640gb PCIe Solid-State Drive Demonstrated

Lisandro writes "TG Daily reports that the company Fusion io has presented a massively fast, massively large solid-state flash hard drive on a PCIe card at the Demofall 07 conference in San Diego. Fusion is promising sustained data rates of 800Mb/sec for reading and 600Mb/sec for writing. The company plans to start releasing the cards at 80 GB and will scale to 320 and 640 GB. '[Fusion io's CTO David Flynn] set the benchmark for the worst case scenario by using small 4K blocks and then streaming eight simultaneous 1 GB reads and writes. In that test, the ioDrive clocked in at 100,000 operations per second. "That would have just thrashed a regular hard drive," said Flynn. The company plans on releasing the first cards in December 2007 and will follow up with higher capacity versions later.'"

Oblig.

[Anonymous Coward]

640gb ought to be enough for anybody.

Re:

[GodfatherofSoul]

Maybe for your pr0n collection ;)

Re:Oblig.

[ady1]

Its not the size of the harddrive which is amazing. Its the read/write speed.
Even if you get a 32GB model, you can install windows on it and use the regular SATA2 HDD for movies/music storage. Think of the booting time.

Re:

[CastrTroy]

Couldn't you mostly boot from it by putting your boot information on a standard drive, just enough to load up the controller for this drive, and then loading everything else off the solid state? I mean, it wouldn't be quite as fast, but you'd still save quite a bit of time.

Re:

[networkBoy]

No you would boot directly from it. GP doesn't understand BIOS very well. This could hook into the boot process much the same as any RAID controller does.
-nB

Re:

[zippthorne]

Which brings to mind an interesting point..

Why even have swap files? Shouldn't caching decisions be done a bit more intelligently at the application level? I have 10 times more RAM in my current PC than all of the memory (including the HDD) on my first PC. At some point, can't we drop swap?

Re:

[jamie]

Once you get above $500 desktop computers, it doesn't much matter. A properly tuned system will only use swap, if at all, to drop a few MB from RAM to disk because it's just never accessed. A server that swaps during use is just not set up properly.

Re:

[AK Marc]

Not in Windows. It has a swap file by default. If you disable swap, it still swaps. If you have swap enabled and have something running in the background and come back hours later, it's so slow it's painful, since everything gets swapped to disk except the one thing running. "Tuning" may be possible, but well outside the realm of the average user, and even completely disabling swap in all settings, you still have swapping happening.

Re:

[walt-sjc]

True, you have a lot more RAM now than you used to... BUT, you are also not running DOS anymore. Hell, MS Office alone take 256M just to load Word (I KID...) But seriously, modern apps are huge. Because memory is cheap, apps are not efficient. We also use our systems differently, working with massive files (images, movies, music) and tend to run lots of apps at the same time, including virtual machines. Yes, you can still run windows in 512M, but it seems that even 2G isn't enough at times.

So we still need

Re:Oblig.

[Eccles]

Oh yeah, how does a solid state drive handle fragmentation? I have heard that they don't fragment, but not from reliable sources, and I just don't see how that is possible unless there is some built in mechanism to close gaps on the fly or something.

Hard disks have a fragmentation issue because sequential accesses are much faster than random ones with a spinning disk. Each time the next sector to get isn't right after the previous one, the head must seek to the start of the next track. Solid state "disks" have true random access, where accessing blocks in random order costs no more than sequential accesses. So while solid state will fragment, it doesn't matter for performance or reliability.

Re:

[darkpixel2k]

So while solid state will fragment, it doesn't matter for performance or reliability.

Yes, but it *needs* to be defragged because I *hate* seeing red in my disk analysis...

Re:

[TheLink]

"Solid state "disks" have true random access, where accessing blocks in random order costs no more than sequential accesses"

AFAIK for flash, sequential access is still faster than random access, even for NOR flash.

It's quite amazing how slow some flash is (esp NAND flash). Some are 1ms for random access, and others are even 7ms.

