2008, The Year of Solid State Storage

An anonymous reader writes "At CES, SSD drives were a plenty on the show floor. "Some companies said we could see 250GB SSD units by the end of this year, while others predicted it could take up to a couple of years for them to become mainstream. None of the companies promised mainstream adoption, but they promised a bright future and we are inclined to believe them. High capacity drives are going to be expensive due to their very nature of early technology and gradual adoption rate."

So we are back to RAM drives!

[LWATCDR]

Oh well everything that old is new again I guess.
I used a RAM drive on my Amgia way back when. Yes I know that they are how using flash but it does seem very familiar.
I wonder when we might see a hybrid flash-ram drive? A big bunch of ram for high speed and flash for permanent storage. Just use a super cap for a power backup and have it copy the ram to flash on power down. A little bit pricey but if you need the speed you need the speed.

within 5 years, tape manufactuers will have troubl

[WindBourne]

HDD still have a ways to go. In particular, the flash storage will be used for desktops, laptops and the core of servers. The real data will still reside on HDD for a long time to come because of cost / MB. What will happen is that HDD will learn to really park and lower their energy needs, most likely due to dropping in size. Tape has been used for eons for back-up, but I think that HDD will overtake that role as their prices will be forced to go way down.

apple

[theMerovingian]

The sales guy at the Apple store told me that there was a persistent rumor of a solid state laptop coming in the next few weeks...

Boot camp + solid state = me finally replacing the old powerbook!!

Re:within 5 years, tape manufactuers will have tro

[DeeQ]

I don't think so, tapes will still have many uses. They are very reliable for backups more than I would trust a hard drive. They also have the ability to be taken to off site locations like all backups should be. Hard drives would make doing that a little more difficult, even with external Hard drives it would be more of a pain than having the media of a tape. I don't see the tape going away any time soon.

I dont see it

[Rooked_One]

Maybe in 09... not 08... unless we get chipsets that can supply greater throughput, the chipset will become the bottleneck - therefore, the only reason to have one of these is in a laptop or desktop... and thats for people for whom price is no object.

In the enterprise sector... forget about it... Even SATA drives are becoming ideal for storage solutions, and a simple raid-5 will max out the cap of a raid controller's bus.

So in other words... I don't see it.

Re:Lets try the other way around, eh

[minginqunt]

I remember seeing a curve of cost/gig over time of SSDs vs magnetic media, and it seemed to show that although both were falling, SSDs were falling faster, and were due to overtake their clicky brethren in the 2012-2014 time frame.

Once that happens, I imagine that magnetic drives' usage will tail off sharply, and disappear within a couple of years, because nobody (or at least nobody worth speaking of) wants to use magnetic over solid state anyway. In fact, it might start happening even whilst SSDs have a small price premium.

God knows, I'd be happy to pay a 20% premium to never have to use magnetic hard drives again.

Re:within 5 years, tape manufactuers will have tro

[JerryLove]

As I understand it, the problem with using HDDs for backup, at least archival backup, has more to do with longevity than anything else. An LTO tape has a shelf life of 30 years. HDDs don't.

Re:Wait...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, it looks like the year of many things:

2008: The year of the big airline merger [nytimes.com]
2008: The year of RSS [typepad.com]
2008: The year of OpenID [identity20.com]
2008: The year of layout engine - CSS3 [css3.info]
2008: The year of principles [usatoday.com]
2008: The year of Palestine [bbc.co.uk]

And all along I thought it was the year of the rat...

Say no to moving parts

[eebra82]

We are finally starting to move away from a long era of computers with moving parts. Since conventional hard drives will be gone within 10 years (my prediction), all that remains is the media player (CD, DVD, etc). Obviously, I am not taking fans into consideration since I don't consider it to be a part of a computer system like a processor is.

Hopefully computers will be completely free from moving parts in 10 years or so. Now that would make it interesting for laptop owners.

SSD as a boot drive

[supertux]

The article talks about large solid state drives, but because of the price premium, I've been experimenting with smaller SSDs. In particular, I've been using an 8GB 266x CF card coupled with a CF->SATA adapter as the OS drive for my mythtv system for 5 months now with great success.

Not only is the flash drive completely silent, it is reasonably fast. Reads always benchmark at 40MB a second and writes benchmark at 34MB a second.

I've been a bit worried about the flash wearing out after repeated writes, but so far so good. Since my mythtv mysql installation is stored on it, as well as the normal system log files, I'm sure it sees quite a lot of action.

