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."
Uh... (Score:1, Interesting)
Quality? (Score:3, Interesting)
End User upgradable (Score:4, Interesting)
News? (Score:1, Interesting)
Flash disks. They've been around for quite a while, why do a slashdot story now?
Re:Not that new. (Score:4, Interesting)
shhh dont mention the disks lifetime (Score:3, Interesting)
100,000 writes isn't gonna last long in todays bandwidth intensive video/mp3 world
no moving parts and non-magnetic media is a worthy goal but until we can cure terrible storage lifetimes they wont be much use if i have to worry about the mess backups of backups, as we know from sci-fi all it takes is a big EM burst from the sun and everything you and i have done is gone !
future generations will look back at us and say "they used to store it on WHAT !?"
RAMdisk solution (Score:4, Interesting)
Of course, this assumes you're working on a stable OS with decent tools and good memory management. If you're not, you can be.
Problem with number of writes. (Score:5, Interesting)
I know that 10000 writes seems like a lot, and perhaps it is. Anyone knows how this figure looks for normal harddrives?
Still it seems to me that the limited number of writes sets the biggest limitation.
floppy (Score:3, Interesting)
Nah...The Slowest Part Is The... (Score:4, Interesting)
Technically, a printer is a peripheral, not a part. Whatever. All printers are evil: Too slow, too big, too expensive, too quirky. Ackk.
Re:Quality? (Score:3, Interesting)
Get rid of the moving parts, and I'd expect more life expectancy. Not less.
Cheaper solution (Score:3, Interesting)
Use a traditional hard drive, but with a RAM cache that's as large as the drive. The drive controller uses idle time to preemptively load data into the cache. There's a battery backup so that the drive can continue operating after powerdown, and the system uses a long time period write behind cache with write combining to reduce drive usage in operation.
They should be! (Score:3, Interesting)
Our solution - new 'legacy free' PCs with no floppy drives. There was initial complaint, but now the users have discovered other ways to tote data around - and we don't lose that critical data like before.
floppy & CRT went away? when was that? (Score:3, Interesting)
Within the decade the spinning hard disk may go the way of the floppy and CRT.
I'm writing this from a workstation around a year old that has both a CRT and a floppy. They both get used (albeit one more than the other). Just because you don't use them doesn't mean other people do the same. I'm no futurist but I predict with my magic powers that based on cost/performance CRTs will still be around at the end of this decade. Floppies, maybe not so much.
RAM (Score:3, Interesting)
Hell, why don't we have that now? Why don't we have an affordable caching controller that will take a dozen commodity 512MB memory modules? Or a self contained 3.5" disk based on a 1.8" 20 or 40gb drive and a few gigs of battery backed cache?
SSD is an old idea (Score:5, Interesting)
I looked into SSD for a database at one point. But I found that you can get almost the same performance by using lots of drives in a fast RAID setup. Striping the content over multiple disks does wonders! And its much cheaper.
E.g. look at something like a 12 disk setup with RAID 5+1. You got a full mirror, and essentialy 4-8 times the speed of a single drive. So you are already close to the 'order of magnitude' they SSD drives claim.
Re:Limited lifetime? (Score:3, Interesting)
the 17-inch TFT on my desk cost me something like 450 euros, and it does gaming just fine. Max Payne, Soldier of Fortune, UT2004 etc, etc.... Zero problems.
Gaming wasn't that nice with those old 25+ms panels, but newer 12, 16 and 20ms panels are ALOT better! And we will be seeing 10ms panels in the near future!
Yay! (Score:3, Interesting)
I recently bought a 200GiB hard drive and if it was made of flash memory and cost the same, I should have payed 1600$ worth of taxes. Or roughly 10 times as much as the hard drive itself.
Until this tax insanity blows over, I don't see the technology going anywhere regardsless of how cheap they can build it.
(*): probably a little less, but I didn't bother to look it up. 3.20 DKR per 64MiB - do the currency conversion yourselves.
Obsolete interface as well? (Score:2, Interesting)
Our current mass storage interface standards encompass concepts firmly attached to the physical model of rotating disk(s) with read/write head(s) that can operate on cylindrical tracks.
