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Data Storage Hardware

DSI Delivers up to 3GB/s with Solid State Disk 214

Posted by CowboyNeal from the nifty-dram-tricks dept.
olivesaregross writes "'Running at what the company says is 250 times the speed of conventional hard drives, it won't come cheap, but it will be fast. It uses DRAM memory to store data instead of spinning platter hard drives, giving an access time of just 20 microseconds.' It still does use platter-based drives but it's a cool idea anyway. Techworld has another story on it."
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DSI Delivers up to 3GB/s with Solid State Disk More

DSI Delivers up to 3GB/s with Solid State Disk

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  • Pricing (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Faust7 ( 314817 ) on Thursday May 06, 2004 @04:41PM (#9077872) Homepage
    Traders link to the system over FDDI, T3 or ATM links, and the Eurex back office servers connect via 2Gbit/s Fibre Channel links and switches to the SSDs. The system uses DSI's 3200 solid state disks, with two to eight Fibre Channel ports that can push out 250,000 IOPS - up to 3Gbit/s - and contain 16-64 GB of capacity. There are two hot-swappable power supplies and three hot-swappable drives per DSI 3200. Uptime is five-nines - 99.999 percent.

    Well! A consumer-level version ought to be cheap in about... ten years.

    • Re:Pricing (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Vihai ( 668734 )

      I would call it "a hard disk with a big cache"... however... I can have a cheaper disk with a bigger cache just by adding more RAM to my system and it would be much much faster... wonderful eh?

      I may be wrong... but I cannot RTFA.. the site is /.tted...

    • Re:Pricing (Score:3, Interesting)

      by b0r0din ( 304712 )
      From the article:

      "Trying to get the general population to think beyond the big RAID systems is our biggest impediment to solid state disk acceptance..."

      That and the hefty pricetag, I'm sure. Obviously the better demand, the better a chance the price will go down, but seeing as RAID stands for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks (for some people) may explain why it's so popular. Same reason most people don't drive Ferrari's - it costs like 1000 dollars for an oil change.

      I don't see this having much use

      • Re:Pricing (Score:5, Informative)

        by eht ( 8912 ) on Thursday May 06, 2004 @05:07PM (#9078122)
        RAID has a couple of semi accepted meanings,

        The I can mean either Inexpensive or Independent
        and the D can be either Drives, Disks, or Devices.

        However it's always a Redundant Array, which of course makes RAID 0 not RAID, but just a good way to lose even more data faster(as any drive/disk/device failing on RAID 0 takes down all your info).

        • Re:Pricing (Score:3, Interesting)

          by ktulu1115 ( 567549 )
          The I can mean either Inexpensive or Independent and the D can be either Drives, Disks, or Devices.

          I never understood that... RAID has historically been set up with SCSI drives, (ATA RAID has been more recently developed/implemented) I would hardly consider them cheap compared to ATA (altough recently I have noticed the price differiental somewhat lessened)

          Regardless, I still use almost all SCSI in my boxes.

    • Consumer edition (Score:5, Interesting)

      by swb ( 14022 ) on Thursday May 06, 2004 @05:06PM (#9078107)
      How many 1G sticks of RAM could you put into your standard Firewire/USB2 enclosure? Why couldn't someone make a USB2/Firewire/SCSI enclosure that the host system saw as a mass storage device but was actually just a smaller version of the above? It might be really useful for some DB applications, video editing, etc.

      I can't imagine that an enclosure of that type would run more than $500, plus the cost of the RAM that went into it. It might not be consumer cost effective, but it could be worthwhile at the prosumer or low end, where the RAM disks shown on /. are almost never affordable but by the richest organizations.

      • The RAM itself is one thing... (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Kjella ( 173770 ) on Thursday May 06, 2004 @05:31PM (#9078281) Homepage
        ...that you can actually do in software (get a PowerMac or AMD-64, load it up with 8-12GB of ram). What usually cost money, is to have some sort of flush-to-disk feature.

        I'd love a SSD at least big enough to boot from, to combine with some other fanless stuff to create a 100% fanless, no moving parts PC (except from burner, which is silent when not in use). That + GbLan (to copy everything in from fanless machine, no damn spinning CD/DVD) using a direct crossover cable to a file server, preferably in a sound-isolated galaxy far, far away.

