Viper95 writes "Samsung has announced that it has developed the world's first 64Gb(8GB) NAND flash memory chip using a 30nm production process, which opens the door for companies to produce memory cards with upto 128GB capacity"
Capabilities aren't very important if they aren't affordable. So maybe some government contractors can afford those things now, I don't think it would be that interesting to the consumer until SSDs get to a tenth of the cost.
Well, defense department would love these. Store a lot of data in places where there is constant vibrations and heat issues (Iraq) without worrying about damaging the disks.
News flash! We all know that cutting-edge hardware is in almost all cases too expensive. It takes time to adopt new hardware regardless of how practical it is. Once vendors acknowledge the need for such disks and once Samsung receives a boat load of orders, things will look different, but until then, it's expensive to produce because it's being done in small quantities.
I guess that the next generation of iPods will completely remove the hard drive capable devices from their line-up.
Okay, how about a terabyte in a form factor small enough for a thunb drive, that costs one-tenth the price of traditional flash memory, and is a staggering 1000 times more energy efficient.
It's not a dupe. The previous article [slashdot.org] said that 64 Gb chips could be combined into a 128 GB device. Now they can combine 64 Gb chips into a 512 GB device. A huge advance!
maybe they created a controller that could read and write from then simultanerously so it's double the read/write speed. I hope so cuz it better be able to beat my sata drives in read write speed otherwise I don't really care how fast the seek time is cuz any file over like 100KB would be slower to open on it than a normal hard drive.
oh yeah and I agree with the other posts. Call me when it's on its way to my budget, not just store shelves lol.
The seek times of SSDs should make it such that trying to read and write from the storage array at the same time would seem kind of pointless. It also increases the costs. It would probably go the way of FB-DIMM. FB-DIMM is supposed to allow simultaneous reads and writes to different memory cards, but it's too expensive and has other problems limiting its performance. Now, if the controller designer can apply something like that to a hard drive array, then maybe that would be nice. I think it might be p
You could use the same logic to conclude that 512 terabyte solid-state media is on the way.
Have you considered getting a job as a futurist? At this point I can guarantee that your track record will be better than many of the ones actually out there.
Maybe human beings are just porn's way of making more porn.
The great thing about slashdot is that there really are some incredibly smart and funny people (two things that usually go together) here. Take the above quote for example, it is both funny and deeply profound. It is an Hall of Fame quote. Thank you, it made my day.
As most of the exceptionally brilliant people have had serious personality issues and were far too obsessed with their work to do more than average or less when it comes to reproduction, I doubt progress has much to do with porn. When it comes to achievements in general though, why not? Even creationists believe that you inherit traits like eye color, hair color, personality traits and so on - the evidence is too overwhelming to ignore. Now assume you have a trait "sex drive" or "urge to have children" whic
Artists have said as much for thousands of years. But that's because the definition of "porn" most people use is "anything that offends me or has naked people in it or has sex implied in it."
Just wait till marketing decides to call these memory cards 550GB instead of 512GB... then other competing companies others will follow suit and call people who complain whiners and that it's an industry standard way of labeling capacity.
On that subject, whenever the 2^n or 10^n units thing gets brought up, some smart arse always says "it's so illogical to have binary based sizes like that, it's so confusing and the media doesn't work in binary anyway."
This is just history re-writing bullshit that someone spouts to get mod points and continue another meme.
There was a time when hard disks were all based on megabytes, and megabytes were always 2^20 = 1048576 bytes. NOBODY EVER GOT CONFUSED. History re-writers say otherwise, obviously. Where did it all change? Well, for hard disk manufacturers, it was a blatantly cheap trick to save 5-10% costs, and whenever anyone complained they could just to that viral history re-write meme about how binary based units were always confusing. Hell, they even convinced SI. SI have absolutely no authority or experience with determining computer units, and the "solution" they came up with is even more confusing and ugly. How do you tell if MeB or MiB is 2^20 or 10^6? Muppets.
