Disk Drives Face Challenge From Chips 235
WSJdpatton writes "Researchers are reporting significant progress in perfecting a different way to store data in semiconductors, which could replace one widely used type of memory chip and possibly become a credible competitor to disk drives. The researchers, in a paper being delivered at a technical conference in San Francisco, say they used a novel combination of materials to create prototype phase-change components that are more than 500 times as fast as flash chips, while requiring less than half of the electrical power to record data."
Yeah, but (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Yeah, but (Score:5, Insightful)
Even if the first unit they put out is 2x [standard size of whatever] but 500x as fast & uses less battery power... don't you think there's going to be a market for it?
Re:Yeah, but (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd probably still keep the platter drive for secondary storage and put the OS and critical apps/servers/whatever on the phase drive though.
I wouldn't pay twice as much for a drive with half the head room though - even if it is 500X faster. That kind of speed (and especially power consumption) may be a big deal for notebooks, but if density is really a problem, the notebooks would probably have to give up a lot more headroom - relatively speaking. We're finally seeing 200G notebook drives, but keep in mind they're tiny compared to your standard laptop drive. If the new phase drives can store the same or more data in the same space, then yeah, I definitely see the end of the platter drive in mainstream use - once the supply outweighs the demand enough to make it financially realistic. If they can put no more than 30G in a notebook drive, then I think it'll take a couple product generations for that to happen.
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Even if this tech can be turned into solid state drives in the next 10 years, with 500X the performance of current drive tech, how many of you have never seen your CPU pegged?
What about the rendering for that new game?
Just because one component of your system is boosted by a huge factor, doesn't mean you'll see any improvement at all. It's very likely that games available in 10 years will hav
Oh, you'd still have your porn. (Score:2)
One of the biggest advantages of Linux that you never really hear about is the ease with which you can create a system that spans multiple disks, keeping frequently used (OS, libraries, swap) items on a fast drive and application data and documents on another one. It
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And no, you really can't have a Wind
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Such a thing would probably confuse the customer base, since many would be scared of such a thing. For those of us who really want these things, Windows may be less-than-ideal.
Seriously, though; almost everyone I know who doesn't care about speed nor capacity has a single disk, and would rather not be bothered about it.
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Porn? Who said anything about porn? :}
I was talking about pr0n: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=pr0 n [urbandictionary.com]. Specifically:
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My guess is that we're not going to be going without moving parts in large-scale storage for quite a while. And people are goi
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I'd be fine with 30gb with a laptop. Desktop no, but I'm looking for battery life and weight with laptop rather than storage.
I don't play games, do development, or even watch many movies on laptops so I could see this would be handy.
If you did need to do those things... Then not so handy.
Formats (Score:5, Insightful)
So run out, children, and buy your SD 2.0 standard devices while they're not yet obsolete. That way you can buy your camera again and again for no good reason.
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It is only Microsoft's own cut-rate implementation of a disk manager that insists on making FAT32 volumes a maximum of 32GB in size, and I suspect it is solely because they want people to use NTFS instead.
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Flash file systems (Score:2)
FAT is both unreliable and slow. Most **real** FFS are log structured which gives them better performance and robustness than FAT.
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I hear it's a killer!
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Seriously, am really looking forward to TB size solid state drives. Get rid of these bloody victorian spinning disk contraptions! They may have been fine for that time machine [k12.in.us] Mr. Wells had but this is the 21st. C.
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Good news (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Good news (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Good news (Score:5, Interesting)
The difference is that flash fails with writes (not reads) and HDD fails with reads AND writes (bad sectors?). Early flash failed after only 10,000 writes per sector, newer flash is in the millions. Flash spreads the writes around, so to reduce the chance of any one sector failing and can do this because flash is genuinely RAM (unlike HDD where location affects transfer speed). Both HDD and SSD employ firmware stratergies that hide sector failure from the OS, only flash can do that without any real cost to performance.
The end result is that if either are working after 3 or 4 years your doing well, and should really be looking for a replacement unit.
