BitMicro Takes Wraps Off 832 GB Flash Drive

Lucas123 writes "BitMicro has unveiled an 832GB NAND flash drive that will begin shipping later this year. The E-Disk Altima drive is expected to have sustained read rates of up to 100MB/sec and up to 20,000 I/O operations per second. The device features a SATA 3.0 G/bps interface. No pricing as of yet."

cost estimate

[192939495969798999]

The cheapest I ever heard of a 2 GB flash drive was about $15, so this is over 400 of those put together or $6000. Even if they had some volume discount, I think anything under $1000 for an 800+GB flash drive is unthinkable... right?

Re:Sweet

[Firehed]

Why would you waste that much space as part of a disk with effectively zero seek time on HD movies? They don't need that kind of performance - even a 4200RPM standard hard drive would have more than enough throughput (and with tech like accelerometer-based head parking, durability shouldn't be too much of an issue). Use it as an OS disk. Better yet, use it for databases - the seek times would be fantastic for the application, and unless you're constantly updating rows (rather than just inserting new ones), the write cycle limit on flash-based storage is unlikely to become an issue.

It's not as if you need a portable video library anyways. Stick a few on your device and go. Your battery life is by far going to be the limiting factor. Apple would be much better off trying to create a mobile video streaming device than to waste so much flash memory on a portable device.

Sure, in five years then I'll probably have a terabyte of flash memory in my car key that only costs eight bucks. And at that point, this kind of thing would make sense. Right now, that's a TON of flash storage that would carry a huge price that would make it beyond impractical for portables. If you want a mobile HD player, create something with a 720p screen and one of those brand new 500GB laptop drives and stick half a gig of RAM in as a massive buffer.

Re:hmm.

[sc7007]

Now tell me why anybody should want this outside of the media/video industry...

I work in the seismic data processing industry (oil and gas exploration). We regularly (almost every project) deliver datasets to clients that are on the orders of 1-5 TB. Many of our milestone QC datasets for clients are 500-750 GB. Putting these on a flash drive or portable hard drive is much faster than a bunch of 3592E tapes, plus easier and quicker for the client to access. Flash drives certainly have the advantage over USB hard disks of being faster to write to (usually). If these were cheap enough, and they will be at some point, I could see these being commonly used. On the other hand, maybe just a solid state portable disk drive, which these are just a variant of, will be cheaper (time and money).

It's twice 416

[Kilraven]

Which was their previous high late last year.

http://www.bitmicro.com/press_news_releases_20070911.php [bitmicro.com]

The bit I'm slightly skeptical on is the environmental specs. While -40C and +85C are becoming a more common standard, not many SSD manufacturers can reliably hit past -25C and +75C. This may not seem that big of a deal, but in some industries - which would currently be the only ones spending Close to the $10k (judging by current pricing for extended/extreme versions of these drives) for them initially - this is huge if true.

Re:Mortgage?

[xENoLocO]

Yes, but can it run on USB power?

Re:cost estimate

[Andrew Kismet]

Which Nintendo? Because a Nintendo Virtual Boy will definitely go UP in value over the next 10 years.
The NES/Famicom probably won't go up much, but as supply drops due to (1) no longer being manufactured (2) damage and disrepair over time, the price of a pristine NES will definitely go up.

Re:832?

[araemo]

Perhaps they couldn't physically fit more than 13 modules into the same space as a 3.5" HDD?

Either way, it nicely explains the 1.6TB version (128MB modules instead of 64MB modules..)

Re:cost estimate

[ACMENEWSLLC]

I don't know if BitMicro is among these, but there are manufactures that have figured out how to mass produce very large USB drives at a fraction of todays costs. There have been articles in Google news, and patents are pending on various methods.

I think we discussed this on /. not long ago?

Re:Will it run...

[rapidweather]

Seems like we've slashdotted the Pen Drive Linux site.

Ok, I'm running my linux (see screenshots, below) from a 2 GB SanDisk Micro Cruzer drive at this time,
on a Gateway 2000 Pentium II. Use these files [rapidweather.com] to kick off the Flash Drive, using loadlin. You have to have a small msdos drive in the computer, or a partition on a larger drive with msdos, put the files there. Documentation is included in the tarball, also, a copy of the Rapidweather Remaster CD is needed also.

Re:832?

[GreatBunzinni]

Wouldn't it make more sense if you thought of 26*32 instead of far-fetched assumptions?