Then came flash cards. Here's a thing a lot of people don't know: flash actually DOES come in binary sizes. That's how it's manufactured. Another thing a lot of people don't know: flash actually gets WORSE for write endurance as its density goes up. It's actually got much worse over time. To begin with, low density flash cards did not suffer much from write endurance problems - to the extent that when you got an 8MB flash card it was basically just writing straight through.
Densities went up, and you started to need a lot of spares, more error correction, and wear leveling. The result was that after formatting, you ended up with about 5-10% of your flash used up. Quite handily close to the decimal-based size. So manufacturers (and I believe SanDisk were the first to do this) silently started selling 64MB cards as 64,000,000 bytes of data instead of 67,108,864. No asterisks, no notes on the bottom of the packaging - nothing. It's fair enough, but done in a fucking deceptive manner.
I remember getting bug reports about our MP3 players (years back now) misreporting SanDisk flash cards as 61MB instead of 64MB. In the end (sigh) we put in a hack to spot deceptive cards and switch units to powers of 10.
So before anyone else spouts how the units are confusing - they weren't until manufacturers tried their damned hardest to make sure they were.
Next, people will complain about how SDRAM, caches and even registers are in silly powers of 2...
The IBM winchester line of drives from the 70s were always labels in units of 1 MB = 10^6. It is just completely false that hard drives have always been labeled using binary prefixes. Digging around, it appears that early PC/workstation drives in the early 80s were mixed. Some used 2^20, some used 10^6. In the late 80s, consumer hard drives made by Seagate, WD, etc. all converged on 2^N for a few years, before switching to 10^6 in the early 90s.
Bandwidth is always measured in 1 MB/s = 10^6 bytes/s, or 1 Mb/s = 10^6 bits/s. Should 1 MB take 1.04 seconds to transfer of 1 MB/s data link? This includes all forms of Ethernet, SCSI, ATA, PCI, and any other protocol I have looked up. If 1 MB/s does not equal 1 MB per 1 s, someone should be shot, that is just not OK.
mega = 10^6 in all other fields. Including other computer terms -- 1 MHz, 1 MFLOP, 1 megapixel, etc.
computer RAM is the only thing that has consistently been labeled using binary approximations to the SI units. And as long as I can remember (computing magazines in the 80s) people have acknowledged that 1 MB = 2^20 is an *approximation* and that mega=10^6.
Mega=10^6 is right. mega=2^20 is wrong. End of story. It happens that it is technically convenient to manufacture and use RAM in powers of 2. No such constraint applies for hard drives, so there is no reason to use the base-2 prefixes. Stupid OSs should be changed to use the SI prefixes when reporting file sizes. RAM should be labeled using the "base-2" prefixes, but they are admittedly somewhat annoying due to lack of familiarity, and since nobody uses base-10 ram, it isn't a big deal.
Sorry, but for certain algorithms it's important that you are working in powers of 2, and that was always called Mega (Bits, Bytes, Words, whatever) or, more commonly Kilo-whatever was 2^10 whatevers.
IO has always been a mixture and compromise. Punched cards could hold 12 * 72 bits (7094 row binary) or 12 * 80 bits (column binary, but don't try to read it with the main card reader). Try to fit THAT into your "powers of 10" scenario!
For the current set of IO devices, capacity measurement was defined by marketing. I saw arguments about it in the trade journals when it was being fought out over hard disks. AFAIK, companies decided independently the choice that was, to them, most advantageous. It was powers of 10. This was not appreciated by any single customer that I was aware of. Some despised it, some didn't care, nobody was in favor. (Yeah, it was a small sample, but it's one that I was aware of. Most didn't care, and many of those weren't interested in understanding.)
But block allocations of RAM are done in powers of two, and these are frequently mapped directly to IO devices. So having a mis-match creates problems. Disk files were (possibly) created as an answer to this problem. (7094 drum storage didn't have files. Things were addressed by drum address. If a piece went bad, you had to patch your program to avoid it. UGH! Tape was for persistent data, drum storage was transient...just slightly more persistent than RAM.) Drum addresses were tricky. I never did it myself, but some people improved performance by timing the instructions so that they would have the drum head right before the data they wanted to read or write to limit lagging. (Naturally this was all done in assembler, so you could count out exactly how many miliseconds of execution time you were committing, and if you know the drum rotation speed, and the latency... So things tended to be stored in powers of two positions on the drum, unless a piece went bad.