If flash memory drives become the norm, are these interfaces (ATA, SCSI, etc.) obsolete? Is there a set of primitive operations that map to a flash drive better than retaining those created for spinning media? Could flash drives like these simply be memory mapped and treated more like a cache?
Re:Not that new. (Score:5, Interesting)
memory chips require many expensive and hazardous chemicals to manufacture like fuming sulfuric acid for dissolving the photoresist inks and hydroflouric acid for etching the circuits. These chemicals have a large environmental regulation cost associated with them that's not going to go down any time in the forseeable future and is entirely outside the control of any manufacturing process.
$1000/GB wasn't bad 10 years ago. (Score:2, Interesting)
And we liked it! Uphill, in the snow, both ways! And at 2400 baud!
Re:Not that new. (Score:3, Interesting)
It still wouldn't last forever, but it might be a lot more practical for ordinary use; although you might consider just mirroring it to a HDD as well.
Way old concept (Score:2, Interesting)
I know Nat Semiconductor does. They sank ALOT of cash into the concept in the "early" PC era.
It worked. It worked well. Capable of storing data w/no power. It was going to replace disk drives an system memory.
But while it worked, it worked not as well as the SDRAM of the day or the less that 1 gig drives that were common then.
They never got close enough to breaking the price/performance/capacity "wall" that the others did. The ecomony of scale they hoped for never came through.
I'm not sure, but it might have some uses still as NVRAM (or might be renamed flash memory for all I know)
Re:Not that new. (Score:4, Interesting)
ANY process? I think that was the point - if someone can come up with a new process, we could reduce costs. The more these are used, the more incentive there is to research new processes.
As far as I can recall, there ARE people working on alternatives to memory as we know it.
The same thing happened with LCDs, as pointed out - CRTs have a bottom line cost - the cost of the components have a bottom line that means that LCDs should, at some point, be cheaper - the processes are still be refined and improved, and there's not a whole lot of leeway anymore with CRTs.
Re:Not that new. (Score:5, Interesting)
Without giving away too much (and getting fired in the process) there is a whole new tech on the horizon. It still uses all the nasty chemicles, but in traditional flash memory, the chip is broken into three major components:
charge punps (to provide the 9.5-12 volts required to program the chip from the punny 1.8 - 3.3 volt supply
the control circuitry (basically a mini CPU)
the flash array
all these elements are "flat", that is they are one structure deep. This new tech coming up, if someone can perfect it, uses multiple layers to make the flash array several layers deep. Thus you could (in theory) shrink your die size while increasing the memory density.
-nB
Why wait? (Score:3, Interesting)
The system is 'perpetually' on and a booted system is stored in (low power) ram, mirrored to the hard drive of course in case power goes out, so boot only takes seconds?
I mean, that's what *I* do. Start up the computer on a daily basis in less than three seconds, most of the time just waiting for the monitor to rez.
CF is $114/GB (Score:3, Interesting)
With COTS parts, you can run 4GB of flash for
about $500. Problem is, you need a filesystem designed for memory with limited write cycles. Just turning off metadata updates would help a lot.
Multi-layer devices. (Score:4, Interesting)
This turns out not to help much. Multi-layer chips add mask steps roughly in proportion to the number of layers. While you save on the cost of wafer area, your processing steps cost a lot of money too, so you rapidly reach a point of diminishing returns. Building multi-layer devices also requires making transistors on epitaxial silicon layers, which generally have far worse performance properties than the monocrystalline wafer (even SOI processes generally work by building devices on a silicon wafer, and either flipping the chip and back-etching or using a buried oxide layer, as opposed to depositing a silicon film).
3D chips have been a holy grail for density reasons for decades, but they turn out to be expensive to manufacture and poorly-performing for the reasons noted above, and for microprocessors, at least, they're now a pretty much obsolete solution, as heat generation is what limits chip performance (and a multi-layer chip gives you that much more heat generation per unit area).
If your company can pull it off in a useful way for storage, they'll deserve kudos, of course.
Re:Not that new. (Score:2, Interesting)