For comparison a 15krpm drive has a random access time of about 5-6ms. So if you have RAID10, you might get similar or faster speeds, than a flash drive 10x the total price of a RAID

Re:

[Lisandro]

Funny...

*looks at his K6-III booting from a PCI-SATA card.*

That'd be a PCI SATA controller card? You can boot from them alright, but the article mentions that drivers are available for several platforms - if drivers are involved, it's most likely not using a regular ATA/SATA interfase.

Re:Oblig.

[norton_I]

You can tell if flash is bad, if worst comes to worst, by reading after writing. Or reading after erasing, and looking for stuck 1's.

'worn out' flash doesn't spontaneously change state. Bits just get stuck and don't erase correctly.

I don't know how flash drives actually handle this, but it isn't magic or impossible to fix.

Also, the lifetime of modern flash is long enough that it is hardly an issue any more, even for normal desktop use. Maybe you don't want to use it for swap *IF* you swap a lot, but given the cost is in the same ballpark as RAM, you could just buy more RAM.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

You can also tell if FLASH is verging toward failure on any particular block by timing the erase cycle. As the part ages out, the erase cycle takes longer. You can also use that information to enhance wear leveling.

Re:Oblig.

[Cantinflas]

I don't know where you got your info, but 'modern' flash has horrible life-expectancy in terms or write-cycles.

Explanation:

Most flash vendors have moved to MLC (Multi-Level Cell) flash. It's cheaper and denser, but the bit-error rate goes up because you have more bits per cell. The typical life expectancy for MLC is somewhere in the range of 10,000 writes using single-bit error correction. This is compared to 'older' SLC flash which has a write endurance of 100,000 to 300,000 writes.

Now, most vendors making media out of flash take varying degrees of a combination of two approaches (in addition to standard wear-leveling approaches). The first approach is to assume that the majority of the users will only ever store audio or video data so the occasional uncorrectable error won't have much impact as long as it doesn't corrupt the filesystem. The second approach is to use more advanced error correcting algorithms to compensate for the higher bit-error rate.

Using more advanced algorithms, it's possible to get more than 300,000 writes out of a MLC flash-block before the errors become uncorrectable.

P.S. I may be wrong, but I believe flash can have some really odd error conditions. For example, it's possible to disturb a bit in a block just by reading it. I believe it's also possible to disturb a bit in a different block on the same matrix when writing. That's why some form of error correction is always required with NAND flash.

Re:

[volsung]

Yes, and they are quite expensive. 32 GB will run you about $14k: HyperDrive 4 [hyperossystems.co.uk]

Re:Oblig.

[Lisandro]

our childish "uh oh" introduction, your completely un-cited "a lot of issues" comment, and your vague "I recall" interruption reveal the fact that you're spouting off some crap on a subject you have no direct, real-world experience with. Find another subject with which to stroke your ego kid, because you're looking like a pompous dumbass on this one.

The specs for a 256Mb NAND flash memory chip [alldatasheet.com] by Samsung (which is by far the biggest NAND flash manufacturer today) quotes 100k millon write/erase cycles, and this is for an IC commonly used in USB pendrives. The figure usually tends to get worse with increased memory sizes since the memory "element" (float gate) becomes smaller. For example, Modern 16Mb chips, which are the ones i have experience with, usualy quote 1 million W/E cycles endurance.

But, it felt good stroking my ego a bit more :) Thanks!

Uhh, Price?

[mosel-saar-ruwer]

Who, what, when, where, why?

Price would seem to be a pretty important detail...

Re:Uhh, Price?

[thegnu]

I think it's safe to assume you won't be buying one soon.

Re:Uhh, Price?

[morgan_greywolf]

FTFA:

So how much will these cards cost? Flynn told us that the company is aiming to beat $30 dollars a GB, something that should seem very cheap to large corporations, adding "You can drop ship or Fedex this card and be up and running in a few minutes... you can't do that with a storage area network."