Disks, when they first appeared, were slower than drums, but more capacious. (They were still too expensive and unreliable to use for persistent storage.) But the habit of mapping things out in powers of two transferred from drums storage to disk storage. When files were introduced (not sure about when that was) the habit transferred. This wasn't all blind habit, lots of the I/O techniques that had been developed were dependent upon powers of two. So programmers though of capacity in powers of two. This didn't make any sense to accountants, managers, etc. When computer equipment started being sold by the Megabyte it made sense to the manufacturers to claim powers of 10 Megabytes for stroage, as they could claim larger sizes. (This wasn't as significant for Kilobytes, as 1024 is pretty close to 1000.) It not only made sense to the manufacturers, it also made sense to the accountants who were approving the orders. And when the managers started specifying the equipment...well, everything switched over into being measured by powers of 10.
No conspiracy. Just system dynamics. And programmers still think of storage in powers of 2, because that's what they work in. (This is less true when you work in higher level langauges, but if you don't take advantage of the powers of two that the algorithms are friendly with, it will cost you in performance, even if you don't realize it.)
No conspiracy. Just system dynamics. And programmers still think of storage in powers of 2, because that's what they work in. (This is less true when you work in higher level langauges, but if you don't take advantage of the powers of two that the algorithms are friendly with, it will cost you in performance, even if you don't realize it.)
However, our job as professionals is to know these facts without bothering the end user with it. 2^10 is a nice and useful hack, but not something to show the end user. Computer users are no longer computer experts, and we should not bother them with internal details.
Disk capacity is reported to my mother in powers of 2. This simply does not make sense.
Technical details should not trump users. This makes us look like geeks with a binary fetish instead of professionals.
Hell, they even convinced SI. SI have absolutely no authority or experience with determining computer units, and the "solution" they came up with is even more confusing and ugly. How do you tell if MeB or MiB is 2^20 or 10^6? Muppets.
I think you're doing a bit of revisionist history yourself. SI was there first. The SI units have always been in powers of ten, and have been used in all other branches of science long before there was a "computer science". It was computer scientists that originally redefined them to be powers of two, and in the computer world it was so for several decades. It was confusing but not more so than "if it ends in -bytes, it's a power of 2". Except the floppy drive which is 1.44 "MB" = 1.44*1000*1024 (1987), or the modem speeds which were reported 1 kbps = 1000 bps (1972) because that's what electrical engineers talked, or Ethernet that ran at 10Mbit/s = 10.000.000 bits/s (1980). This lead to a "bytes is powers of two, bits is powers of ten" which made all sorts of fuck-ups possible.
Yes, the HDD manufacturers did it because it was a cheap 5-10% savings, but the excuses were plenty and not all bad. It was confusing every time computer science bumped into one of the other sciences and telecommunications in particular, which inevitably used the SI prefixes. However, instead of actually fixing a problem it became only an even greater mess, invalidating pretty much every rule of thumb because the OS would invariably report something else. That's pretty much proof they didn't want to fix anything, just grab some extra profit.
After that, it was a big mess and with next to no interest in solving it. That's when the people at IEC, not SI, and certainly not pushed by HDD manufacturers, finally said that these units are FUBAR, and the only way to make a long-term solution is to abandon the SI-prefixes and make new and ugly ones, particularly the names. At that point, we're talking 50 years of computer science use against 200 years of other sciences, and with retards messing up the boundary. I think they're ugly as hell, but they're also the only way to go forward from here.
This is all very well but you are totally wrong. Go download a datasheet of a popular FLASH part. Guess what? The capacity is an exact power of 2.