        That is my dream for my next setup. I've looked at doing the same simply dragging DVI + USB cables + external burner at machine, but it's not that great. A network cable can go so much longer...

        Kjella

      • Re:Consumer edition (Score:2, Insightful)

        by CylanR77 ( 532552 )
        What's the point?

        Any speed gain you'd get from using solid state media would be lost if the device is hooked up to such a bus. And if you really want something small, think about the iPod. It holds many gigabytes of data in a handheld form factor; all it has is a tiny hard drive.

        Also, RAM needs a constant supply of power to keep it useful. If the device is going to be portable at all [and why shouldn't it be, if you hook it up to Firewire or something similar?], it's going to need batteries, something tha
    • You could do a consumer version using end-of-life slow DRAMs, but it seems that slow DRAM doesn't stay on the market very long after its primary use (PCs) moves on to faster stuff.

      With UltraATA topping out at 100MB/sec even the cheapest/slowest available DRAM can keep the interface chugging at full speed 100% of the time. A simple 16 or 32 bit bus clocked at 50 MHz (one 16 bit word per cycle since ATA is only 16 bits wide) will be sufficient.

      Throw in a couple batteries (NiMH or LiIon, whatever's cheaper)

  • Not cheap, but fast (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 06, 2004 @04:41PM (#9077879)
    then it must be good. cheap, fast, good, pick any two.

    • SSD is a niche technology at best (Score:4, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 06, 2004 @04:44PM (#9077913)
      Let's see:

      Imperial folded, Platypus folded, Solid Data is barely hanging on and Texas Memory survives on defense contracts.

      SSD is a great technology, yes.
      SSD makes commercial sense, no.

      How many more VCs can be fooled into investing into SSD startups?

    • Re:Not cheap, but fast (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Erwos ( 553607 )
      I believe you mean "cheap, fast, large capacity; pick two". "Good" is not really meaningful.

      -Erwos

    • Doesn't "fast" usually refer to time taken for development and/or to market?

  • Interesting Uses Possible (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Pavan_Gupta ( 624567 ) <`pg8p' `at' `virginia.edu'> on Thursday May 06, 2004 @04:42PM (#9077885)
    I can imagine this kind of technology being really applicable in situations where large databases are in use -- but potentially, slightly cheaper then just keeping the entire database in ram. I think it would be interesting to use, but a bit more interesting to play with.
  • Their website or hosting firm isn't very dynamic, at least. Right now, it's not even static. It's slashdotted.

  • Looks like those companies... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 06, 2004 @04:42PM (#9077894)
    Are already starting the hard work on getting the components together to meet the minimum specs for running Longhorn. Huzzah!
    • Yes they are. While this drive itself wouldn't be capable of running Longhorn I'm sure that what was learned getting here will be put to use when they turn their attention towards the eventual drive they develop that's capable of running it.

      Another decade full of baby steps like this and we're there!

      I know I can't wait.

  • Obligatory comment... (Score:4, Funny)

    by beavis88 ( 25983 ) on Thursday May 06, 2004 @04:44PM (#9077909)
    Maybe they should be serving their website from SSDs

    *waits for the groans*
    • Has anyone ever wondered about the effect that is a "slashdotting"? See, it's fact that no one will ever "RTFA". And it's also a foregone conclusion that anything mentioned on /. is overwhelmed by traffic. So what's happening in the middle there?

      And back (slightly) on track -- with the technology arriving yearly with faster and smaller hard-drives (mostly used in digital music devices) why do people still have giant (even a midi case is massive) cases on their desktops? Is it only due to standardised compo

      • I don't know what kind of computer you're using, but mine doesn't really have any sharp edges or tiny switches, and has just a few jumpers (Optical drives, clear CMOS, possibly a couple others that I never touched or cared about). And no, it doesn't look like a plastic fishtank, and certainly not a glowing one. :)

      • why do people still have giant (even a midi case is massive) cases on their desktops?

        Some of us prefer a nice roomy engine compartment [att.net] as opposed to something else [klio.net]. It's always more fun to work someplace where there's room for not only the item you're working on, but also your hands and the tools they're holding.

  • A new requirement... (Score:4, Funny)

    by D-Cypell ( 446534 ) on Thursday May 06, 2004 @04:44PM (#9077911)
    I wonder how long it will be before microsoft add this technology to their list of requirements [slashdot.org] for longhorn!