So, let's say they get to $29 a GB, a reasonable price for NAND flash-based memory devices. 640*30==$19,200. Sorry, but that doesn't seem to beat an inexpensive SAN in price. I recently priced out a 12TB iSCSI SAN for a little bit more than that, and even 1-2 TB fibre SAN from IBM should be around the same price.

Re:

[BlueBlade]

Not to nitpick, but you're not even close to the price of flash memory with your estimate there. $29 per GB? Newegg lists several 16GB USB key drives [newegg.com] for about $130, or $8.12 per GB. And that's retail. It's safe to assume that the actual price per GB for a mass-produced drive would be much lower than that. Even at $8, that hypothetical drive would be about $5120.

Right now, flash RAM prices drop in half every 6 months or so, meaning it won't be that long until this drive isn't outrageously expensive anymor

Re:

[walt-sjc]

Um dude? He is quoting the FA. It's pretty clear that this drive will release at prices closer to $30/G. Maybe next year they can get down to $8...

Re:

[BlueBlade]

Hum yeah sorry, classic case of didn't RTFA. It's just that anyone claiming that flash costs $30 per GB is smoking some seriously good stuff (or is a govt employee paying $50k for a few hundred rolls of toilet paper or some such).

Re:

[Ceriel Nosforit]

Sorry, but that doesn't seem to beat an inexpensive SAN in price.

You're forgetting maintenance costs. Solid-state devices have a lot longer MTBF than mechanical devices, and I assume they need less power too. Both of those get rather costly.

Why the product rocks....

[tempest69]

This device is all about the IO/second.. a 12 TB SAN cant come close..

If your looking to run a blast/darwin query on 50k files to find the closest match to an unknown dna sequence Either you need to recode a bunch of software to use sql, or you snag a piece of hardware that gives database level performance. 80gigs at $2400.00 is a bloody bargain.

The device is also 10x faster in bandwidth than a normal drive which is comparable to a san, but not such a power hog.

So really the tradeoff rocks for small

Re:

[PineHall]

From the article they are "aiming to beat $30 a GB". Not cheap! Figuring $30/GB, a 640GB drive would cost $19,200. So it is way out of my price range.

Re:

[KingSkippus]

So how much will these cards cost? Flynn told us that the company is aiming to beat $30 dollars a GB

At $30/GB, that would make an 80GB drive around $2,400. Hopefully the price will eventually come down, as "He even hinted that the company is looking into some gaming applications, but didn't want to give any further details."

Re:

[CastrTroy]

I could buy a 10 GB drive for most of my OS and software, and just keep my media on a traditional hard drive. You don't need a super fast drive for your MP3s and Videos, but it would be nice to increase boot times as well as application start up times.

Re:

[hackstraw]

I could buy a 10 GB drive for most of my OS and software, and just keep my media on a traditional hard drive. You don't need a super fast drive for your MP3s and Videos, but it would be nice to increase boot times as well as application start up times.

As an cluster guy, I would like to have these things as cheap, reliable, and removable. Size does not matter too much here.

As a server guy, I would like to have the same, but also with larger capacities.

Imagine a life w/o ever having a RAID array throw a disk

Re:

[ArcherB]

Who, what, when, where, why?

Price would seem to be a pretty important detail...

$30 a GB.

Re:

[Black Copter Control]

If price is an important detail, then you should wait 5 years for this to hit the mass market.

Speaking as someone who remembers paying $2500 for a 1GB drive (and that was with a 30% educational discount...
If that kind of I/O speed is important enough for a business, I can see them not only paying the $2400 for an 80GB drive, but buying 5 of them to put in a 4 disk raid-5 configuration with hot-swap spare. (because FLASH drives have a nasty history of dying after too many writes when used in place of an

Re:

[harryk]

I'm guessing you didn't read the article. Fusion IO hopes to beat $30/GB. True, it did not give a specific price, but the reference is available.