I'm not just making this up. NAND is naturally base-2 capacity sized. Yes, there is sparing, but pages are normally 2048 byte (or larger these days) with a few extra bytes per 512 for ECC. The non-ECC areas are still power-of-2 based, and the chip area itself is square and ends up being another power-of-2 pages. End result, a power-of-2. I've been working on this
Does anybody know how well flash SSDs perform in RAID arrays? 15kRPM SAS drives are horrendously expensive so if I could plug a couple small flash drives into my RAID card (RAID 0) I'd be a happy camper. Can't find benchmarks anywhere and flash drives have horrible write speeds which means they have terrible OLTP performance.
Does anybody know how well flash SSDs perform in RAID arrays? 15kRPM SAS drives are horrendously expensive so if I could plug a couple small flash drives into my RAID card (RAID 0) I'd be a happy camper. Can't find benchmarks anywhere and flash drives have horrible write speeds which means they have terrible OLTP performance.
Individual flash chips have terrible write performance, mostly due to the slow block erase time. However, you always use multiple chips in high capacity storage devices (anything larger than an MP3 player), and you can start doing fancy tricks with interleaving, or just plain have way more buffer memory to hide the erase time. If you really want to crank out even higher performance, then you stick multiple NAND interfaces of the controller chip and drive it all in parallel.
SSD, doesn't that stand for Single Sided Disks, as in floppies... ; may as well...
anyways, if we had 1000 terabyte solid drives for $10 then you'd hear wining for the yet to be released Googleplex drive for $5...
Like damn, anyone using up their new 100 gig drives faster than the next size is out for less money?
To back up very large drives today, it near cheaper in time/labor and costs to just use hot swap drives, where the back up is the removed drive, plugged in and run for 15 minutes a few times a year, if even that. Or a rotation system as was done with tape.
So solid state disks are all about NAND flash memory, right? I thought that SSDs would be all about MRAM, and that MRAM SSDs would be viable by the late 2000's. What's up with that?
Don't flash chips have a much shorter lifespan than regular hard drives and relatively low number of reads and writes? Or is that just with older flash tech?
I already boot/run my main Internet-facing server (Ubuntu) from a 4GB memory SSD card to minimise power consumption, and I have more than 50% space free, ie it wasn't that hard to do.
I'm not being that clever about it: using efs3 rather than any wear-leveling SSD-friendly fs, and simply minimising spurious write activity, eg by turning down verbosity on logs. And laptop-mode helps a lot of course.
Now that machine does also have a 160GB HDD for infrequently-accessed bulk data (so the HDD is spun down most of the time and a power-conserving sleep mode), and it would be good to get that data onto SSD too. But a blend, as in many memory/storage systems, gives a good chunk of maximum performance and power savings for reasonable cost.
simple... people keep modding it interesting/informative/etc. instead of Troll. And if they're not trolling, there needs to be a new mod: -1 Clueless/Oblivious.
There are ~31.5 million seconds in a year. If you assume that the write speed is 1 GB/s and that you were writing constantly, you would generate ~62 thousand writes to each bit. Roll the write speed back to a still unlikely ~100 MB/s(still writing constantly) and you generate about 6 thousand writes to each bit in a year.
Throw in the fact that the controllers for these chips spread writes around and you can be certain that the endurance is not a problem.
This has been discussed before. Modern flash drives use wear leveling to avoid writing to well-worn blocks and to move unchanging files from unworn blocks so they can be used more. Yes, it adds complexity and yes it slightly delays the write process. But it's invisible to the CPU and OS and takes far less time that it would to move the heads of the standard mechanical HD. An SSD is free to organize blocks in any order in the address space because there is virtually no penalty for fragmentation.
I think you will find that even in very heavy use applications (e.g. working with HD video or using the SSD for virtual memory) that the lifespan of these drives be longer than a decade (and longer than mechanical HDs). Moreover, they will fail gracefully as blocks become tags as worn.
These devices can already do block relocates.. The MTBF on these drives is on the order of 2 million hours. WAY better than winchester drives and so far out there that I kinda wish people would stop bringing this up.
