Ultra Fast Disk Drives With No Moving Parts 530
saccade.com writes "Let's face it, the slowest part
of PC's today is the disk drive. Bit
Micro has come up with a nifty solution - flash memory based
disk drives available in typical
disk
form-factors. These e-disks are electrically compatible
with ATA, SCSI, etc. but run orders of magnitude faster - access
times down to 40 usec and transfer rates over 100 MB/sec. What's
the catch? Cost. Currently going for just under $1K/G, a 30G model
I recently held in my hand was worth much more than my car. However,
as flash memory prices drop, so do the price of these drives.
Within the decade the spinning hard disk may go the way
of the floppy and CRT."
Is this an ad? Or what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Life time? (Score:3, Insightful)
Yet again (Score:4, Insightful)
write cycles (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:FP (Score:2, Insightful)
Floppies are dead? (Score:5, Insightful)
Are we done yet with the whole 'floppies are dead' stories? I regularly use floppies because it's easier to plop in a floppy, copy one file and pop out the floppy than it is to put in a USB drive, wait for your pc to recognize it (don't know about Macs), copy the file then have to correctly disconnect the USB drive
What about those machines which don't have USB drives or who aren't on a network? What then? Floppies will be around much longer than anyone thinks and for good reason.
Man, the Bottleneck (Score:5, Insightful)
No, the slowest part of PC's today is the user interface. The rate at which a user enters data (via keyboard/mouse) is a fraction of the rate at which a user thinks. (Your mileage may vary, of course.)
-kgj
Nothing happening then. (Score:5, Insightful)
You mean it'll still be the default option on most new PCs and in use by ~90% of PC users?
Famous eternal predictions (Score:3, Insightful)
For how many decades now has this been predicted? Holographic memory, battery backed RAM, yada yada yada. Methinks rotating storage will be around for more than the rest of the decade.
WHy not integrate with the motherboard then? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not that new. (Score:3, Insightful)
Just SAY IT - a whooping 1,000 $ for 1 crappy GB! No thanks I'll stick with my s-ata, and if that gives me any more issues, I'll get rid of that too, and use IDE
Re:Not that new. (Score:5, Insightful)
They also have industrial uses. They get used in places where the gyroscopic effect of a normal drive would be undesirable, or the vibration caused is undesirable.
Personally, I don't think the price will come down that much. FLASH devices (the actual chips) are used in a ton of places. In the past there have been shortages of the devices, and IIRC the cell phone manufacurers are the largest buyers of them.
What about disk prices? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not that new. (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, what's so different from this and just using a standard CF card? You can get 1GB of CF for under $150. It should be fairly simple to put together a "CF-raid" drive for way less than $1K/GB.
Yes, floppies are dead. (Score:3, Insightful)
What about those machines which don't have floppies?
Seriously, I haven't put a floppy into a machine in the last 6 years. They're totally unnecessary nowadays. They're about useless for transporting documents for the simple reason that the majority of useful documents exceed the size of the floppy nowadays.
And USB drives are much cooler than you seem to make them out to be. Plug the thing into the USB connector in the front, it mounts, you copy, you unplug the thing. Yes, you might have to wait a second or two for it to recognize and mount the thing, but that's better than waiting for at least 90 seconds to copy 1.4 meg to the slow-as-hell floppy.
Floppies once had limited usefulness as being the only easy way to bootstrap the system. Boot from the floppy, format the hard drive, install the OS. Now that every mobo can do CD booting, I no longer need boot floppies, as I can have boot CD's instead.
Re:Whats a 1K/G? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Man, the Bottleneck (Score:3, Insightful)
Always beware of "X is dead!" in the media (Score:5, Insightful)
Within the decade the spinning hard disk may be capable of holding terabytes, or even petabytes, on a single platter. And it will be orders of magnitude cheaper than solid state storage as we know it. I doubt that hard drives will go the way of the dodo anytime soon.
Just as a comparison, look at how many backup solutions still use tape media (and use it very effectively and cheaply, I might add).