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No, but HDDs are amongst the most reliable storage media. A good, well-built SCSI drive can last for much, much longer than 3-4 years. I've personally seen hard drives as old 10 years functioning without a hitch. RAID can very much mitigate the risks associated with keeping drives around that long, too.
Re:Good news (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow! I never suspected. You should probably let Seagate know. I'm sure they will want to rethink their 5 year warranty.
Perhaps you buy really cut rate drives, but in my experience hard drives almost always outlast their usefulness. I've disposed of more drives due to a combination of obsolete busses and pathetic capacity than outright failures. If you are really seeing high failure rates after only three years, you should be looking for some external factor because that isn't normal.
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Flash is good for some things like portable media, but where constant activity is found you should use something more durable.
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My understanding is that newer flash is still only in the low hundreds of thousands but the storage devices have onboard intelligence that remaps sectors on the flash device to cure utilization problems. If you have a half-empty flash device and you attempt to rewrite the same block a bunch of times, it will continually remap that block to unused blocks on the device so that your writes don't all take place in the sam
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This [techreport.com] HD has 600 000 hr MTBF max and transfer rate of 300MB/s.
Say you transfer at this rate for all its MTBF life thats
600 000 hr * 3600s/hr * 300MB/s = 648 000 000 000 MB or 6.48 petabytes max transfer in its life
MTBF(sec.) * Transfer rate = Max lifetime transfer
Normal flash [storagesearch.com] has 300,000 write cycles/block amortized among N GB blocks (block = byte) so thats 300,000 * N cycles with (comparable)max rate of 300MB/s or 90 000 000 * N MB max transfer in its
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Try 9 years, where my main computer is still using hard drives I bought in 97.
1x 9 gig 10krpm HD for OS
2x 18 gig 10krpm HD in raid0 for the game.
This isn't a computer that just sits there, but gets used daily. Gaming, torrents, ripping movies, developing.
Granted the 70gig deskstar I bough as a storage drive died. (I thought that would be more reliable than then old raid zero drives I was using for storing data)
I have lots of 2-20 gig HD's still in use. (I do own ~20 computers)
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Other technologies have come and gone claiming to compete with hard drives for speed and reliability. But the fact is that hard drives are a very mature technology with a low cost per megabyte, with performance and reliability characteristics that have long been considered good enough. The
Re:Good news (Score:4, Insightful)
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I have Knoppix on a USB flash drive. I find it does make boot times faster, but still the main bottlenecks are getting OS to detect/initialize all the usb/drives/monitor/other hardware. At least with Knoppix or some other liveCD system.
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[from http://www.microsoft.com/uk/windowsvista/features/ foreveryone/performance.mspx%5D [microsoft.com]
You are probably kicking yourself for not pate
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GP (or at least TFA) is pointing out how transistors in each progressively smaller technology leak more electrical current than the previous generation. This has gotten to the point where the power consumed by leakage is a large portion of the overall power usage of an IC.
No more harddrives? (Score:3, Insightful)
Although it could make really cool applications for OS installs. Could you imagine your favorite OS installed on something as fast or faster then today's RAM? I don't want to think about the cost of 4G of this stuff though. *shiver*
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Re:No more harddrives? YES! (Score:4, Funny)
The irony is that this would explain why in the future (à-la-Star-Trek), backups of the computer's memory doesn't exist and cause improbable storylines for us system admins.
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[shrug] A decade ago, I'd never even seen a machine with 4GB RAM, and five years ago, I'd only ever seen that much RAM in monstrously expensive servers. Now I have a machine with that much RAM on my desk. (And yes, I use it; most of my work is pretty heavy number-crunching.) So if this stuff turns out to be viable, it'll get there.
Actually, a better comparison just occurred to me: about fifteen years ago, I paid an extra thousand
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A far cry from the 20MB "half hight" MFM drive I bought for $500 back in 1985.
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Moore's Law and disks (Score:3, Interesting)
My first Vax, 22 years ago, had 1GB of disk, in the form of four washing-ma
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Dark Star (Score:3, Funny)
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That brings back memories. Our shop had a GB of disk, too - eight Fujitsu Eagles in a couple of racks. Of course, we were doing "big" things - IC design. Even at that, we were running about 20 or so users from that configuration. Things have definitely changed...