A few years back, BiTMICRO published an article that arrived at a different conclusion with regard to solid state flash drive endurance in database applications. Although the write endurance rating for BiTMICRO's computations is smaller (1 million cycles), endurance ratings are much higher as a result of wear leveling methods, proprietary RS ECC and other techniques designed to prolong the life of E-Disk solid state drives. Assuming a much smaller endurance rating of 100,000 cycles (typical rating quoted by
What the hell are you talking about? It's the media and other content you need storage for. You can run any operating system on 16 GB if you wish, but whining about how big Vista is makes you look stupid.
Today's operating systems (OSX, Vista, etc) are not big because the software is bloated with meaninglessness, but because there is not a living soul out there who is considering XP, Vista or OSX but cannot get it because their hard drives are too small. Is it not obvious that developers want to make full use of the current generation of hardware?
I'm sure Microsoft could strip down Vista to something the size of 300 MB or so if only they wanted to remove drivers, icons and other graphics, sounds, media players, web browsers, etc. On the other hand, that would kind of kill the whole purpose of the operating system.
I doubt Microsoft would allow Dell etc to pare their Vista install down, or change its component structure to move portions to a separate drive, just so it could boot on a flash drive.
Slightly optimistic numbers, there. The USB connectors, packaging and controllers are nowhere near $15 (more like $1-$2). Even so, the $8:GB ratio only holds for small numbers. The biggest problem with flash at the moment is scaling.
Each flash chip needs board space, soldering, and bus routing. So, each chip has 20 or so (depending on bus width) bus lines connecting it. That's just for 8GB. Now for a big drive, we'll need 16 of those. That's 16 chips stuck down on the board, making it a fair large board wi
I think your arithmetic has fallen off it's horse. $50/80GB is not $6.50/GB. It's actually about $.63/GB. Quite a large difference in comparison to $8/GB.
Notebook drives currently cost as little as about $50:80GB, or $6.50:GB, which is a good size for a mobile device, and almost the largest available.
The 2.5 inch magnetic drives are much more effective on a $/GB basis if you look at the larger 120/160/200 GB drives. And I'm not sure how you came up with $6.50:GB...
80GB for $60 = $0.75/GB
120GB for $70 = $0.58/GB
160GB for $90 = $0.56/GB
200GB for $170 = $0.85/GB
For current solid state drives:
8GB for $155 = $19.37/GB
16GB for $180 = $11.25/GB
32GB f
Cost? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Cost? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Yes, you could certainly say that there are some bad vibs in Iraq.
Re:Cost? (Score:4, Funny)
Not only that, these drives are easy to lose and misplace. Incompetently losing massive amounts of data has never been so easy!
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Re:Cost? (Score:5, Insightful)
I guess that the next generation of iPods will completely remove the hard drive capable devices from their line-up.
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Nano Nano (Score:5, Interesting)
Researchers Develop Technology to Make Terabyte Thumb Drives Possible [gizmodo.com]
Makes a mere 512GB flash chip look a bit sad, doesn't it?
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Four times the memory in three days (Score:5, Funny)
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oh yeah and I agree with the other posts. Call me when it's on its way to my budget, not just store shelves lol.
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512GB? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:512GB? (Score:5, Funny)
Have you considered getting a job as a futurist? At this point I can guarantee that your track record will be better than many of the ones actually out there.
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There are times...... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:There are times...... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:There are times...... (Score:5, Interesting)
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I feel so used.
Re:There are times...... (Score:5, Funny)
Hey, sailor...
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Porn and War are the two major competing drivers of all progress. It kinda brings new light to the phrase "Make Love not War."
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But that's because the definition of "porn" most people use is "anything that offends me or has naked people in it or has sex implied in it."
Is it any wonder that porn has done so much?
I bet the HD makers are going to be pissed! (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:I bet the HD makers are going to be pissed! (Score:5, Insightful)
On that subject, whenever the 2^n or 10^n units thing gets brought up, some smart arse always says "it's so illogical to have binary based sizes like that, it's so confusing and the media doesn't work in binary anyway."
This is just history re-writing bullshit that someone spouts to get mod points and continue another meme.