What I'm more interested in is which PCIe bus it plans to use? Is this 1x, 8x, 16x ??

Re:Uhh, Price?

[walt-sjc]

Um, we were using large RAM disks (the kind that hooked up to SCSI, had a built in UPS and disk to dump RAM contents) many years ago (8 now?) to speed up databases. That was limited by the SCSI bus, but access time and latency were near zero (which was awesome.)
Of course, large back then meant 4G, and the average hard disk was 9G. This is evolutionary, not revolutionary.

Re:

[hedwards]

Exactly, organizations will make a decision as to how many of these they want based upon the cost, performance and their needs. Considering the other costs of a large set up, I wouldn't be surprised if these wound up in the DB servers. Especially ones which were primarily read only under normal use.

Of course, I don't personally know if PCIe is hot swappable, which could make a difference for some people, but with the bandwidth and simultaneous connections, it shouldn't take very long at all to get a new dis

Re:

[nuzak]

> Of course, I don't personally know if PCIe is hot swappable

It is. But so is PCI -- it's just a matter of whether the physical and electrical connections on your hardware allow it, and whether your OS is set up to handle it. I wouldn't recommend yanking out your video card while the PC is on.

The return of HSM?

[Wesley Felter]

With small but fast flash drives appearing on the market, it would be nice to have storage systems that can automatically migrate data between disk and flash to maximize performance.

And another question.

[AltGrendel]

What's the MTBF? [wikipedia.org]

Re:And another question.

[LiquidCoooled]

Hitachi are saying that they have solved the overwrite problem (at least mitigated it by a factor of 100)

They appear to want to use normal DRAM memory for the running of the drive but then write it permanently to the NAND flash at shutdown/memory full time.
I would assume this involves charging of a small battery and dumping the data later on.

http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2007/09/26/hitachi-reckons-solid-state [theinquirer.net]

Re:

[drxenos]

More likely it uses hold-up capacitors. We use NVSRAM that does this. It will permanently store the memory when it detects a power lose.

Re:

[fragmentate]

The only MTBF I've found is based solely on stress testing. Estimates vary wildly from 500,000 hours, up to 1 million hours.

I think that getting this to market will improve MTBF (and, of course, give us REAL numbers). It will also spur competition in two areas. First, other companies that provide storage solutions will take it seriously, which may drive prices way down. Second, the NAND flash drive companies will try to improve MTBF to be able to sell more flash. Of course, their prices may drop as

Re:

[CastrTroy]

500,000 hours is a long time. That's 57 years. I've had many traditional drives die. And none of them had anywhere close to 57 years. The oldest operational drive I have is 10 years old, but it probably only has 4-5 years maximum of time that it's been on. Are you really going to care about your hard drive 57 years after you buy it? And those are old smaller capacity drives. The newer higher capacity drives tend not to last as long. Most drives I wouldn't trust past 5 years of usage.

Re:

[norton_I]

MTBF is usually misunderstood. This is largely because it does not measure the mean time until your drive fails, despite the name. MTBF is usually quoted for a 5 year drive life. So, if the MTBF is 50 years, and you have 100 drives, you expect 2 failures/year, as long as you replace all the drives when their 5-year life is up, failed or not.

Hence, it is a metric only of direct importance to people estimating failure rates for RAID arrays and the like.

Ya, know...before WikiPedia...

[StressGuy]

We'd have said something like, "What's the Mean Time Between Failures?"

WTF?

Wow

[thatskinnyguy]

I could imagine using this as an OS drive. No sooner do you let your finger off the power button than the login screen appears.

Re:

[east coast]

What's the big deal about that? My Commodore 64 can do the same thing.

Re:

[thatskinnyguy]

Yeah? How does WoW play on your C64?

Re:Wow

[FiveLights]

You are standing in a field, facing East. A river runs East and West to the North of you and a path runs to the South and East.

Re:Wow

[HarvardAce]

You are likely to be eaten by a gnome.

