BitMicro Takes Wraps Off 832 GB Flash Drive

Lucas123 writes "BitMicro has unveiled an 832GB NAND flash drive that will begin shipping later this year. The E-Disk Altima drive is expected to have sustained read rates of up to 100MB/sec and up to 20,000 I/O operations per second. The device features a SATA 3.0 G/bps interface. No pricing as of yet."

Mortgage?

[mudetroit (855132)]

Unless they came up with some radically cheaper method of producting them this will basically probably require a mortgage to go out and buy.

Re:

[xENoLocO (773565)]

Yes, but can it run on USB power?

Re:

[maxwell demon (590494)]

Well, maybe I'm not up to date, but I always thought first-borns run on food, just like anyone else.

USB power, that's not the question.

[Tatarize (682683)]

But, can it blend?

Re:Mortgage?

[Linker3000 (626634)]

Poors Law?

cost estimate

[192939495969798999 (58312)]

The cheapest I ever heard of a 2 GB flash drive was about $15, so this is over 400 of those put together or $6000. Even if they had some volume discount, I think anything under $1000 for an 800+GB flash drive is unthinkable... right?

Re:cost estimate

[PrescriptionWarning (932687)]

the same could be said of a 800 GB hard drive years ago. i'll explain in mathematical terms: as time, thats our X axis, increases, the Y value decreases. If you guessed Y to be the cost, give yourself a chimichanga. If you guessed Y to be anything else including, but not limited to, goat milk, give yourself a wedgie.

Re:cost estimate

[by Anonymous Coward]

zOMG that means cars should be like $5.99 now since they were hella expensive back in the day, right?

lrn2economics

Re:cost estimate

[PrescriptionWarning (932687)]

the curve of time to car value is far different from the curve of technology value over time. For example, a car is considered an antique after a certain period of time, in which its value goes up (if properly maintained and restored)!

try selling a nintendo or an old watch calculator made in the 80s in 10 years, I doubt you'll get more than a 5-10 bucks. The point is, the car analogy has yet again made someone look like an idiot :P

Re:

[Andrew Kismet (955764)]

Which Nintendo? Because a Nintendo Virtual Boy will definitely go UP in value over the next 10 years.
The NES/Famicom probably won't go up much, but as supply drops due to (1) no longer being manufactured (2) damage and disrepair over time, the price of a pristine NES will definitely go up.

Re:

[berashith (222128)]

The term "car" is being applied generically here, which is unfair. If the term computer were being used equally generically then we would have a comparison to make. The cost of cars has stayed high, but the value of the pieces are always getting better and better. If cars were limited to the same models, features, power and efficiency that they had in the late 50s, but continued to be produced in massive amounts, then the cost would be absurdly low.

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[seanadams.com (463190)]

I am confused. Surely the global population of pirates factors into the equation somehow?

Re:cost estimate

[TeknoDragon (17295)]

more likely they will be using anything from 4gb - 64gb chips (Samsung announced 25/10/07)

If they are shooting for video editing only that price would be right, but the enthusiast & business market will IMO want something under $2000. TFA suggests business application.

Re:cost estimate

[ACMENEWSLLC (940904)]

I don't know if BitMicro is among these, but there are manufactures that have figured out how to mass produce very large USB drives at a fraction of todays costs. There have been articles in Google news, and patents are pending on various methods.

I think we discussed this on /. not long ago?

Re:cost estimate

[phoenix321 (734987)]

"There is a lot more computing in this world than what can be found in data centers and offices, young Padawan."

Really, there is. Computers that fly, sail, drive or are employed in low power, low heat, low noise, high vibration, high dust, high heat, low heat environments. Be creative: That starts with laptops in the space shuttle and surely doesn't end with onboard systems of surveillance planes. All Gigabyte-intensive operations where you do not have an unlimited power socket in the wall and/or have other considerations about weight and shock tolerances.

And all of these applications have powers with large checkbooks behind them, who will write off 5000USD as merely half a percent price increase for much better reliability and power consumption.

Sweet

[Quasar1999 (520073)]

Now Apple has the technology to support flash based player of HD content in a year or two, once the price of this drops. 832 Gigs should be enough for at least 50 HD movies.

