Micron Demos SSD With 1GB/sec Throughput 120
Lucas123 writes "Micron demonstrated the culmination of numerous technology announcements this year with a solid state disk drive that is capable of 1GB/sec throughput with a PCIe slot. The SSD is based on Micron's 34nm technology and interleaving 64 NAND flash chips in parallel. While the techology, which is expected to ship over the next year, is currently aimed at high-end applications, a Micron executive said it's entirely possible that Micron's laptop and desktop SSDs could have similar performance in the near future by bypassing SATA interfaces."
Re:Yes that's nice. (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah, but ... Intel is shipping SSDs with 220Mb/s read/write:
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/11/25/015209 [slashdot.org]
What's so fantastic about 1Gb/s? It's only four times faster...a RAID with four Intel devices will do it so just put four of them in a box with a RAID controller and Bob's your uncle...
Re:Yes that's nice. (Score:5, Informative)
This reminds me of all the demos of holographic disc technology. It'll be on the market in just 1 year!
That one has always been in the mysterious future (3-10 years away, never next year) and never really showed up outside of labs. SSDs on the other hand aren't really "new", they're in essence flash chips like we've been using in cameras and USB sticks for many years plus RAID0 that's been a well known way to make slow storage devices faster by running them in parallel. There's quite a bit more controller magic than that, but it's nothing really revolutional in the creation of SSDs. Only the regular miniturization process that's happening all around which means they are reaching capacities and speeds that are useful for main computer storage.
Re:Yes that's nice. (Score:5, Informative)
It was about $300 extra for a 128 gig SSD in this Dell laptop. I just ran a casual test. Keep in mind, this is currently being used (lightly), and I haven't done anything to improve the results of this test -- in fact, probably just the opposite, as the file in question was downloaded via BitTorrent, and I've never defragmented this hard drive. It certainly hasn't been read since the last boot.
dd if=foo.avi of=/dev/null
348459+1 records in
348459+1 records out
178411124 bytes (178 MB) copied, 1.82521 s, 97.7 MB/s
Keep in mind, that's throughput -- it gains nothing from the real killer feature of no seek times.
I can always buy big, slow spinning disks and put them in a NAS somewhere. I can take old desktops, put Linux on them, and turn them into a NAS. For the kind of stuff that takes hundreds of gigs, I don't need much speed.
But for the places where it counts -- like booting an OS -- there is a definite, real benefit, and it's not entirely out of reach, if you care about this kind of thing.
Re:Oblig (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Yes that's nice. (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, in RAID 5, five 250MB/s drives will roughly offer you the same performance as a 1Gbps drive for most sequences of IO operations. SSDs feature almost linear scaling due to the extremely low seek times.
Re:Yes that's nice. (Score:5, Informative)
Say what?
Actually, RAID can work EXACTLY in this way. Set up a RAID 0 array of 250Mb/s devices and if the host controller can handle it - bingo, Gigabit throughput from the array. There's a guy out there that RAID'ed six of the Gigabyte iRAM cards on some high end RAID card a year ago - and he managed somewhere in the neighborhood of 800MB/s - surely a year later we can do better than that. The only limitations his rig encountered were the limited space available, and of course the volatile nature of the iRAM cards.
The things by Micron appears to have handled the issue of volatile memory when the memory goes down, and getting all the bandwidth through a single channel bus. When it becomes commercially available - count me in for one (when the price comes down enough for me to afford it.)
Re:Yes that's nice. (Score:3, Informative)
You are assuming you'd only want a single disk. The target market is people who are generating several disks worth of data per day. If you are recording HD footage, and especially if you are editing it, then you burn through a TB very quickly. The cost of the drive becomes tiny per disk if you're using a lot of them. Even if you're only burning one disk a day, you're paying $50/disk over the course of the year. If you burn two a day then it brings the cost of disk and drive to around $200 each, very cheap for a 50-year archive of your content. The disks are the same size as a DVD, and so can be stored in a lot less space than a hard disk, which is also a factor when you are archiving hundreds of TB per year.
Like I said - they're not affordable by the average /. reader, but they do exist and there are segments of the market where they make good sense.
Re:throughput IS NOT most important parameter (Score:3, Informative)
the Micron video shows a 2-drive setup performance of 200,000 I/Os per second. (2KB) random read = ~400MB/sec.
a benchmark performed by Linux.com [linux.com] also shows that SSD absolutely creams SATA [linux.com], even 6 SATA drives in RAID 6, in terms of random seek. in other tests a single Mtron 16GB SSD gave 111 MB/s sustained read with .1 ms access time, outstripping the WD Raptor 150, which was the fastest SATA drive at the time the test was performed (12/13/07). the only area where SSD lags behind is random write, which it suffered 23% over the raptor. but with the several-fold increases in I/Os per second achieved by Micron's PCIe cards, even random write speeds would be be faster than normal mechanical rotating drives.
Re:Interleave (Score:3, Informative)
You mean like this: http://www.mars-tech.com/ans-9010b.htm [mars-tech.com]
And the battery doesn't need to be huge either - it backs your data up to a flash drive if the power cut lasts more than a few seconds.
Re:Yes that's nice. (Score:3, Informative)
Erm my home server with four disks in RAID 5 (software RAID) handles wonderfully.
I've never seen the RAID take more than 2% CPU and write speeds are far faster than a single drive.
Re:Oblig (Score:3, Informative)