  • Why is this significant? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by John Jorsett ( 171560 ) on Thursday May 06, 2004 @04:44PM (#9077916)
    We pretty much expect things to get increasingly bigger and faster, so is another RAM-based pseudo-disk that big a deal?

  • 26.6666666 times faster (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Wasn't there already a solid state transfer rate of 80GB/s reported from SGI/Cray a year or so ago?

  • RELIABILITY!!! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by NineNine ( 235196 ) on Thursday May 06, 2004 @04:46PM (#9077935)
    Screw speed. At least for me, that's not an issue. I want a r-e-l-i-a-b-l-e hard drive. I've tried all the brands, but they all come down to this: You have moving parts. It's going to break, eventually. The bearings will go. The head will hit a platter, etc. Personally, I've been saying for years that a solid state hard drive will be the next big boost in PC technology, and I think this is the beginning.

    I don't understand why the company isn't touting reliability. If I have a slow hard drive... eh. No biggie. I wait an extra second. If I have a hard drive crash, that's potentially days of lost work and business, even more if a backup failed recently. I'll be buying these just as soon as I can afford them. With these drives in place, the next reliaibility bottleneck are the stupid little cooling fans failing. Electronics (printed circuit boards, chips) rarely fail on their own. It's almost something with moving parts (like a fan) that leads to their death.

    To me, this is the most exciting advance in computing since Ethernet.

    • Re:RELIABILITY!!! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by neurojab ( 15737 ) on Thursday May 06, 2004 @05:11PM (#9078155)
      >I don't understand why the company isn't touting reliability.

      Traditionally, DRAM-based storage units are LESS reliable than hard disks. Why? Power loss. Yes, you can always create a massive UPS, but to be really considered "stable storage", you need to be able to store data without power for years on end. The advantage here is that the unit writes data to its hard disks, giving you some assurance that you won't lose your data even then. That turns the RAM in the unit into a giant cache. This helps with read operations, but does nothing for writes. Besides, if the hard drives fail in this unit, the unit still fails. That makes it no more reliable than RAID.

      >To me, this is the most exciting advance in computing since Ethernet.

      This concept has been around since before Ethernet. The concept of storage in solid-state isn't new. Even using RAM for a hard disk isn't new. Ever run VDISK in an expanded-memory DOS system? This concept was available in the higher-end comptuer world far before that.

      • Actually, it does help with writes too, because the "drive" is the ram, and the harddrive it writes to is the backup...meaning everythign is used from ram, and the ram is paged out to disk at intervals to keep a consistent backup. These things generally also have batteries which supply enough juice that should power go out they can write out the rest of ram to the drive and shutdown semi-cleanly...
    • I don't understand why the company isn't touting reliability.

      Probably because they are? Their specs say 99.999% uptime all over them.

      Too bad the storage is so teeny. Only 8-64 gig? What are we going to fit on that? Oh well, I guess it has applications for databases. But certainly nothing where you could survive waiting for your raid array to fetch the data.

    • I don't understand why the company isn't touting reliability.

      You're in the minority. Most people's data are not worth the expense of dramatically more reliable hardware. In fact, they apparently aren't even worth the trouble to making regular back-ups for.

      If I have a slow hard drive... eh. No biggie. I wait an extra second.

      No, a slow hard drive can preclude entire applications, such as video capturing.

      I'll be buying these just as soon as I can afford them.

      And that's why not many people are selling

    • Drives may rotate but generally speaking the high-end is better than memory because you can't pull the plug on memory. What we have here is a solid-state ram backed by an HD combo. The unit can still fail so generally they are doubled up. As someone else has commented here, the Fibre Channel may be new but the tech is about 15 years old.

      The main problem with drives at the moment is insufficient cooling. Sprin them fast and drive the heads hard and they will get hot. Commercial units don't tend to be that

  • Google Cache (Score:4, Informative)

    by DeathToBill ( 601486 ) on Thursday May 06, 2004 @04:46PM (#9077937) Journal
    Hmmm, one of the fastest slashdottings in recent history, methinks. Google cache is here [google.com].
  • These units store the data in RAM and on disk (a RAID array). At some point the data has to be written out to disk and this will not be as fast. Alternatively, it's possible that when powering off, the entire contents fo the cache could be written to disk -- the time to power off would be quite large though. I see at least one unit has it's own UPS to manage this.