Re:

[east coast]

You are standing in a field, facing East. A river runs East and West to the North of you and a path runs to the South and East.

Come on now, this is MMO! It should read:

You are standing in a field, facing East. A river runs East and West to the North of you and a path runs to the South and East.
Also here: John lvl 12 Cleric

Re:

[Actually, I do RTFA]

Come on now, this is WoW! It should read:

You are standing in IronForge, facing East. A chasm runs East and West to the North of you and a path runs to the South and East.
Also here: John lvl 12 Cleric
John1 lvl 13 Cleric
FarmerJohn00 lvl 70 Farmer
FarmerJohn01 lvl 70 Farmer
FarmerJohn02 lvl 70 Farmer
FarmerJohn03 lvl 70 Farmer
FarmerJohn04 lvl 70 Farmer
FarmerJohn05 lvl 70 Farmer
FarmerJohn06 lvl 70 Farmer
FarmerJohn07 lvl 70 Farmer
FarmerJohn08 lvl 70 Farmer
FarmerJohn09 lvl 70 Farmer
FarmerJohn10 lvl 70 Farmer
FarmerJo

Re:Wow

[east coast]

Yeah? How does WoW play on your C64?

It plays very nice.

[turns to the other Commodore users] I told him it plays very nice [chuckling from users]

Now! Go away or I shall taunt you a second time.

Startup bloat

[IdahoEv]

Don't worry. I'm sure they'll find a way to bloat the startup to make it slow again.

As soon as resources are available, developers find a way to use them to just within the patience threshhold of the user.

Re:Wow

[zlogic]

My PDA boots in about 30 seconds, and it doesn't have a harddrive. Booting isn't just loading stuff from a drive, it's hundreds of tests like
- hardware changes
- hardware initialization (e.g. loading firmware)
- searching for drivers
- applications acquiring and releasing resources and checking for stuff like library versions, user names etc.
That's why BIOS initialization often takes time, and yet it works even if the system has no drives.

The only way this would work is hibernating, but hardware would still need to be initialized.

Re:

[langelgjm]

[joke]Sadly, it only scores a 4.1 on the Windows Experience Index.[/joke]

Can you boot from them?

[IceCreamGuy]

I can't find any mention in the article of whether you'll be able to boot from them with current BIOSs. Surely any system they'll be in will have a decent amount of RAM for the OS, but it would be pretty cool solely for the fast boot times.

Re:

[king-manic]

I can't find any mention in the article of whether you'll be able to boot from them with current BIOSs. Surely any system they'll be in will have a decent amount of RAM for the OS, but it would be pretty cool solely for the fast boot times.

Hey,
We all use Linux right.. we never have to reboot /sarcasm.

Re:

[IceCreamGuy]

all it cares it the communication protocol (IDE, scsi, sata etc)

That's exactly what I'm saying and why I asked. Judging from the article, it seems apparent that they're not IDE, SCSI, USB, SATA, or any of the current standard interfaces; they are attached through the PCIe bus. I remember when USB storage devices first came out that it took a little while for BIOS manufacturers to support booting from them, yet the OSs had no trouble using them. Support for storage devices these days seems to start at the software level, and trickle back down to the hardware level for t

Number of write cycles?

[Reality Master 201]

Will it last as long as a standard hard drive?

Re:

[Joce640k]

Longer...MUCH longer.

Expect to pay big

[PhrostyMcByte]

So how much will these cards cost? Flynn told us that the company is aiming to beat $30 dollars a GB

So the initial 80GB model will hopefully cost less than $2400. I suspect these will be limited to servers demanding immense I/O with a large amount of data.

Re:

[Ant P.]

Sounds like it'd be more cost effective to just have a ton of RAM and a good UPS.

