5 years jail-time for not providing the key.

      • Right, because when your house gets raided and the police see you erased your hard drive they just turn around and say "well played". 'Obstruction of justice' ringing any bells?

        Since when is pr0n illegal? However, since you want to go down that path...

        If whatever your drive contained was 'illegal' or sufficiently incriminating, it may very well be that an "obstruction of justice" charge is preferable to whatever charges would have come about from confiscation of the actual drive contents.

        • Since when is pr0n illegal?

          Well, why would you need to erase your entire drive for anyone besides the police? You'd have to have a serious lack of crisis management skills to erase your hard drive every time you heard your wife coming. It wouldn't exactly avert suspicion either...

          'What are you doing in here honey? Why is the screen black?'
          'Oh I'm just err.. reformatting it. Damn thing got corrupted'
          'That new "solid state" thingie is useless, this is the third time this week you've had to do that!'

          And yes, I know what you're thinking

          • Well, why would you need to erase your entire drive for anyone besides the police?

            Well, why would you need to encrypt your entire drive for anyone besides the police?

            A laptop with a "quick erase" button would be useful to many businesses with people who travel in less than the safe regions. Same goes for people in less than free countries who are working for change. Full disk encryption doesn't stand up to rubber-hose cryptography very well.

            I'm sure with more than 30 seconds to think about I could come up with any number of 'legitimate' uses.

      • Re:Quick Erase? (Score:5, Funny)

        by noidentity (188756) on Friday November 16 2007, @12:34PM (#21380875)

        Not to mention the British police will assume it's just encrypted and you'll get 5 years jail-time for not providing the key.

        All those zeroes... there must be something hidden in them. Produce the key at once!

  • EVE Online uses the TMS RamSan (Score:5, Interesting)

    by LakeSolon (699033) * on Friday November 16 2007, @11:53AM (#21380325) Homepage
    As has been mentioned already, TMS sells a solution that fills a rack. The article is about something to fill a drive bay.

    We've had a few EVE-Online stories lately, so I thought it might be interesting to some to point out that one of the users of the TMS setup is CCP Games, the makers of EVE Online. In fact if you click on 'success stories' in right sidebar of the first link in the summary you'll see a short article about CCP's first install of the TMS RamSan [superssd.com] a while back.

  • getoffmylawn (Score:4, Funny)

    by ronadams (987516) on Friday November 16 2007, @12:04PM (#21380453) Homepage
    Yeah, these look pretty nice, but you can't beat those old tube drives for that warm, acoustic sound.
    • but they're prone to getting all clogged up with electric mails, and those technicolor Flash moving pictures don't help any either. and they never should have got rid of those nice operator ladies with rolls of wire under their desks of blinky lights and plugholes to route calls, replacing them with those tabulator contraptions with only four or five plugholes to move packages has got the tubes so backed up

  • New! Improved! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by JohnnyBigodes (609498) <morphine@digital ... BSDnet minus bsd> on Friday November 16 2007, @12:22PM (#21380701)
    Now available with a terabyte-sized pricetag!
  • RamSan-400

    The starting capacity of a RamSan-400 (32GB) is $35,000. It includes:
    -32GB DDRRAM storage
    -one dual-ported 4Gb Fibre Channel controller
    -hot swappable RAID 3 hard disk drives
    -hot swappable and redundant power supplies
    -redundant battery and fans
    -IBM Chipkill in memory (redundant RAM)
    -1 year return to factory warranty

    Each additional 4Gb FC controller is $3,000 (up to 4 in each chassis).

    The RamSan-400 can upgrade in 32GB increments for $18,000 (up to 128GB).

    RamSan-400 (64GB) - $50,400
    RamSan-400 (96GB) - $65,800
    RamSan-400 (128GB) - $81,200

    RamSan-500

    The 1TB base-level system of a RamSan-500 (1TB SLC NAND Flash, 16GB DDR) is $200,000. It includes:
    -one dual-ported 4Gb Fibre Channel controller
    -hot swappable and redundant power supplies
    -redundant battery and fans
    -1 year return to factory warranty

    The 2TB base-level system of a RamSan-500 (2TB SLC NAND Flash, 32GB DDR) is $300,000. It includes:
    -two dual-ported 4Gb Fibre Channel controllers
    -hot swappable and redundant power supplies
    -redundant battery and fans
    -1 year return to factory warranty

    The RamSan-500 can upgrade DDR Cache.
    -16GB to 32GB is $10,000
    -32GB to 64GB is $20,000

    Each additional 4Gb FC controller is $3,000 (up to 4 in each chassis).

  • Not Yet Convinced (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Nom du Keyboard (633989) on Friday November 16 2007, @03:35PM (#21383407)
    I'm not yet convinced that paying a premium price for a hard drive using a more expensive technology with a very (compared to rotating storage) limited lifetime in terms of write cycles is a wise idea. There are parts of my hard drive (swap areas) that get beat-up pretty badly at times. Don't want to wear this thing out in a year or two.

    That's also why I don't have a plasma big screen yet. I'm using an alternative technology there as well.

    • This is not funny anymore.
    • This comes up every single time flash drives get mentioned on Slashdot. Go search around and you'll dozens of posts in every article asking and answering this question. The short answer is that with the wear levelling used on all modern flash drives they work out at at least an order of magnitude more reliable than current HDDs despite the write limit.
    • These are RAM drives with a battery backup. They aren't flash drives. RTFA.
    • Yes, it would suck, because we all know that standard hard drives with spinning platters, and magnetic read/write heads, almost never break down. :)

      My point is, is that if solid state drives had better known failure times, they could be better than the spinning platter types. Spinning platter drives tend to die whenever, for unknown reasons, and they also die if they just get too old. If using solid state drives could solve the first problem, and only have drives die at a known point in the future, whe

    • Since filesystems are so closely tied to cylinders, tracks, sectors and blocks...how does this play on SSDs? If I'm not mistaken, when allocating new extents, filesystems take into account physical locations to minimize future seek times...is that valid on a SSD?

      Actually,

      1. Even for low level disk access, that hasn't been so since the days of MFM hard drives. Nowadays everything uses LBA (Logical Block Addressing) [wikipedia.org]. Meaning that when the computer wants a certain sector it tells the hard drive, quite literall

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