    • Re:Really just a disk with a huge cache.. (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      A UPS is one way to keep the data going, but it's much simpler and more effective to use the method that Sun used years ago with its Prestoserve disk-cache boards years ago: you put a little lithium watch battery on the board with the RAM. If the system loses power, the battery powers the RAM for, I don't know, a year or two. Then you also build in a little software-accessible battery monitor that tells you when it's time to replace the watch batteries.

      Of course, you have to have some software so that

      • Thanks, I noticed the prestoServe when I was looking for parts for an Ultra2 that is soon to become my testbed machine at work, got distracted and didn't google for it. I'm just going to be glad to see that SparcStation 5 disappear from my office, it is just a little underpowered for my tastes and very little disk space.
    • the time to power off would be quite large though.

      Well given the operating hours of this particular application (stock market), they only run 12 hours a day anyways.

  • I know it's not quite the same as a ramdisk but (Score:3, Informative)

    by foidulus ( 743482 ) on Thursday May 06, 2004 @04:46PM (#9077941)
    This idea seems to have been around for a while. I remember seeing a few years ago a hd controller that you could plug standard ram into to act as a fast cache. Now granted this is on a much larger scale, but.
    It is still cool though :P

  • Slashvertisement? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by stratjakt ( 596332 ) on Thursday May 06, 2004 @04:47PM (#9077947) Journal
    It still does use platter-based drives but it's a cool idea anyway.

    From the article, I gather these are merely SAN boxes with up to 64GB of DRAM, fiber channel output, and 3 hot-swappable hard drives that act as backup.

    Has a record been broken? Has anything special happened? Sure this is high-end stuff, but it doesnt seem new or particularly exciting.

  • dram (Score:3, Funny)

    by ejaw5 ( 570071 ) on Thursday May 06, 2004 @04:49PM (#9077971)
    I certainly hope they're using RAMBUS memory..unless they want to be sued for "not wanting to pay loyalty fees"

  • Logical Uses (Score:3, Funny)

    by Wasteofspace ( 777087 ) on Thursday May 06, 2004 @04:49PM (#9077972)
    This technology would be purely for database read speed at the present moment, though down the track I would imaging that this technology will be used to rapid access, Read only, operating system storage. Basically to make idiot proof operating systems for future, high speed computer systems.

    "I have a problem with my computer, it says boot disk invalid"

    "Please remove the cartridge from the front of the PC and replace it with one that will arrive at your door shortly, and don't worry, you wont lose any information"

  • Caching? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by amalcon ( 472105 )
    Is this sort of thing more or less expensive than plain ol' RAM? If it costs more, then just caching 3gb of data from disk into memory at bootup is more cost-effective. If it's cheaper, then perhaps people will start using this technology for swap space, etc. In any case, I've been waiting to see an HDD using solid-state RAM for quite some time now. If we're lucky, it'll be cost-effective before too long.
    • This device can get away with using much slower RAM than your desktop, so the bulk price should be cheaper. Also, it can use many many banks (because it is custom-designed), while your desktop has a limited number of slots (and a limited number of slots may forec you to use more expensive 1GB DIMMS rather than what's the best value).

      If it weren't for those two significant factors, then regular-old-ram would be a better investment. But then, throw in the fact that this is sharable between many machines on a
    • I doubt it. I'm pretty sure I saw something like you're describing years and years ago (think 486/68040 age) and it still isn't cheap...

  • Obviously it's not that fast (Score:3, Funny)

    by GoClick ( 775762 ) on Thursday May 06, 2004 @04:53PM (#9078009)
    Obiviously it's not that fast, it's already /.ed

    A number of other companies have been making DRAM disks for several years

  • Whats new about this? (Score:4, Informative)

    by Kenja ( 541830 ) on Thursday May 06, 2004 @04:55PM (#9078020)
    Solid state drives have been around for a long time. Hell, the old RocketDrives [nifty.com] could hit 4GB with four 1GB RDRAM sticks.
    • From a linked article:

      Texas Memory System's OEM, Dynamic Solutions International, which has over 18 years of experience delivering solid state disk solutions to the enterprise, installed a

      2.5 Terabyte Tera-RamSan at a customer site to accelerate critical database applications, metadata and to maintain a technological edge.