Re:

[petermgreen]

ram, especailly server ram is more that $30/gigabyte.

also even ignoring the issue of power using system ram for long term storage is a bad idea because it is so vulnerable to crashes and you can't have very much of it (32 gigabytes is the limit of most server boards you see and that is only achievable by using very expensive 4 gigabyte sticks). Ramdrive cards with built in battery backup do exist but that drives up the price even more as you have to buy the adaptor card as well as the sticks of ram.

Re:

[Teun]

It sounds like a gamers dream, they are the driving force behind a lot of speed improvements and will pay about anything to have the latest HW.
On the other hand, do (present) games really benefit from this massive speed bump?

Re:

[Nicolay77]

Half-life 2 level load times come to my mind.

Re:

[TemporalBeing]

I suspect these will be limited to servers demanding immense I/O with a large amount of data.

I could see some uses for them, especially in environments where things will get bounced around quite a bit. For example, airplanes, military vehicles, off-road vehicles, etc. could all benefit.

Hmmm....I wonder how good it would be for submersibles, perhaps they could push new depths since they wouldn't have worry about the air pressure within the hard drive enclosures.

on behalf of all of slashdot, i would like to say

[circletimessquare]

(drool!)

$30 per gb, ouch

[dnamaners]

Its fast, but not as fast as I would have hopped with parallel access. They better get the speed up or the cost down to hit it big. Right now I'd take either direction, as they both have decent applications. Good progress though, time will tell.

PCIe

[Gadgetfreak]

Seems like finally a newer reason to upgrade my hardware. I've never bothered with Vista, and I'm not big into gaming, so my P4/2.2GHz rig has been more than adequate for (surprisingly) over 5 years. Haven't needed a high end graphics card for a while, and only upgraded that for DVI output 3 yrs ago. When I built the thing in '02, I figured I'd get 3 yrs tops before it became a file server.

But it doesn't have a PCIe slot. Something like this would finally give me a reason to build an all new PC. Anyone e

RAID!!

[mulvane]

Imagine a RAID6 of these. With a parallel interface between then for parity calculations..

Re:

[kalirion]

Would it be worth a second mortgage?

Very important spec omitted

[Whuffo]

This could be a revolutionary product - or something that dies a quick death. The difference is "how much does it cost?"

Even a guess would be helpful. As a "proof of concept" it's pretty well useless - putting memory on a interface card isn't something that was invented recently. Heck, Microsoft was selling memory boards for the PC-XT way back when.

It was a good idea back then and it's still a good idea now - but what's kept it from becoming a widespread technology has always been the price. If they haven

$30 bucks a gig

[niola]

According to the article, they are looking at pricing to be 30 dollars a gig. That is pretty pricey.

That means their low-end 80GB drive will be around $2400+ or so US dollars depending on tax, shipping, retail prices etc.

Re:

[PoconoPCDoctor]

Mod me down for sour grapes - I am fairly certain my story, which is still listed as "pending" will be rejected!

007-09-28 15:05:44 Would you buy a $2,400.00 80 gig Flash Hard Drive? (Hardware,Data Storage) (pending)

Oh the pain of rejection!

B-)

At least I got to shake the hand of the next POTUS! [eburgobama08.org]

Peace out!

Re:

[jandrese]

Don't worry the weekend is coming up, prime time for dups!

Re:

[LingNoi]

They priced it at $30 per gig but said the price may change.

Southbridge

[eepok]

Wow... adding 800gb/s to the workload of a southbridge would be quite a jump in required power, no? If they want such a possibility, would we have to accept another mboard form factor? Make room for yet another heatsink. O.o

Misleading benchmark

[Chris_Jefferson]

"'[Fusion io's CTO David Flynn] set the benchmark for the worst case scenario.."

By which he means, set up a completely unrealistic benchmark which shows his flash drive in the best possible light, and a traditional drive in the worst possible light.

I still want one of these, but that benchmark is nothing to be proud of.

Re:

[Joce640k]

400Mb/sec transfer rate with instant seek is "nothing to be proud of"?

I know people who would commit felonies to have one of those for their page file.

