640gb PCIe Solid-State Drive Demonstrated

Lisandro writes "TG Daily reports that the company Fusion io has presented a massively fast, massively large solid-state flash hard drive on a PCIe card at the Demofall 07 conference in San Diego. Fusion is promising sustained data rates of 800Mb/sec for reading and 600Mb/sec for writing. The company plans to start releasing the cards at 80 GB and will scale to 320 and 640 GB. '[Fusion io's CTO David Flynn] set the benchmark for the worst case scenario by using small 4K blocks and then streaming eight simultaneous 1 GB reads and writes. In that test, the ioDrive clocked in at 100,000 operations per second. "That would have just thrashed a regular hard drive," said Flynn. The company plans on releasing the first cards in December 2007 and will follow up with higher capacity versions later.'"

Oblig.

[by Anonymous Coward]

640gb ought to be enough for anybody.

Re:

[GodfatherofSoul (174979)]

Maybe for your pr0n collection ;)

Re:Oblig.

[ady1 (873490)]

Its not the size of the harddrive which is amazing. Its the read/write speed.
Even if you get a 32GB model, you can install windows on it and use the regular SATA2 HDD for movies/music storage. Think of the booting time.

Re:Oblig.

[norton_I (64015)]

You can tell if flash is bad, if worst comes to worst, by reading after writing. Or reading after erasing, and looking for stuck 1's.

'worn out' flash doesn't spontaneously change state. Bits just get stuck and don't erase correctly.

I don't know how flash drives actually handle this, but it isn't magic or impossible to fix.

Also, the lifetime of modern flash is long enough that it is hardly an issue any more, even for normal desktop use. Maybe you don't want to use it for swap *IF* you swap a lot, but given the cost is in the same ballpark as RAM, you could just buy more RAM.

Re:Oblig.

[Cantinflas (514778)]

I don't know where you got your info, but 'modern' flash has horrible life-expectancy in terms or write-cycles.

Explanation:

Most flash vendors have moved to MLC (Multi-Level Cell) flash. It's cheaper and denser, but the bit-error rate goes up because you have more bits per cell. The typical life expectancy for MLC is somewhere in the range of 10,000 writes using single-bit error correction. This is compared to 'older' SLC flash which has a write endurance of 100,000 to 300,000 writes.

Now, most vendors making media out of flash take varying degrees of a combination of two approaches (in addition to standard wear-leveling approaches). The first approach is to assume that the majority of the users will only ever store audio or video data so the occasional uncorrectable error won't have much impact as long as it doesn't corrupt the filesystem. The second approach is to use more advanced error correcting algorithms to compensate for the higher bit-error rate.

Using more advanced algorithms, it's possible to get more than 300,000 writes out of a MLC flash-block before the errors become uncorrectable.

P.S. I may be wrong, but I believe flash can have some really odd error conditions. For example, it's possible to disturb a bit in a block just by reading it. I believe it's also possible to disturb a bit in a different block on the same matrix when writing. That's why some form of error correction is always required with NAND flash.

Re:Oblig.

[Lisandro (799651)]

our childish "uh oh" introduction, your completely un-cited "a lot of issues" comment, and your vague "I recall" interruption reveal the fact that you're spouting off some crap on a subject you have no direct, real-world experience with. Find another subject with which to stroke your ego kid, because you're looking like a pompous dumbass on this one.

The specs for a 256Mb NAND flash memory chip [alldatasheet.com] by Samsung (which is by far the biggest NAND flash manufacturer today) quotes 100k millon write/erase cycles, and this is for an IC commonly used in USB pendrives. The figure usually tends to get worse with increased memory sizes since the memory "element" (float gate) becomes smaller. For example, Modern 16Mb chips, which are the ones i have experience with, usualy quote 1 million W/E cycles endurance.

But, it felt good stroking my ego a bit more :) Thanks!

Re:Oblig.

[Eccles (932)]

Oh yeah, how does a solid state drive handle fragmentation? I have heard that they don't fragment, but not from reliable sources, and I just don't see how that is possible unless there is some built in mechanism to close gaps on the fly or something.

Hard disks have a fragmentation issue because sequential accesses are much faster than random ones with a spinning disk. Each time the next sector to get isn't right after the previous one, the head must seek to the start of the next track. Solid state "disks" have true random access, where accessing blocks in random order costs no more than sequential accesses. So while solid state will fragment, it doesn't matter for performance or reliability.

Uhh, Price?

[mosel-saar-ruwer (732341)]

Who, what, when, where, why?

Price would seem to be a pretty important detail...

Re:Uhh, Price?

[thegnu (557446)]

I think it's safe to assume you won't be buying one soon.

Re:Uhh, Price?

[morgan_greywolf (835522)]

FTFA:

So how much will these cards cost? Flynn told us that the company is aiming to beat $30 dollars a GB, something that should seem very cheap to large corporations, adding "You can drop ship or Fedex this card and be up and running in a few minutes... you can't do that with a storage area network."

So, let's say they get to $29 a GB, a reasonable price for NAND flash-based memory devices. 640*30==$19,200. Sorry, but that doesn't seem to beat an inexpensive SAN in price. I recently priced out a 12TB iSCSI SAN for a little bit more than that, and even 1-2 TB fibre SAN from IBM should be around the same price.

Re:Uhh, Price?