But to my point...

One common problem with systems such as mythtv that are under heavy IO stress is that during these moments of stress (lots of recordings going on at once) the whole operating system grinds to a halt or at least becomes sluggish waiting on some needed IO.

It was very common on my old mythtv setup where I used the extra space on the OS hard drives as extra storage space for mythtv recordings. I'm not experiencing any of that sluggishness with the new setup.

This has got me thinking that for my future desktop system, maybe instead of getting a raptor for the OS drive, and a large, slower hard drive for the rest of my stuff in order to minimize IO bottlenecks, I should swap out the raptor for a 16GB SSD for the OS drive. I'd end up with something that has almost no latency, good speed, silent, and it may be possibly just as reliable in that role.

What do you think?

CDMA works for hard drives too!

[Hasmanean]

As far as I know, hard drives encode data on the disk using simple binary waveforms. Communication systems are designed to use elaborate modulation schemes, and employ digital coding methods which make much more efficient use of the communication channel.

Hard drive makers could do something similar, like spreading the data over a number of physical bits on the disk (such as CDMA does.) Essentially, they would not be limited by the density of the data on the disk, but by the SNR (signal to noise ratio) of the magnetic medium, which I imagine is very high.

Taking this idea furthur, they could bifurcate their encoding methods into 2: a low latency one that retains the characteristics of existing drives, and a high-bandwidth-low-latency scheme which uses digital coding methods to spread each block of data over an entire cylinder for example, and has requires reading the whole cylinder to retrieve a single bit. This would be useful for storing video and large image data, which is retrieved linearly and usually buffered too, and does not require low-latency access the way normal files on a filesystem do.

Hybrid schemes are always better than simple implementations, if they provide a closer fit to reality.

Re:Lets try the other way around, eh

[cbreaker]

No, no.

Hard drives are actually vented. There's no pressurized compartment. They run at the same atmosphere as the rest of the machine. The lift of the hard drive heads is the "Bernoulli effect" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernoulli's_equation) see also (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/click_online/5413198.stm).

Flash storage is certainly preferable in hard environments, no doubt. But as far as I've seen, I'm not a convert. Useful as hell for digital cameras, PDA's, MP3 players and USB drives. Not so much for primary storage. They're simply not fast enough, usually. I guess some people are making faster ones, but you still can't affordably beat the ol' hard drive when it comes to transfer speed. Seek times, flash wins, but when the transfer rates are as slow as they are on most flash, it doesn't matter.

Ask Slashdot

[pragma_x]

SSD is expensive right now. Is there any kind of DIY solution for battery-backed RAM out there? How about hacking one together?

Solution for /var activity

[r_jensen11]

I've been thinking about this workaround for quite a while, but I never see anything discussed about it. But why not mitigate activity on the SSD by having /var be a ramdrive? Once the system is stable, cron a backup (snapshot) to the SSD, along with writes for whenever the partition is unmounted. Ram is cheap enough that for typical applications, /var shouldn't be too large (unless you have large caches stored in /var, but that can be solved with symbolic links)

Re:So we are back to RAM drives!

[Sen.NullProcPntr]

It has been that way for a long time it is called a cache.
but the cache isn't as big as the drive.
Flash is actually slower for writes and has limited write cycles.

True, but flash chips in parallel (the way SSD are made) make that less of an issue. Sort of how certain RAID configurations can speed up disk access times. Samsung [samsung.com] quotes maximum write speeds of SSD higher than equivalent magnetic HDD. Even the MTBF numbers are much much better for SSD. Of course the write speed is the maximum-guaranteed-never-to-exceed number the slowest write may very well be slower than the slowest HDD write.

What I was imagining was using a ram drive for reading and writing data and then backing that up to a slow flashdrive when you powered down the drive. On power up You could pre cache the ram or just use it as a very large cache.

I see, that would be a very fast drive (once all of flash has been read into cache) and also expensive - how much does 160G of DRAM cost today? Prices will go down but disk capacity will probably go up even faster.

Re:Lets try the other way around, eh

[Cyberax]

Right now, I have a computer with 150Gb SSD drive - it's a rugged industrial design for high-vibration environments. It works very fast, about as fast as 7200RPM desktop drive on bulk reads/writes and _much_ faster on random access.

There's only one problem: this SSD drive costs about $5000.

So we have the technology, we only need to wait until prices come down to reasonable values.