Toshiba Developing High-Density 1TB SSD 149
MojoKid writes "A new partnership between Toshiba and Tokyo's Keio University has led to the creation of a new technology that could allow SSDs up to 1TB in size to be made 'with a footprint no larger than a postage stamp.' The report states that the two have been able to integrate 128GB NAND Flash chips and a single controller into a stamp-sized form factor. They've even made it operational with a transfer rates of 2Gbps (or about 250MB/sec) with data transfer that relies on radio communication."
Radio? (Score:5, Interesting)
"...with data transfer that relies on radio communication."
Well that sounds like an eavesdropping invitation if I ever heard one.
Re:Radio? (Score:5, Interesting)
My understanding, from TFA, is that the radio communication being used is very short range, a substitute for the usual maze of tiny and hard to fabricate gold wire interconnects that go between stacked dice. Die stacking itself isn't new; but the real-world manufacturability drops off unpleasantly as you stack higher, because of all the little wires. If you can use very short range RF instead, your life becomes rather less painful.
Assuming a suitable faraday cage layer isn't baked in, somebody with a nice antenna and some serious DSP could probably capture some of the traffic from the chip if they could get within a few cm of it. I'd hesitate to base the next generation of smart cards on such a thing; but it isn't as though it would necessarily be a radical advance over what you can do today with a few needles and a logic probe.
Re:Who cares about size... (Score:5, Interesting)
More broadly, though, size and reliability are actually closely linked with Flash SSDs. It is inherent in the nature of Flash that it will only survive a limited number of writes before a given block of cells becomes unwriteable at best and unreliable at worst. SSD controllers deal with this by trying to spread writes as evenly as possible over the available Flash space, and by having some amount of reserve space that can silently be substituted for failed blocks. The trouble, of course, is that since Flash is expensive, there is a strong commercial imperative to make as much as possible of the Flash you include visible storage space, so you can put a big shiny number on the box, and as little as possible reserve space, since that is hard to brag about. As a consequence, you'll note that cheap consumer SSDs ship with substantially less reserve flash than do the expensive; but reliability focused, enterprise ones(some of which will even let the customer adjust the allocation between storage and reserve).
If you can make Flash denser and cheaper, you'll make it more likely that, for all but the crappiest fly-by-night shops soldering together stuff stolen from nearby dumpsters, adding more reserve Flash is cheaper than processing RMAs and dealing with angry customers. Improvements in the intrinsic reliability of Flash cells would be nice as well, of course; but we are already using vaguely RAID-like techniques to turn quantity into reliability, so improvements in density and cost are almost as good.
Which make/model of SSD drive? (Score:3, Interesting)
Would you care to provide the model number of the SSD you used for reference?
Thanks!
Re:Makes me think of Arthur Clarke. (Score:5, Interesting)
It would take about 200TB to record a lifetime of audio at CD quality.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Makes me think of Arthur Clarke. (Score:3, Interesting)
You sure about that? 75 years is 657,000 hours. At FLAC sized files (350mb/hr) it would require 229,950,000 megabytes. I guess you are pretty close there!
Re:Radio? (Score:5, Interesting)
Radio communication does not say it has to be over the air, it means that there is a carrier wave (in the wire) that has the signals put on top of just like radio.
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Make them affordable instead of larger (Score:1, Interesting)
We always hear about SSD flash technology and how cool it is but we never seem to get it. SSDs are now more expensive than last year...So, what's the point of 1TB SSD when I can't even afford a 30GB one?
Re:Makes me think of Arthur Clarke. (Score:3, Interesting)
... or about 35 TB to record a lifetime at 128k MP3, stereo, "near CD quality".
Really - do you need your entire life recorded in CD quality? Mostly, you'll worry about proving crimes you didn't commit, so anything better than 32 Kbps MP3 is probably a waste. And while there will be those precious moments, most of your life will consist of you sitting and consuming media that's already recorded elsewhere anyway. Really, do you want hi-def audio copies of the Dresden and Star Trek reruns that you watched?
A TB now costs about $90. If trends of the last 20 years continue, in about 10 years, a lifetime of audio at 128k MP3 will cost about $90, inflation adjusted.
Re:Gaming? (Score:1, Interesting)
The key distinction here is that when a HDD dies, the data is effectively lost, requiring specialist techniques to recover. Most SSD failure modes, on the other hand, merely make blocks read-only.
Re:End of the hard drive soon (Score:3, Interesting)
Lets look at a few metrics.
1: performance: afaict SSDs are already the clear winner here.
2: density: I can put a 2TB drive in a standard 3.5 inch bay. Afaict SSDs are generally the same size as laptop hard drives and you can put two of those in a 3.5 inch bay with readilly available adaptor kits. Afaict the drives go up to 512GB so the density is about half that of HDDs. For laptops the density situation is even closer (especially if the laptop in question only has a 9.5mm high bay).
3: cost: the aforementioned 2TB hard drives cost $150-$300 while a 512GB SSD costs $1400 so the cost per gigabyte is about 20 to 40 times higher for the SSD.
In other words the main issue for SSDs right now is cost.
Re:Makes me think of Arthur Clarke. (Score:3, Interesting)
And while there will be those precious moments, most of your life will consist of you sitting and consuming media that's already recorded elsewhere anyway.
Oh heck, its worse than that. I'd contend that fully 3/4 of a person's life isn't fit for being recorded at all:
Sleeping
Driving
Toileting/Grooming
Showering
Cooking
Eating
Cleaning
Consuming Media
I'd say that the vast majority of those recordings would be of you talking to yourself, at best. Without video, the time spend doing most of it would lose its context anyway.
In short, I'm guessing you could get all the important bits on less than 9 TBs...