There was a time when hard disks were all based on megabytes, and megabytes were always 2^20 = 1048576 bytes. NOBODY EVER GOT CONFUSED. History re-writers say otherwise, obviously. Where did it all change? Well, for hard disk manufacturers, it was a blatantly cheap trick to save 5-10% costs, and whenever anyone complained they could just to that viral history re-write meme about how binary based units were always confusing. Hell, they even convinced SI. SI have absolutely no authority or experience with determining computer units, and the "solution" they came up with is even more confusing and ugly. How do you tell if MeB or MiB is 2^20 or 10^6? Muppets.
Then came flash cards. Here's a thing a lot of people don't know: flash actually DOES come in binary sizes. That's how it's manufactured. Another thing a lot of people don't know: flash actually gets WORSE for write endurance as its density goes up. It's actually got much worse over time. To begin with, low density flash cards did not suffer much from write endurance problems - to the extent that when you got an 8MB flash card it was basically just writing straight through.
Densities went up, and you started to need a lot of spares, more error correction, and wear leveling. The result was that after formatting, you ended up with about 5-10% of your flash used up. Quite handily close to the decimal-based size. So manufacturers (and I believe SanDisk were the first to do this) silently started selling 64MB cards as 64,000,000 bytes of data instead of 67,108,864. No asterisks, no notes on the bottom of the packaging - nothing. It's fair enough, but done in a fucking deceptive manner.
I remember getting bug reports about our MP3 players (years back now) misreporting SanDisk flash cards as 61MB instead of 64MB. In the end (sigh) we put in a hack to spot deceptive cards and switch units to powers of 10.
So before anyone else spouts how the units are confusing - they weren't until manufacturers tried their damned hardest to make sure they were.
Next, people will complain about how SDRAM, caches and even registers are in silly powers of 2...
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Re:I bet the HD makers are going to be pissed! (Score:5, Interesting)
Bandwidth is always measured in 1 MB/s = 10^6 bytes/s, or 1 Mb/s = 10^6 bits/s. Should 1 MB take 1.04 seconds to transfer of 1 MB/s data link? This includes all forms of Ethernet, SCSI, ATA, PCI, and any other protocol I have looked up. If 1 MB/s does not equal 1 MB per 1 s, someone should be shot, that is just not OK.
mega = 10^6 in all other fields. Including other computer terms -- 1 MHz, 1 MFLOP, 1 megapixel, etc.
computer RAM is the only thing that has consistently been labeled using binary approximations to the SI units. And as long as I can remember (computing magazines in the 80s) people have acknowledged that 1 MB = 2^20 is an *approximation* and that mega=10^6.
Mega=10^6 is right. mega=2^20 is wrong. End of story. It happens that it is technically convenient to manufacture and use RAM in powers of 2. No such constraint applies for hard drives, so there is no reason to use the base-2 prefixes. Stupid OSs should be changed to use the SI prefixes when reporting file sizes. RAM should be labeled using the "base-2" prefixes, but they are admittedly somewhat annoying due to lack of familiarity, and since nobody uses base-10 ram, it isn't a big deal.
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Re:I bet the HD makers are going to be pissed! (Score:5, Interesting)
IO has always been a mixture and compromise. Punched cards could hold 12 * 72 bits (7094 row binary) or 12 * 80 bits (column binary, but don't try to read it with the main card reader). Try to fit THAT into your "powers of 10" scenario!
For the current set of IO devices, capacity measurement was defined by marketing. I saw arguments about it in the trade journals when it was being fought out over hard disks. AFAIK, companies decided independently the choice that was, to them, most advantageous. It was powers of 10. This was not appreciated by any single customer that I was aware of. Some despised it, some didn't care, nobody was in favor. (Yeah, it was a small sample, but it's one that I was aware of. Most didn't care, and many of those weren't interested in understanding.)
