Seagate to Offer Solid State Drives in 2008

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."

I wonder what Flash capacity growth

is projected out in the future? Normal hard drive capacity growth has certainly seemed to level off lately and perhaps is stagnating (so it seems to me). Yes, flash has grown astronomically the past few years, but is it sustainable to the point of meeting and exceeding conventional drives?

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

I'm not sure flash drives need to meet and exceed conventional drives in capacity (maybe that's why conventional drives have slowed in growth)? I like to use virtual machines for development, but never had the right medium to work on them, exchange them between developers, etc. They're just to big to swap easily by network, external hard drives are too big and fragile, etc. But now I see 16 GB [newegg.com] usb flash drives are available, and only $130 to boot! I'm going to try installing a VM on one and buy a few more if it works well. 16 GB is PLENTY for installing a linux development environment, and I think for XP, too. Vista, I don't know.

Yes, But what is the best File system ?

The headache now is that most file systems are optimised for mechanical based storage media so wont this also mean we will have to look at changing to new file systems ?

Re:Yes, But what is the best File system ?

It can get trickier. The arrangement of chips varies by size and vendor. The controller used and how the chips are connected affect this too. There is a very friendly computer shop that lets me try everything and return if it doesn't work as advertised. I picked up two 2G sticks for about EUR 10,-- each that use a Psion controller and are arranged in 16k blocks. (A four GB stick, with the same Taiwan brand, at EUR 39,-- turned out to be very slow. You have to test them. Except for quick tweaks, its not wise to make excessive writes. It must (in this case) write 16k no matter how small the file. (symlinks are hell) I simply allocate the same space on a HD and do 'dd if=/dev/sdN... of=/dev/da1s2a bs=16k' and that will run 396M in about 22s on BSD and surprisingly much faster with Linux. I use them as boot loaders with the kernel and userland. I slice them because ext2fs has different requirements. Reading is not normally a problem with current sticks. That block size parameter is quite important. I get 30MB/s on BSD (ufs2) and a surprising 90MB/s on Linux. (ext2fs). This is _much_ faster than the claimed rates for msdosfs/ntfs they advertise. (12MB/s write, something I've never seen msdosfs/ntfs do.) Bottom line is I can have upto a dozen or more systems on two sticks.

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. :)

     

Noise

Nobody mentioned the noise! SSD's are silent.

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?

Am I safe in assuming SATA transfer rates are sufficient to handle a SSD?
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.

Limit on writes...

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

Given your comment... what does this do to data recovery, when one DOES fail?

Flash + Low-speed HD = Best of Both

I wonder to what extent current high capacity HDs owe their high power consumption to the needs of high performance (low access time and high bandwidth). But if a large flash cache (say 4-16 GB) buffers the HD, then the HD mechanism could be redesigned to a much lower spec. I'd bet that a ultraslow 300 RPM platter with a stepper-motor head (versus the 4200 to 7500 rpm platter + voice coil technology currently used) would provide adequate performance (and low power consumption) if flash handled the vast majority of accesses and high speed read-writes. The physical disk mechanism would only need to support a bandwidth of about 2-3 Mbytes/sec (for a sustained read of an HD video stream) and flash would provide the 80-150 MBytes/sec burst bandwidth to compete with current laptop drives. (Hardcore video editors wouldn't use this device, but then they wouldn't use most of the low-power laptops on the market anyway).

Are hard drives the tape drives of the future?

If we go back about 20 years, hard drives were for non-volatile fast-access storage, and tape drives were for backup, bulk data storage, archiving and sometimes data transfer (when there was too much for floppies.)

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

Guys, hate to break it to you, but anyone who wants to be running on solid state, is.

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:Warranty?

The rewrite issue has been rehashed a million times. It will be fine. I promise.

Re:Warranty?

Do the math. When rewrites were a problem, how big were the chips? How big are the chips now? How many more writes are possible now? The amount of data that becomes a problem is astronomical at this point...the 'rewrite problem' will kick in long after a spinning disk has found a reason to die.

Re:Warranty?

The drive controller will do wear leveling, so it will not rewrite the same bits over and over again, even if the OS thinks it does. This has also been rehashed a million times.

Re:Warranty?

This has also been rehashed a million times.

I know.. but my brain's wear-leveler keeps storing that knowledge in random places.

Re:Warranty?

Not trolling, I just havent ever seen hard stats on current flash/solid state durability over time recently.

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.

Re:Warranty?

Relax, they still sell mechanical hard drives.

Re:Warranty?

Next thing you'll be saying they still sell RAM sufficient for your working set.

Re:Warranty?

Current flash technology has 1-5 million *write* cycles MTBF.
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:

Write endurance

In the case of 32GB capacity Mtron SSD: >85 years @ 100GByte / day erase/write cycles

So lets lay this one to rest. SSDs are worth it.

Re:Warranty?

I have been researching some of the more current SSD drives lately, and I know that they greatly improved the technology/algorithms behind how they write data to the physical memory. Most companies use some kind of wear-leveling techniques that evenly distribute the writes over the entire surface of the disk, maximizing the disk's life span. I have also read that the different-sized memory modules have different physical characteristics such that smaller modules are actually outlived by larger ones.

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

Re:Warranty?

>>How long of a warranty will these have? Doesn't flash memory break down after a good number of rewrites?

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/browse _frm/thread/136aad9133d01bb7/9c5bce4697be4e1f?lnk= st&q=&rnum=8#9c5bce4697be4e1f [google.com]

(Tone:Sarcastic/Funny)

Re:Lifespan?

There are different grades of flash chip, with varying amounts of write cycles. The problem with the kind of flash that you get in a usb keyring is not that flash is limited in the number of writes, but that cheap low-end flash is. The kind of solid state storage in a drive can take millions of write cycles, which combined with a file-system that spreads the writes evenly across he chip will give a decent lifespan.

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?

Re:Countdown to new iPod version...

I think the 160 GB refers to the hybrid disks Seagate also has in their lineup (which are also mentioned in TFA). Would be more logical too because even with todays cheap flash prices, a 160 GB flash drive would still be relatively pricey.

Re:Flash/RAM Drives?

For that matter, how come we never saw magnetic drives with builtin RAM caches in the GB scale, occasionally written (in parallel) back to the magnetic disc for reliability?

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.

Re:Solid state

It would be awesome. That's the point.