      Texas Memory Touts Largest SDD Installation [dynamicsolutions.com]

      The system uses DSI's 3200 solid state disks, with two to eight Fibre Channel ports that can push out 250,000 IOPS - up to 3Gbit/s - and co

    • Or even more to the point, how is this different from the solutions people like EMC have been selling to the enterprise for years now? The idea of tiered storage (ram/disk/tape) with a unified interface is not at all new.

  • barebones ramdrive (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Incy ( 635621 )
    You think by now. Someone would have started selling these solid state ramdrives with empty RAM sockets & simply support cheap off the shelf SDRAM. No firmware limit of 4gigs or anything. Just a bunch of SDRAM slots on the logic to address them. Is the hardware *that* expensive?

  • DSI Delivers up to 3GB/s... (Score:4, Funny)

    by ForestGrump ( 644805 ) on Thursday May 06, 2004 @05:04PM (#9078098) Homepage Journal
    damn and I thought I could get a 3GB/s DSL line...

  • Used interface? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Karamchand ( 607798 ) on Thursday May 06, 2004 @05:08PM (#9078130)
    What interface are they using? Even the fastest SCSI can't provide 3GB/s!

  • Now that's a drive... (Score:4, Funny)

    by theendlessnow ( 516149 ) on Thursday May 06, 2004 @05:12PM (#9078161)
    ...for Longhorn!!

  • Solid State Discs have been around for a while (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Burdell ( 228580 ) on Thursday May 06, 2004 @05:14PM (#9078175)
    I've got a mail server that uses an SSD for the mail queue filesystem. It is great for that because the random I/O transactions per second rating is 10,000 (vs. a typical hard drive thrashing hard at 150 tps).

    The SSD we have is a Nitro!Xe from Curtis, Inc. [mncurtis.com]. It looks like a standard 3.5" wide 1" high Ultra2 SCSI drive with an 80 pin SCA connector. We have a 2G model with a 2.5" notebook drive for backup (it has a battery to dump RAM to disk on power off) and it greatly improved the performance of our mail server (high performance mail queue is all about I/O TPS).

    • I've got a mail server that uses an SSD for the mail queue filesystem. It is great for that because the random I/O transactions per second rating is 10,000 (vs. a typical hard drive thrashing hard at 150 tps).

      Can I ask why a 2GB SSD was better than buying another 2GB of RAM for your mailserver, and putting your mail queue on a ramdisk?
      • Probably because smart mail servers will always ensure that the file has been written to disk before confirming delivery. In these conditions, gigabytes of cache won't help at all, the mail server's still waiting for the disk.

        The advantage of these systems would be that they're insanely fast, and have a battery in case power is lost. Since they emulate a hard disk, the mail server thinks everything has been safely written, and since there is a battery this works pretty well.
      • Mail is important to people now, and you don't want to just lose a message. The way most mail servers work is that at the end of the SMTP DATA phase, before returning a successful response code, the server flushes the mail queue file(s) for that message to disk (i.e. they don't just close the files; they tell the OS to flush the blocks for those files to disk and don't return until they are written). That way, in case of crash, power failure, etc., the message is not lost. Then the server tells the other

  • Wafer-scale integration? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by steveha ( 103154 ) on Thursday May 06, 2004 @05:19PM (#9078217) Homepage
    Whatever happened to wafer-scale integration?

    I read an article about this years ago. The idea was something like this:

    Memory chips are made on wafers. They are made side-by-side, then sliced apart, then each tested and mounted in a package. (Then eventually mounted on a little circuit board, and thence into our hands to install into our computers.)

    The idea was to make a wafer of memory chips, but not to just have them side-by-side; actually have traces connecting one chip to another. Then use the whole wafer as a RAM unit. You would need to test and find any defective RAM chips in the wafer, then cut a trace (or burn out a fuse, or whatever) to disconnect them from the rest of the wafer. (Not too different from bad-block management on a hard drive, really.) Finally you could make a stack of these wafers in a box, and sell it as a disk drive.

    This should be much cheaper than current RAM-based disk drives. It would be slower (the traces connecting the chips would be slower than a direct memory bus to each chip) but still way faster than a drive with moving parts.