Re:

[stonecypher]

"[Fusion io's CTO David Flynn] set the benchmark for the worst case scenario.."

By which he means, set up a completely unrealistic benchmark which shows his flash drive in the best possible light, and a traditional drive in the worst possible light.

No, the scenario he set up is a classic worst case scenario for drives, one which is well known to large disk usage corporations: near-random access by hundreds-or-thousands of concurrent users. This is what SANs are built to address, this is what parallel RAID

We need something bigger than 32 GB in laptops

[wile_e_wonka]

These things sound great--I'm just afraid of Dell and other computer companies deciding that consumers don't want flash hard drives because we aren't buying the ones they offer. Then they attempt no development in this regard. The thing is, though, people are just not willing (for the most part) to pay extra to get a small capacity hard drive. They need to offer these things with similar capacies to their conventional hard drives--64GB just isn't that unreasonable for these things.

Then again, perhaps the

Wow, $19,200 for 640gb

[Acecoolco]

Damn expensive, $19,200 for 640GB......... I want it but cant afford it.. Josh

Re:

[glop]

There is quite are premium to pay here. Flash is at 8$/GB right now (16-17$ for 2GB etc.).
So the Flash for a 640GB SSD could be obtained for about 5 thousand dollars.
But integrating all that Flash is not that easy.

You could buy a bunch of USB flash drives and use software RAID to make a big drive. If you have plenty of USB ports on your PC, you might connect 6 flash drives of 8GB which would offer 48GB at 400$ or so.

Another idea I had was to buy CF flash and CF-IDE adapters and connect them to an Areca RAID

Just as expensive as RAM

[mathx]

considering that large quad-socket boards have space for 8 Dimms per CPU we're looking at 128GB+ per machine and soon to increase. 640Gb isnt that much bigger. Since it's on the memory bus and not a PCI-* bus, its going to be faster than these drives, and it's more expensive right now. By the time they're at $30/GB ram will be alot less than that. The automatic persistence (without scheduling to back the memory to disk, like RAM would need) is the only advantage, so you're putting a high price on that abili

Re:

[Joe The Dragon]

And FB-DIMMS are a $100 a gig

HardCard!

[jeffy210]

It's the return of the HardCard!!!! I remember having one of these with my old PC/XT. It was a 20 MB HardCard that fit into an ISA slot. The first ever hard drive i had running Windows 3.0 with DOS 3.3 on it.

How much???

[drxenos]

640GB? Why don't they translate that into something more usable, like Porn/Sec.

Talking to the company at demo

[shdowhawk]

Having talked to people at demo, what it pretty much came down to is this... is this a product we should be excited about? Definitely ... is it something that will do well right away? Not at all. The price has to drop before this becomes a really valid and useful tool for the GENERAL PUBLIC / Company. But there are a lot of companies out there willing to pay too much money to get these. Hopefully these big companies buy these up and fund this project as QUICKLY as possible. 7 of these side by side at 320/640 gigs a piece is a SCARY/powerful server.

That being said, a few of the guys there said that they pretty much expect these (at the beginning) to do the best sales for companies that are looking to get really really fast database servers going. NOT for scsi san replacements (it's silly to spend $100,000 for something you could get for 10,000 hard drive space wise). Eventually as the price drops... i know of a handful of people who would EASILY pay 1000$ to get one of these on a gaming rig even if it was only 100 gigs. But that right there is already 1/3rd of the price of what it currently is. (assuming it's around 30$ a gig).

Another thing to keep in mind that came up in the conversations... since these are tiny, think about the cost per server rack... and think of the cost per electricity to run. If you take those into consideration, these are actually less expensive that most people would think! A massive rack of hard drives could cost a lot of money in a co-location ... and a lot of electricity to run it all... But then again, we're talking about savings on servers, not general in home use.

When this gets to about 1/3rd of it's current price, that's when you will see these things become TRUELY mainstream both to the average company and home users (be it rich ones who need the latest and greatest).

