512GB Solid State Disks on the Way

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"

Re:number of writes still limited?

[chris_eineke]

Why won't this meme die already?

Re:number of writes still limited?

[maxume]

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.

Debunking SSD life cycle issues

[G4from128k]

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.

Re:number of writes still limited?

[LoveMuscle]

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.

Re:number of writes still limited?

[WryCoder]

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 NAND flash vendors), a bigger volume of writes per day at 3.4TB and no caching nor wear leveling implementations, a 160GB solid state drive is projected to last up to 12.9 years, which is definitely longer than the average replacement cycle of most IT storage devices and equipment.

In a recent article on write endurance published in STORAGEsearch.com, editor Zsolt Kerekes provided theoretical computations on the longevity of solid state flash drives deployed in enterprise server applications. His test solid state drive had the following specifications: total capacity of 64GB, sustained write speed of 80MBps and a write endurance rating of 2 million cycles. By assuming that data is written in big blocks and there is perfect implementation of wear leveling techniques, Kerekes estimates disk endurance at 1.6 billion seconds, which translates to 50.74 years.

Debunking Misconceptions in SSD Longevity [bitmicro.com]

Its never enough for less.....

[3seas]

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.

Re:another reason to hate Vista...

[eebra82]

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.

Re:Flash Already Close to Discs

[pslam]

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 with a monster amount of bus routing. This is also where electrical engineers stick their hands up and say words like "bus capacitance, surely?" - in other words, it's not going to work for crap without buffers and other stuff stuck in there too.

So no - it simply does not scale well. Flash is very cheap at small sizes simply because it's so easy to interface it and wire it up. Wiring up 16 of them to one controller is not. This is why big SSDs are so damn expensive.

I predict that small form factor PCs (e.g laptops, media centers) may all end up using flash fairly soon, but desktops and servers aren't going that way any time soon. The technology isn't quite there, yet.

Forget Flash

[Strange Quark Star]

64 GB flash? Pff... The next big thing is ion memory!

A thumb drive using [programmable metallization cell memory technology] could store a terabyte of information

http://www.wired.com/gadgets/miscellaneous/news/2007/10/ion_memory [wired.com]