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Re:No more harddrives? (Score:4, Interesting)
A solid state drive has a higher G-shock tolerance, is quieter and requires less power than a hard drive. These features are why the technology is attractive to the people who need it. And not everyone needs a hard drive that is 400gb in size. Network appliances may only need a small 1gb boot drive, and these kind of devices will need this new phase-change memory, or whatever will work for the task beyond flash.
It would be cool to have something like this that is your main memory AND your storage space in one. We could call it Run-In-Place. We could then have a instant-on computers. Just imagine Windows XP or Linux booting up in under 3 seconds!
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I agree. This is a big problem for larger companies that want maximum performance, but don't have that much data. They stripe 8, 16, 32 drives, and it's a pain in the wrist to find someone that can sell small enough drives so that you don't massively overshoot the space requirements.
Repeat after me... (Score:2)
A terabyte is 1000 gigabytes (1024 if you're old school), not 128.
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Second, this is Slashdot, not a technical journal. Bit/Byte standards are lax, as are the SI vs. binary expansions.
Third, technically a Tb is 125 GB, not 128 GB.
So, the poster may have been setting a trap, or he may have been lax. Either way, the post is wrong. If it was a prank, bad form.
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A solid state drive has a higher G-shock tolerance, is quieter and requires less power than a hard drive. These features are why the technology is attractive to the people who need it.
Totally true. There's a number of reasons I prefer solid state. I was up at around 15,000 feet this summer and my hard-drive based iPod crapped out. Apparently the head mechanisms require a certain air pressure to operate. My flash-based Newton eMate, however, continued to work just fine. Thank God. If I'd been using a regular laptop (with a spinning drive), I would have been totally screwed.
The Newton's totally solid state construction also allowed for a freaky low power consumption. I could go f
BUNK! (Score:2)
"The SSD found files more than twice as fast, and accelerated boot-up. Its cumulative speed advantage over the other two drives was an impressive 25 percent" http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,126833/article.h tml [pcworld.com]
Solid state
NOT BUNK! (Score:2, Informative)
While the actual flash technology might be capable of that kind of speed, the entire stack isn't. Compare the MB/s throughput of several hard drives here [hothardware.com] with the throughput of several USB flash drives here [arstechnica.com] (both benchmarks done with SiSoft's Sandra).
Bottom line: The USB drives are topping out at an average of 8 MB/s, the hard drives are in the 60 MB/s range. That alone puts hard drives an average of 7.5 times faster.
Flash drives have great single block seek times because they don't have to move a h
Technology description (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.ovonyx.com/tech_html.html [ovonyx.com]
http://www.ovonyx.com/ovonyxtech.html [ovonyx.com]
Ita about time (Score:5, Insightful)
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Or power switches
Wouldn't be necessary! (Score:2)
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4 years down the road (Score:2)
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I suspect it will be closer to 32 Gigs, and after looking at Vista, I am sure of it. Four Years ago, 256 was the minimum to run WinXP, today, it is more like 1GB is my minimum with 2 Gigs being optimal. 4-8x in four years. Today, I wouldn't recommend Vista with anything less than 2 full gigs of Ram, and highly recommend 4. 4-8x would most likely put Vista's 4 year at 16 gigs MINIMUM, and probably more like 32.
My $.02
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Cost is what matters (Score:2)
>OUM requires fewer steps in an IC manufacturing process resulting in reduced cycle times, fewer defects, and greater manufacturing flexibility.
>a process that deviates little from a basic CMOS logic flow.
I get nervous about people who make claims like
>the OUM memory state can be written more than 10 trillion times
unless they've tested it to a trillion cycles, which is just possible.
Anyone else nervous that they didn't say anything like "write time N nanoseconds"?
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I can't seem to find hard numbers on the chips, but USB Flash being able to obtain upwards of 13MB/s now puts it faster than U320 SCSI
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Re:Cost is what matters (Score:4, Informative)
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>the OUM memory state can be written more than 10 trillion times
unless they've tested it to a trillion cycles, which is just possible.