Fusioni-io [fusionio.com] -- Link to their site.

Re:

[Mr. Underbridge]

I hope this means that laptops and large capacate media players with extremely long battery life are not too far away.

At least as far as laptops are concerned, I thought a limited number of write cycles was a problem for solid-state drives.

Re:Still Expensive

[Jeff DeMaagd]

I hope this means that laptops and large capacate media players with extremely long battery life are not too far away.

I think people expect too much from SSDs. The hard drive is far from the dominant power consumption component in a notebook. The CPU, chipset, GPU and display panel each consume more power than a notebook hard drive does. If you follow a modified version of Amdahl's law (not a law, but whatever), you want to fix the biggest problem first, and that is either the display or CPU. An LED backlit display can save some power, and running a lower power rating CPU saves power too. Compared to that, the savings of swapping HDD for SSD is negligible. On a standard notebook, I think you might add 15 minutes to battery life, which is still far from "extremely long battery life".

In media players, doubling in capacity every year is a reasonable expectation.

Re:

[duerra]

Even at a few dollars per GB, that is too expensive to hope that this technology could re-introduce cartridge-based gaming as opposed to disc-based gaming on consoles. I can't wait for the return of 3 second load times in gaming - having to wait 30 seconds for a level to load (especially in games where the action you are performing, and may want to repeat, is as long as the load time).

Re:

[Eccles]

Is there any sign they have a significant patent on this tech, or are they just counting on being first to market? If there are no patents, we could expect the price to go down fast, just price flash drives.

Re:

[adisakp]

$30/Gb is $2400 for the 80 Gb drive. That's a lot of money. Then again, I paid a similar amount of money for 64MB of RAM back around 1993 which is pretty hard to believe. The price will eventually come down but for right now, it's not terribly practical until they can get it to under $500 for your 80Gb super-fast drive. Then again, think how fast you could boot/sleep/swap at 600-800MB/s with almost no penalty for seeks.

Re:

[Teun]

He who drops nearly $20,000 for such a unit will have investigated the drawbacks.
And decided they are outweighed by the advantages, no worries professor!

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

should its battery fall out

The fuck?

by egg troll (515396)

Oh, carry on.

Re:

[Teun]

You forget the power consumption and space factors.

Re:

[HarvardAce]

I'm sure the local Electric Company wouldn't be thrilled, unless they're fighting with brown outs/black outs, but maybe you could justify the cost with savings in your electric bill.

I think you'll find that a lot of electric companies would much rather you lower your energy usage. After a certain amount of demand, the electric companies actually will start losing money -- either because of infrastructure upgrades or needing to exceed their agreements with other providers. A great example of this is in NYC, where ConEd is actually giving $50-100 if people replace their old air conditioners with energy-star approved units.

Re:write limit?

[Lord Ender]

That's a standard feature these days. I want to know how many times I can overwrite the entire disk with /dev/random. If I did a "dd if=/dev/random of=/ioMemory size=[size of ioDrive]" how many times could I execute that command before the thing goes tits up?

Re:write limit?

[TinyManCan]

Somewhere between 100k and 1 million times.

Cosidering that this drive is 640GB, that means you would need to write somehwere in the region of 61 PETABYTES of information.

You'd have to write to the drive at a perfect 800 MB/s for 941 days to hit that mark.

It could last as long as 30 years, at full write speed of 800 MB/s if it can handle 1M writes per cell.

At the end of the day, semiconductors this large and high quality are certainly better than tiny bits of rust on rapidly spinning platters.

Re:

[TinyManCan]

Certainly they are using wear leveling. They are probably (information is thin) also over allocating storage, such that 10-15% can fail before impacting the advertised free space on the device. In reality you will see your full 640GB of storage, which you could write 61PB of data to the very first sector on the disk over and over and never experience any issues. Before the last 'extra' block is used up, you'll get an alert and replace the device.