But block allocations of RAM are done in powers of two, and these are frequently mapped directly to IO devices. So having a mis-match creates problems. Disk files were (possibly) created as an answer to this problem. (7094 drum storage didn't have files. Things were addressed by drum address. If a piece went bad, you had to patch your program to avoid it. UGH! Tape was for persistent data, drum storage was transient...just slightly more persistent than RAM.) Drum addresses were tricky. I never did it myself, but some people improved performance by timing the instructions so that they would have the drum head right before the data they wanted to read or write to limit lagging. (Naturally this was all done in assembler, so you could count out exactly how many miliseconds of execution time you were committing, and if you know the drum rotation speed, and the latency...
So things tended to be stored in powers of two positions on the drum, unless a piece went bad.
Disks, when they first appeared, were slower than drums, but more capacious. (They were still too expensive and unreliable to use for persistent storage.) But the habit of mapping things out in powers of two transferred from drums storage to disk storage. When files were introduced (not sure about when that was) the habit transferred. This wasn't all blind habit, lots of the I/O techniques that had been developed were dependent upon powers of two. So programmers though of capacity in powers of two. This didn't make any sense to accountants, managers, etc. When computer equipment started being sold by the Megabyte it made sense to the manufacturers to claim powers of 10 Megabytes for stroage, as they could claim larger sizes. (This wasn't as significant for Kilobytes, as 1024 is pretty close to 1000.) It not only made sense to the manufacturers, it also made sense to the accountants who were approving the orders. And when the managers started specifying the equipment...well, everything switched over into being measured by powers of 10.
No conspiracy. Just system dynamics. And programmers still think of storage in powers of 2, because that's what they work in. (This is less true when you work in higher level langauges, but if you don't take advantage of the powers of two that the algorithms are friendly with, it will cost you in performance, even if you don't realize it.)
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unprofessional (Score:4, Insightful)
Disk capacity is reported to my mother in powers of 2. This simply does not make sense.
Technical details should not trump users. This makes us look like geeks with a binary fetish instead of professionals.
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Re:I bet the HD makers are going to be pissed! (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, the HDD manufacturers did it because it was a cheap 5-10% savings, but the excuses were plenty and not all bad. It was confusing every time computer science bumped into one of the other sciences and telecommunications in particular, which inevitably used the SI prefixes. However, instead of actually fixing a problem it became only an even greater mess, invalidating pretty much every rule of thumb because the OS would invariably report something else. That's pretty much proof they didn't want to fix anything, just grab some extra profit.
After that, it was a big mess and with next to no interest in solving it. That's when the people at IEC, not SI, and certainly not pushed by HDD manufacturers, finally said that these units are FUBAR, and the only way to make a long-term solution is to abandon the SI-prefixes and make new and ugly ones, particularly the names. At that point, we're talking 50 years of computer science use against 200 years of other sciences, and with retards messing up the boundary. I think they're ugly as hell, but they're also the only way to go forward from here.
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This is all very well but you are totally wrong. Go download a datasheet of a popular FLASH part. Guess what? The capacity is an exact power of 2.
I'm not just making this up. NAND is naturally base-2 capacity sized. Yes, there is sparing, but pages are normally 2048 byte (or larger these days) with a few extra bytes per 512 for ECC. The non-ECC areas are still power-of-2 based, and the chip area itself is square and ends up being another power-of-2 pages. End result, a power-of-2. I've been working on this
You're fucking kidding me... (Score:3, Funny)
Ugh. And I though that they had seen the light and decided to go in base 10 and count the actual bits.
What about IOPS? (Score:3, Interesting)
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Does anybody know how well flash SSDs perform in RAID arrays? 15kRPM SAS drives are horrendously expensive so if I could plug a couple small flash drives into my RAID card (RAID 0) I'd be a happy camper. Can't find benchmarks anywhere and flash drives have horrible write speeds which means they have terrible OLTP performance.
Individual flash chips have terrible write performance, mostly due to the slow block erase time. However, you always use multiple chips in high capacity storage devices (anything larger than an MP3 player), and you can start doing fancy tricks with interleaving, or just plain have way more buffer memory to hide the erase time. If you really want to crank out even higher performance, then you stick multiple NAND interfaces of the controller chip and drive it all in parallel.