Re:

[bagboy (630125)]

Why would you want to watch a HD Movie on that tiny-ass screen? Good waste of bits if you ask me.....

Re:Sweet

[Firehed (942385)]

Why would you waste that much space as part of a disk with effectively zero seek time on HD movies? They don't need that kind of performance - even a 4200RPM standard hard drive would have more than enough throughput (and with tech like accelerometer-based head parking, durability shouldn't be too much of an issue). Use it as an OS disk. Better yet, use it for databases - the seek times would be fantastic for the application, and unless you're constantly updating rows (rather than just inserting new ones), the write cycle limit on flash-based storage is unlikely to become an issue.

It's not as if you need a portable video library anyways. Stick a few on your device and go. Your battery life is by far going to be the limiting factor. Apple would be much better off trying to create a mobile video streaming device than to waste so much flash memory on a portable device.

Sure, in five years then I'll probably have a terabyte of flash memory in my car key that only costs eight bucks. And at that point, this kind of thing would make sense. Right now, that's a TON of flash storage that would carry a huge price that would make it beyond impractical for portables. If you want a mobile HD player, create something with a 720p screen and one of those brand new 500GB laptop drives and stick half a gig of RAM in as a massive buffer.

Re:

[DigitAl56K (805623)]

What has this got to do with Apple?

hmm.

[apodyopsis (1048476)]

no idea of pricing yet, but several major limbs and a contract signed in your own bodily fluid was hinted at.

832GB SSD?! holy cow thats going to be dear.

Now tell me why anybody should want this outside of the media/video industry...

Re:hmm.

[MyLongNickName (822545)]

Now tell me why anybody should want this outside of the media/video industry...

We've found Bill Gates' Slashdot user account.

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[TeknoDragon (17295)]

:)

I'd take one for my gaming laptop. I could live with something as small as 200 gigs, but if they're going to give me 4x that much I'll take it!

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[MBCook (132727)]

I would have thought he would have had a much lower UID.

Or did you lose your password a few times Bill?

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[rucs_hack (784150)]

Hassle free household media server?

The various media in my house, shared among four PC's comes to well over 600Gb. It would be more, but I don't have the room to rip all my DvDs yet, and it grows, thanks to my various subscriptions, by several Gb a month. Having all that on one fast access solid state device would be serious bonus.

Re:hmm.

[easyTree (1042254)]

Now tell me why anybody should want this outside of the media/video industry...

To lower power consumption/size/weight of laptops?

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[Wordsmith (183749)]

For all the same reasons someone would want a big hard drive (I've got a TB in a mainstream machine that cost me just over $1,000, and I'm sure I'll someday use it up with various media I've purchased, downloaded or recorded off TV). And they might prefer this due to the longer life, better access speed and lack of noisy moving parts.

-Lou

Re:

[Amouth (879122)]

i would love to have a raid 5 setup with this on the db server here at work.. with that kind of sustained data rate .. hummmm

Re:hmm.

[sc7007 (26649)]

Now tell me why anybody should want this outside of the media/video industry...

I work in the seismic data processing industry (oil and gas exploration). We regularly (almost every project) deliver datasets to clients that are on the orders of 1-5 TB. Many of our milestone QC datasets for clients are 500-750 GB. Putting these on a flash drive or portable hard drive is much faster than a bunch of 3592E tapes, plus easier and quicker for the client to access. Flash drives certainly have the advantage over USB hard disks of being faster to write to (usually). If these were cheap enough, and they will be at some point, I could see these being commonly used. On the other hand, maybe just a solid state portable disk drive, which these are just a variant of, will be cheaper (time and money).

Yawn

[Rie Beam (632299)]

They've already announced a 1.6TB flash drive for launch around mid-2008 [bitmicro.com].

Re:

[lazyforker (957705)]

The drive you linked to is 3.5" and 1.6TB; whereas the drive in TFA is 2.5" and 832GB. I assume they're aiming for a different market with this product. In fact the 2.5" might be ideal as a storage device for an HD video camera. Small, light, low power consumption, less susceptible to shocks etc. Or if you have a high performance laptop with which you perform video editing and want to avoid carrying bags of external FW drives, cables, PSUs, spare batteries etc etc this would be pretty cool to have *in*

832?