    My understanding is that wafer-scale integration isn't very interesting for most applications, but for the specific niche of RAM-based storage units it seemed promising. Clearly I'm wrong since it didn't happen. Anyone know why?

    steveha
  • ...it's a HDD with an absurdly huge cache:

    Uncompromised SDRAM data integrity is maintained through both battery backup and redundant disk drives, so your data is always protected.

  • Rebadged TMS RAM SAN (Score:3, Informative)

    by lazn ( 202878 ) on Thursday May 06, 2004 @06:07PM (#9078536)
    am I the only one to notice this is just a rebadged Texas Memory Systems RAM-SAN?

    http://www.superssd.com/default.asp [superssd.com]

    ==>Lazn

  • How can this possibly be better than just putting more RAM in to your computer. Ok, sure, if you have a 32-bit machine, then you're stuck. But if you have the money for this beast, than you have a 64-bit server box, and you can install 64MB of RAM.

    This would be EVEN FASTER because you don't have to get your disk data from over some SCSI bus or whatever. Instead, you just rely in your OS to do a good job of caching disk blocks in RAM. If all of your data fits in RAM, then the only disk access that will

  • huh? (Score:3, Funny)

    by djcatnip ( 551428 ) on Thursday May 06, 2004 @06:40PM (#9078803) Homepage Journal

    It uses DRAM memory to store data instead of spinning platter hard drives, giving an access time of just 20 microseconds.' It still does use platter-based drives but it's a cool idea anyway.

    <jon stewart> Whaaaaaa? </jon stewart> How can you use DRAM instead of platters but still be platter based?

    Oh, yes. Now I understand. Way to be crystal clear there. I know the formula, (submit well written story with exacting details that clearly illustrate the point minus "well written" and minus "with exacting deatils that clearly illustrate the point"), and yet... I keep taking the bait.

    and let me beat you to the punchline:

    "you must be new here..."

    "you realize you're on slashdot..."

    (Score: -1 Duh)

    • The DDRAM is battery backed, but there is a small HD there which backs up the solidstate memory so when power fails, it will use the battery for a set period and then copy the contents to HD to preserve it.

  • To anyone who has bought / implemented an SSD... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by JamieF ( 16832 ) on Thursday May 06, 2004 @06:48PM (#9078874) Homepage
    Why is this so much better than a bunch of additional system memory?

    Theoretically if you throw a bunch of RAM into a computer with a remotely modern OS, some of that memory will be used to buffer writes, and performance will improve. An exception would be in cases where applications go out of their way to force writes all the way to disk, such as in databases with their transaction logs.

    Is the problem just that there are so many applications that sync() all the time, that a hardware buffering solution such as SSD is required because otherwise the OS's file buffers are constantly being flushed? (Yes I understand that SSD is persistent, or at least much more persistent than plain old RAM that dies when the power goes off.)

    I can see the enterprise-friendly angle of "just add this disk and the whole system goes much faster" instead of trying to rewrite existing apps or tune the hell out of the OS. I'm just curious about particular cases where adding RAM doesn't work but SSD works well... are there enough to justify the existence of these devices?

  • Ugh, moving VFS out of system memory and into dedicated memory on the HD doest make it any better. Its still not perminate storage. And when you do hit that memory critical you swap out memory to memory.. instead of just skipping the swap. It seems like this is really targed against PAE or 64bit chips. Bah I like my memory where it belongs swaping out early just becouse the OS doest know that its just a one big memcpy is LAME.
  • It uses DRAM memory to store data instead of spinning platter

    You know, 25+ years ago they had solid state paging drums for the mainframes of the time. Sure they were larger in size, less capacity, slower than this unit, and more expensive -- but so were computers in general. This is hardly a new idea.

  • I cant wait for MRAM solid state disks. Non-volatile fast, dense...etc

    Has all the makings of a great future hard drive replacement.

    Small sizes of it are already available, at least on paper.

    Datasheets here. [cypress.com]
  • This must be a new record for /.!!! The original Eurex [eurexchange.com] is based in Frankfurt, Germany and has been running since 1989 when it was known as DTB. Eurex is a financial futures and options exchange,

    The backend runs OpenVMS and the critical files are kept on solid-state disks. Originally DEC ESE20s. In particular, the order-books are kept on mirrored solid-state disks to allow for fast matching between buyer and seller.

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