Considering the size and quantity of their prototype I'd say your skepticism is warranted. It's probably more likely derived from theory and marketing rather than a real world test.
Or...
I'll believe it when the MFR's warranty bears that claim.
The real challage is price. (Score:5, Insightful)
Price is a major driving force in memory.
CPU Registers are the fastest but most expensive (very small amount is used)
Cache is the next fastest and the second most expensive. (4 Megs or so)
Then comes normal RAM Memory Still slower then Cache and cheaper normally systems now have about a Gig or 2 of that.
If price wasn't a case Computers wouldn't have much RAM but all Cache, or huge amount of registers. But in real life price is the final decision.
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But, leaving the computers on also costs money in terms of electricity. This is also a big price to pay. If the computers would boot significa
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I see this scenario:
Admin approves a patch/upgrade
Admin pushes patch to server
Server uses smart scheduling to push upgrade to machine to avoid work conflicts
Machine is off/doesn't respond
Server sends WAKEUP code to machine
Machine boots and (as default booting solution) sends ready signal to server
Server pushes pat
Wake on LAN (Score:2)
Re:The real challage is price. (Score:4, Interesting)
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You're a bit on the high side there... SATA/PATA drives are down around $0.28-$0.32 per gigabyte and have been for a while. The sweet spot seems to be the 250GB drives for $70, with the 200GB, 300GB, 400GB sizes at around $0.32/GB.
(Which hasn't changed a whole lot in the past few months. But Seagate's 7200.10 series is one of the cheaper $/GB drives on the market even though it's brand new tech.)
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For you hard-core retrogrouches, that's $425/GB for audio cassette.
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Only if you need a bunch of gigabytes - what if you need only 4 GB? What if size and power consumption matter? A 6GB compactFlash microdrive goes for a couple of hundred dollars. That's over $30/GB. They are creating them and selling them, so there are people willing to pay that price for the size/power consumption.
Even if size doesn't matter that much, a standard 10 GB IDE drive is about $20.
Magnets and rust (Score:2)
On our way to the future (Score:4, Funny)
Maybe we need to perfect holographic 3D displays first?
Abstract of presentation. (Score:2)
Ultra-Thin Phase-Change Bridge Memory Device Using GeSb
Y.C. Chen, C.T. Rettner***, S. Raoux***, G.W. Burr***, S.H. Chen, R.M. Shelby***, M. Salinga***, W.P. Risk***, T.D. Happ*, G.M. McClelland***, M. Breitwisch^, A. Schrott^, J.B. Philipp*, M.H. Lee, R. Cheek^, T. Nirschl**, M. Lamorey^^, C. F. Chen, E. Joseph^, S. Zaidi*, B. Yee^, H. L. Lung, R. Bergmann*, and C. Lam^, Ma
Bah (Score:3, Funny)
Personal Tokens (Score:2)
Slow, low density optical discs are good for offline storage, up to 4.7GB [osta.org] at about $0.042:GB [pricewatch.com]. Plus about $1000 for a 400-disc changer jukebox makes about $0.60:GB across all jukebox loads, theoretically also automatable across many loads, for "nearline" storage.
Fast, high denisty magnetic discs are good for online storage, the kind we use as "permanent" without worrying about dealing with them directly (until they fail). They cost
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And while block reads are common to practically every medium, solid state makes access vs transfer speed very close. Wit
ten states per 20 nanometer cell (Score:3, Insightful)
"novel" (Score:2)
I'm so tired of finding the word "novel" in research publications, etc. It's an overused word which contains absolutely no new information. Most style guides for scientific writing grip about it, and many research publications ask authors not to use such words in titles or abstracts, but I get the feeling the use is still increasing. It's basically scientific marketing, and it's not even clever or original. Most things which are described as novel are anyway anything but, and the word has just become we
About That Power Curve (Score:2)
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"The chips won't work in brown devices."
"Doh!"
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dirty f'in racist chips.
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