The problem with hard drives (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know much about flash memory technology or the reliability associated with it. I don't give a hoot how fast it is. If it's solid state (no moving parts) and can guarantee me it won't one day decide to utterly destroy itself, I'm sold.
Re:Nothing happening then. (Score:3, Insightful)
You mean it'll still be the default option on most new PCs and in use by ~90% of PC users?
awwww...I was going to say that, but with more blood dripping evil sarcasm.
I still wonder why we can't move away from floppies. I mean we made the switch from 5.25 to 3.5. The only thing I see taking the floppies place right now is the cdburner and there are so many limitations to that media. I've got floppies from the early 90s that I still read/write to....I don't use cds that way.
Re:Man, the Bottleneck (Score:3, Insightful)
Next time, open up vi or emacs, or even for god's sake pico, and print from there. If your boss doesn't like plain fonts, then get a new job.
Spreadsheet? sc. 'Nuff said.
Write Times? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Not that new. (Score:5, Insightful)
Why the hell would we stuff this onto the IDE interface? This would be a great opportunity to drop that interface entirely.
Re:Life time? (Score:2, Insightful)
If so that's not a very useful way to calculate lifespan of the device. A much more typical usage pattern will have certain bits written very frequently and certain bits written never at all.
Their rating of 1 million write/erase cycles is the really interesting part. If I had a database server that wrote to the same area on disk (maybe a heavily-used row of a table or something), I wouldn't be surprised if the same spot on disk was written to well over 10,000 times per day. At this rate, those bits on the drive would die after 100 days.
I wonder if their devices automatically work around "dead" bits, remapping that section to a new area of the drive? In this case, every time a bit died it would transparently be replaced by a working bit. But then your drive would continuously be shrinking as your bits died
Re:Always beware of "X is dead!" in the media (Score:3, Insightful)
I thought the comparison was pretty good. Floppies are still used by many people as a quick way to transport files back and forth from home (particularly by people that don't have Internet access at home). I generally don't put the drives in anymore, but theres a couple people in the office that specifically ask for them. The drives are dirt cheap, so it's not a big deal.
CRT's are still popular. Even the cheap LCDs are well over twice the cost of a CRT. If you're trying to do gaming or something that requires high refresh rates, you need a very good LCD and the costs start getting pretty high. I personally don't really like paying as much for the monitor as I do for the rest of the machine.
So I totally agree with the grandparent. Within the decade the spinning hard disk may go the way of the floppy and CRT.
Yep, it'll be an alternative, that some people will use when they can afford it and/or require it. And like CRT's and floppies, many people will still use spinning drives when they don't feel like dropping a bunch of extra money on a fancy technology that doesn't really give them any huge benefit*.
* I'm talking about your typical desktop here, where the lifetime of the machine is a 3-4 years, you're using fans in the machine (so the missing noise of a drive is not a big deal), and the most system intensive task you do is boot up.
Re:Not that new. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:WHy not integrate with the motherboard then? (Score:3, Insightful)
2) Trace complexity. Routing the little etched copper wires can be tricky, and this could easily result in 2+ extra layers of PCB.
3) Maximum addressability. On a modern machine, software could address an unrealistic amount of ATA/SCSI storage (assuming they've updated the standards with enough address lines on the bus). Doing it your way imposes limits (as fantastic as they might be). Keep in mind that while an onboard SCSI controller might be imposing hard limits again, you can always plug in another PCI card.
4) Corporate needs dictate storage that is seperable from the big iron's main logic boards. Even if it had your version also, this would end up being cache, not storage.
5) 25 years' worth of inertia. The old stanards are *the* standards. What good is a new fancy $50,000 "hard drive", if we have to buy a new $2 million sun server to use it? Why can't we use this in our $2 million sun server we bought only 19 months ago?
6) Makes too much sense. Remember, this is the industry that chose IDE over SCSI, for what? A nickel per unit of short-term gain?