If you stack about 4-8 chips in
iPhone (Score:3, Funny)
Its never enough for less..... (Score:4, Informative)
anyways, if we had 1000 terabyte solid drives for $10 then you'd hear wining for the yet to be released Googleplex drive for $5...
Like damn, anyone using up their new 100 gig drives faster than the next size is out for less money?
To back up very large drives today, it near cheaper in time/labor and costs to just use hot swap drives, where the back up is the removed drive, plugged in and run for 15 minutes a few times a year, if even that. Or a rotation system as was done with tape.
What's up with MRAM? (Score:2)
So solid state disks are all about NAND flash memory, right? I thought that SSDs would be all about MRAM, and that MRAM SSDs would be viable by the late 2000's. What's up with that?
Longevity (Score:2)
I already boot from a 4GB memory card. (Score:5, Interesting)
I already boot/run my main Internet-facing server (Ubuntu) from a 4GB memory SSD card to minimise power consumption, and I have more than 50% space free, ie it wasn't that hard to do.
http://www.earth.org.uk/low-power-laptop.html [earth.org.uk]
I'm not being that clever about it: using efs3 rather than any wear-leveling SSD-friendly fs, and simply minimising spurious write activity, eg by turning down verbosity on logs. And laptop-mode helps a lot of course.
Now that machine does also have a 160GB HDD for infrequently-accessed bulk data (so the HDD is spun down most of the time and a power-conserving sleep mode), and it would be good to get that data onto SSD too. But a blend, as in many memory/storage systems, gives a good chunk of maximum performance and power savings for reasonable cost.
Rgds
Damon
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Re:number of writes still limited? (Score:5, Informative)
Throw in the fact that the controllers for these chips spread writes around and you can be certain that the endurance is not a problem.
Parent
Re:number of writes still limited? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Debunking SSD life cycle issues (Score:5, Informative)
I think you will find that even in very heavy use applications (e.g. working with HD video or using the SSD for virtual memory) that the lifespan of these drives be longer than a decade (and longer than mechanical HDs). Moreover, they will fail gracefully as blocks become tags as worn.
Parent
Re:number of writes still limited? (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
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Re:another reason to hate Vista... (Score:5, Informative)
Today's operating systems (OSX, Vista, etc) are not big because the software is bloated with meaninglessness, but because there is not a living soul out there who is considering XP, Vista or OSX but cannot get it because their hard drives are too small. Is it not obvious that developers want to make full use of the current generation of hardware?
I'm sure Microsoft could strip down Vista to something the size of 300 MB or so if only they wanted to remove drivers, icons and other graphics, sounds, media players, web browsers, etc. On the other hand, that would kind of kill the whole purpose of the operating system.
Parent
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Re:another reason to hate Vista... (Score:5, Funny)
Well, umm. Vista takes up more processor time, runs the computer hotter.
Computer running hotter means more power used.
Power generation contributes to global warming.
Global warming contributes to increased forest fires.
Therefore, it follows:
Vista is responsible for the fires in California.
What could possibly be more logical?
Parent
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Slightly optimistic numbers, there. The USB connectors, packaging and controllers are nowhere near $15 (more like $1-$2). Even so, the $8:GB ratio only holds for small numbers. The biggest problem with flash at the moment is scaling.
Each flash chip needs board space, soldering, and bus routing. So, each chip has 20 or so (depending on bus width) bus lines connecting it. That's just for 8GB. Now for a big drive, we'll need 16 of those. That's 16 chips stuck down on the board, making it a fair large board wi
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The 2.5 inch magnetic drives are much more effective on a $/GB basis if you look at the larger 120/160/200 GB drives. And I'm not sure how you came up with $6.50:GB...
80GB for $60 = $0.75/GB
120GB for $70 = $0.58/GB
160GB for $90 = $0.56/GB
200GB for $170 = $0.85/GB
For current solid state drives:
8GB for $155 = $19.37/GB
16GB for $180 = $11.25/GB
32GB f