TB-Sized Solid State Drives Announced

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.

Don't Forget Fusion IO's PCIe Card Drive

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.

Re:Don't Forget Fusion IO's PCIe Card Drive

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

.....The Texas Memory Systems RAMSan requires 2500W of power........

It appears that one of these is NOT ready to be used in your next laptop in the near future!

Re:Don't Forget Fusion IO's PCIe Card Drive

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.

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.

Re:Clarification to the Summary required.

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.

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

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.

Re:In other news

Well, at 2500W you could probably buy it as a space heater with a home improvement loan, and snip it off your taxes for the year as well.

This is not a drive... its an array

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:

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...

...how does it compare to capacity equivalent in SD cards plus RAID/reader glue logic piece of hardware?

the bus will be the bottleneck

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!

Very nice

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:

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).

Th

ReadyBoost, et al

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.

One terrabyte!

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

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?

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.

Quick Erase?

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?

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.

Re:Quick Erase?

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

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

Yeah, these look pretty nice, but you can't beat those old tube drives for that warm, acoustic sound.

All This For the Modest Price Of..

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).