Re:WHy not integrate with the motherboard then? (Score:2, Insightful)
SSDs with integrated traditional hard drives and a battery (used to write the memory module resident data to the dedicated hard disk in case of power failure) seem to negate any problems with power loss.
Why bother having such devices anyways (aka ramdrive argument)? Easy...when you've maxed out the amount of memory you can possibly install on a system, and you need MORE, you install SSDs on fast SCSI busses, and swap to the SSD. Not quite as good as having the extra RAM, but a damn sight better than writing to a physical disk in most cases.
As to 'why not just make another interface for a memory module' on the motherboard...well, i'm not an EE, but there's very small distances that you can go at reasonable speed, and a ton of trace paths.....you only have a certain number of memory slots on a board running at that ultra-fast DDR speed because that's all the engineers designing it could pull off! It's not like they're lazy and could simply add another couple inches to the board and put in 32 slots or so. I have seen boards with special accomodations for memory mezzanines and such to hold more modules, but I'd imagine that implementing multiple direct memory interfaces (running at appreciable speed and integrity) would be difficult and cost a great deal of money...I wish I understood all the issues involved.
Re:Floppies are dead? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Floppies are dead? (Score:4, Insightful)
1. Time It takes my WinXP Pro laptop about 5 seconds to recognize the USB drive and allow me to explore its contents. Likewise, "Safely removing the hardware" takes 5 seconds, tops. So we're talking 10 seconds total for mounting/unmounting. Floppies take at least 2 seconds to be recognized, though granted dismounting is instantaneous. Advantage: floppy, by 8 seconds.
However, there is another huge issue I think you are neglecting:
2. Size While that floppy might be 8 seconds faster, I hope whatever you're planning on transporting is less than 1.44 MB. Nowadays, there is very little I transport that would fit on such an incredibly small storage medium. A 256 MB USB key can hold as much data as 178 floppy disks, and fits on my keychain.
Finally, a caveat regarding your "time" complaints about USB: it takes much longer to write 1.44 MB to a floppy disk than it does to write that same 1.44 MB to a USB drive. So your 8 second mounting/unmounting delta is rendered utterly moot.
Re:Yay! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Yay! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Nothing happening then. (Score:3, Insightful)
Why did nothing ever replace the floppy disc?
Because manufacturers got greedy.
Iomega's ZIP, Sony's LS-120, and a bunch of other small sized, 100MB+ capacity discs were all supposed to be "floppy killers". However, due to greed, none of the companies would cross-license or agree to a common standard. Which had the nasty side-effect of keeping prices for both the media and drives high. Drive costs needed to be on the order of $50 with media costs in the $2 range (MD could've been a contender, but Sony is their own worst enemy).
Once CD-R media broke $2/disc (or CD-RW), it no longer made sense and they quickly priced themselves out of the market. Even at the tail end, ZIP disks were $10 or $15 compared to a $2 CD-RW which held 5x or 2x as much. Even better, a CD-RW could often be read in any system with a regular old CD drive.
USB flash drives are probably the only thing that's going to kill of floppies, even though they're slightly more difficult to use.
Re:Not that new. (Score:3, Insightful)
On newer CF cards they have an internal microprocessor that constantly remaps the logical addresses of the drive to different physical addresses [...] So even though the OS thinks it's writing the FAT to that same spot on the drive, the drive is really moving that spot around to maximize the life of the drive.
Wow. So forget trying to shred files on those. (Yes, mods, I realize it would still work at the filesystem level--that won't stop someone who cracks the case open and reads straight off the chips.)
And what about the memory where the logical-to-physical map is stored? Even if you rewrite the same sector to 10,000 different places, you'll have to rewrite the same map entry 10,000 times. Or is that part of the memory designed to withstand rewriting better?
Re:$1000/GB wasn't bad 10 years ago. (Score:2, Insightful)
Erasable punch cards?
Given the IQ level of many slashdotters, I can't tell whether this is supposed to be humor or not.