[walt-sjc (145127)]

Um, we were using large RAM disks (the kind that hooked up to SCSI, had a built in UPS and disk to dump RAM contents) many years ago (8 now?) to speed up databases. That was limited by the SCSI bus, but access time and latency were near zero (which was awesome.)
Of course, large back then meant 4G, and the average hard disk was 9G. This is evolutionary, not revolutionary.

And another question.

[AltGrendel (175092)]

What's the MTBF? [wikipedia.org]

Re:And another question.

[LiquidCoooled (634315)]

Hitachi are saying that they have solved the overwrite problem (at least mitigated it by a factor of 100)

They appear to want to use normal DRAM memory for the running of the drive but then write it permanently to the NAND flash at shutdown/memory full time.
I would assume this involves charging of a small battery and dumping the data later on.

http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2007/09/26/hitachi-reckons-solid-state [theinquirer.net]

Wow

[thatskinnyguy (1129515)]

I could imagine using this as an OS drive. No sooner do you let your finger off the power button than the login screen appears.

Re:Wow

[zlogic (892404)]

My PDA boots in about 30 seconds, and it doesn't have a harddrive. Booting isn't just loading stuff from a drive, it's hundreds of tests like
- hardware changes
- hardware initialization (e.g. loading firmware)
- searching for drivers
- applications acquiring and releasing resources and checking for stuff like library versions, user names etc.
That's why BIOS initialization often takes time, and yet it works even if the system has no drives.

The only way this would work is hibernating, but hardware would still need to be initialized.

Re:Wow

[FiveLights (1012605)]

You are standing in a field, facing East. A river runs East and West to the North of you and a path runs to the South and East.

Re:Wow

[HarvardAce (771954)]

You are likely to be eaten by a gnome.

Re:Wow

[east coast (590680)]

Yeah? How does WoW play on your C64?

It plays very nice.

[turns to the other Commodore users] I told him it plays very nice [chuckling from users]

Now! Go away or I shall taunt you a second time.

on behalf of all of slashdot, i would like to say

[circletimessquare (444983)]

(drool!)

$30 per gb, ouch

[dnamaners (770001)]

Its fast, but not as fast as I would have hopped with parallel access. They better get the speed up or the cost down to hit it big. Right now I'd take either direction, as they both have decent applications. Good progress though, time will tell.

Misleading benchmark

[Chris_Jefferson (581445)]

"'[Fusion io's CTO David Flynn] set the benchmark for the worst case scenario.."

By which he means, set up a completely unrealistic benchmark which shows his flash drive in the best possible light, and a traditional drive in the worst possible light.

I still want one of these, but that benchmark is nothing to be proud of.

Talking to the company at demo

[shdowhawk (940841)]

Having talked to people at demo, what it pretty much came down to is this... is this a product we should be excited about? Definitely ... is it something that will do well right away? Not at all. The price has to drop before this becomes a really valid and useful tool for the GENERAL PUBLIC / Company. But there are a lot of companies out there willing to pay too much money to get these. Hopefully these big companies buy these up and fund this project as QUICKLY as possible. 7 of these side by side at 320/640 gigs a piece is a SCARY/powerful server.

That being said, a few of the guys there said that they pretty much expect these (at the beginning) to do the best sales for companies that are looking to get really really fast database servers going. NOT for scsi san replacements (it's silly to spend $100,000 for something you could get for 10,000 hard drive space wise). Eventually as the price drops... i know of a handful of people who would EASILY pay 1000$ to get one of these on a gaming rig even if it was only 100 gigs. But that right there is already 1/3rd of the price of what it currently is. (assuming it's around 30$ a gig).

Another thing to keep in mind that came up in the conversations... since these are tiny, think about the cost per server rack... and think of the cost per electricity to run. If you take those into consideration, these are actually less expensive that most people would think! A massive rack of hard drives could cost a lot of money in a co-location ... and a lot of electricity to run it all... But then again, we're talking about savings on servers, not general in home use.

When this gets to about 1/3rd of it's current price, that's when you will see these things become TRUELY mainstream both to the average company and home users (be it rich ones who need the latest and greatest).

Fusioni-io [fusionio.com] -- Link to their site.

Re:Still Expensive

[Jeff DeMaagd (2015)]

I hope this means that laptops and large capacate media players with extremely long battery life are not too far away.

I think people expect too much from SSDs. The hard drive is far from the dominant power consumption component in a notebook. The CPU, chipset, GPU and display panel each consume more power than a notebook hard drive does. If you follow a modified version of Amdahl's law (not a law, but whatever), you want to fix the biggest problem first, and that is either the display or CPU. An LED backlit display can save some power, and running a lower power rating CPU saves power too. Compared to that, the savings of swapping HDD for SSD is negligible. On a standard notebook, I think you might add 15 minutes to battery life, which is still far from "extremely long battery life".

In media players, doubling in capacity every year is a reasonable expectation.

Re:write limit?

[Lord Ender (156273)]

That's a standard feature these days. I want to know how many times I can overwrite the entire disk with /dev/random. If I did a "dd if=/dev/random of=/ioMemory size=[size of ioDrive]" how many times could I execute that command before the thing goes tits up?

Re:write limit?

[TinyManCan (580322)]

Somewhere between 100k and 1 million times.

Cosidering that this drive is 640GB, that means you would need to write somehwere in the region of 61 PETABYTES of information.

You'd have to write to the drive at a perfect 800 MB/s for 941 days to hit that mark.

It could last as long as 30 years, at full write speed of 800 MB/s if it can handle 1M writes per cell.

At the end of the day, semiconductors this large and high quality are certainly better than tiny bits of rust on rapidly spinning platters.