[teslar (706653)]

Well, that's an odd number, what's the motivation behind it? I can see that 832 = 512 + 256 + 64 = 2^9 + 2^8 + 2^6, but I still fail to see the logic there.

Re:832?

[MyLongNickName (822545)]

Well, that's an odd number

No. It is even.

Re:832?

[Rickz0rz (831049)]

832 = 64 * 13 Perhaps they are using 13 64mB modules.

Re:832?

[mr_mischief (456295)]

The thing is, 13's not exactly a power of two. To access 13 modules, you'd need the same 4 control lines as 16 modules. Perhaps it's actually 16 * 64 and three are specifically for redundancy and wear leveling?

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[araemo (603185)]

Perhaps they couldn't physically fit more than 13 modules into the same space as a 3.5" HDD?

Either way, it nicely explains the 1.6TB version (128MB modules instead of 64MB modules..)

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[SeaFox (739806)]

Perhaps it's actually 16 * 64 and three are specifically for redundancy and wear leveling?

Perhaps they are giving the formatted capacity.

I know. I don't believe it either.

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[GreatBunzinni (642500)]

Wouldn't it make more sense if you thought of 26*32 instead of far-fetched assumptions?

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[easyTree (1042254)]

what is a millibyte?

It's what you'll be getting from my pet mPede shortly =)

I want one

[jollyreaper (513215)]

I think I'm going to need a bigger keychain.

the marketing dept has picked a name for it:

[circletimessquare (444983)]

The Porntropolis 832 (tm)

Preinstalled?

[cashman73 (855518)]

Does it come with a free copy of Duke Nukem Forever preinstalled?

If you need to ask the price ...

[Skapare (16644)]

... then you can't afford it, yet. Wait a couple years and pick them up in the discount bin at Walmart.

Re:

[GregPK (991973)]

Only if you drive a domestic. ;)

Re:nothing to see here...

[Not_Wiggins (686627)]

The sweet spot right now seems to be around 16 or 32 Mb. You can get an 16 Mb flash drive for about $150, but 32 Mb is more than twice the price.

Can't... resist...

1999 called... they want their flash pricing back. ;)

Or, if you'd like, I'd be willing to sell you some 32Mb flash cards for, shall we say, $100 a piece? ;)

(Sorry.)

Re:nothing to see here...

[Slashcrap (869349)]

no evidence that they actually have working hardware.

This is a good point and you are right to be cautious. Obviously there will be massive technological challenges to overcome in order to move past the current state of the art, which is loads of flash connected to an SATA interface, to this new paradigm of having shitloads of flash connected to an SATA interface.

I'm not an expert, but I'm thinking perhaps they can start by adding more flash?

Re:I thought flash went bad over time

[LighterShadeOfBlack (1011407)]

I swear at least one person has asked this question in every flash-drive related article on /. for the last 5 years. Yes, there is a limited number of writes - usually in the 100,000 to 1 million range depending on the quality of flash used. No, it isn't a problem in any practical terms for common uses. Using wear-levelling a flash drive should work out a great deal more durable than existing hard drive technology.

Re:

[Skapare (16644)]

So if I use one of these to record the nightly news every day in UNcompressed high definition, it will wear out in just over 273 years in the worst case, or last nearly 2738 years in the best case. It's more likely to be stolen as primitive relic in that time frame :-)

Re:Sorry

[modecx (130548)]

If I can't buy it yet, then it doesn't exist yet.

F-22 Raptor: so expensive that it's practically invisible!

Re:Sorry

[UbuntuDupe (970646)]

You can't buy a house with your credit and income. Do no houses exist?

Re:

[rapidweather (567364)]

Seems like we've slashdotted the Pen Drive Linux site.

Ok, I'm running my linux (see screenshots, below) from a 2 GB SanDisk Micro Cruzer drive at this time,
on a Gateway 2000 Pentium II. Use these files [rapidweather.com] to kick off the Flash Drive, using loadlin. You have to have a small msdos drive in the computer, or a partition on a larger drive with msdos, put the files there. Documentation is included in the tarball, also, a copy of the Rapidweather Remaster CD is needed also.