512GB Solid State Disks on the Way 186
Viper95 writes "Samsung has announced that it has developed the world's first 64Gb(8GB) NAND flash memory chip using a 30nm production process, which opens the door for companies to produce memory cards with upto 128GB capacity"
Cost? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Cost? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Yes, you could certainly say that there are some bad vibs in Iraq.
Re:Cost? (Score:4, Funny)
Not only that, these drives are easy to lose and misplace. Incompetently losing massive amounts of data has never been so easy!
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having a super-high-def view of Baghdad would be very useful I would think
Re:Cost? (Score:5, Insightful)
I guess that the next generation of iPods will completely remove the hard drive capable devices from their line-up.
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I know iPods will all be flash, but we don't really know if the HDD players will be gone next year. Even if flash has a price of $5/GB next year, the 160GB model would be $800 in flash chips alone. The cost of the memory chips w
Nano Nano (Score:5, Interesting)
Researchers Develop Technology to Make Terabyte Thumb Drives Possible [gizmodo.com]
Makes a mere 512GB flash chip look a bit sad, doesn't it?
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Flash hard drives will not be cheap for many many years to come.
Four times the memory in three days (Score:5, Funny)
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oh yeah and I agree with the other posts. Call me when it's on its way to my budget, not just store shelves lol.
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512GB? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:512GB? (Score:5, Funny)
Have you considered getting a job as a futurist? At this point I can guarantee that your track record will be better than many of the ones actually out there.
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Now it's just engineering (Score:2)
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There are times...... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:There are times...... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:There are times...... (Score:5, Interesting)
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In case any of our dear readers don't recognise the quote, I believe the GP is ripping off Richard Dawkins whose gene-centred theory of evolution can be paraphrased as "Human beings are just genes' way of making more genes". This is top grade geek humour.
I look forward to reading the full paper in the next edition of Nature (or at least looking at the pictures).
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I feel so used.
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Or is that not the porn you're thinking of?
Re:There are times...... (Score:5, Funny)
Hey, sailor...
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Porn and War are the two major competing drivers of all progress. It kinda brings new light to the phrase "Make Love not War."
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Not simultaneously I hope...talk about peformance anxiety.
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But that's because the definition of "porn" most people use is "anything that offends me or has naked people in it or has sex implied in it."
Is it any wonder that porn has done so much?
I bet the HD makers are going to be pissed! (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:I bet the HD makers are going to be pissed! (Score:5, Insightful)
On that subject, whenever the 2^n or 10^n units thing gets brought up, some smart arse always says "it's so illogical to have binary based sizes like that, it's so confusing and the media doesn't work in binary anyway."
This is just history re-writing bullshit that someone spouts to get mod points and continue another meme.
There was a time when hard disks were all based on megabytes, and megabytes were always 2^20 = 1048576 bytes. NOBODY EVER GOT CONFUSED. History re-writers say otherwise, obviously. Where did it all change? Well, for hard disk manufacturers, it was a blatantly cheap trick to save 5-10% costs, and whenever anyone complained they could just to that viral history re-write meme about how binary based units were always confusing. Hell, they even convinced SI. SI have absolutely no authority or experience with determining computer units, and the "solution" they came up with is even more confusing and ugly. How do you tell if MeB or MiB is 2^20 or 10^6? Muppets.
Then came flash cards. Here's a thing a lot of people don't know: flash actually DOES come in binary sizes. That's how it's manufactured. Another thing a lot of people don't know: flash actually gets WORSE for write endurance as its density goes up. It's actually got much worse over time. To begin with, low density flash cards did not suffer much from write endurance problems - to the extent that when you got an 8MB flash card it was basically just writing straight through.
Densities went up, and you started to need a lot of spares, more error correction, and wear leveling. The result was that after formatting, you ended up with about 5-10% of your flash used up. Quite handily close to the decimal-based size. So manufacturers (and I believe SanDisk were the first to do this) silently started selling 64MB cards as 64,000,000 bytes of data instead of 67,108,864. No asterisks, no notes on the bottom of the packaging - nothing. It's fair enough, but done in a fucking deceptive manner.
I remember getting bug reports about our MP3 players (years back now) misreporting SanDisk flash cards as 61MB instead of 64MB. In the end (sigh) we put in a hack to spot deceptive cards and switch units to powers of 10.
So before anyone else spouts how the units are confusing - they weren't until manufacturers tried their damned hardest to make sure they were.
Next, people will complain about how SDRAM, caches and even registers are in silly powers of 2...
Re:I bet the HD makers are going to be pissed! (Score:5, Interesting)
Bandwidth is always measured in 1 MB/s = 10^6 bytes/s, or 1 Mb/s = 10^6 bits/s. Should 1 MB take 1.04 seconds to transfer of 1 MB/s data link? This includes all forms of Ethernet, SCSI, ATA, PCI, and any other protocol I have looked up. If 1 MB/s does not equal 1 MB per 1 s, someone should be shot, that is just not OK.
mega = 10^6 in all other fields. Including other computer terms -- 1 MHz, 1 MFLOP, 1 megapixel, etc.
computer RAM is the only thing that has consistently been labeled using binary approximations to the SI units. And as long as I can remember (computing magazines in the 80s) people have acknowledged that 1 MB = 2^20 is an *approximation* and that mega=10^6.
Mega=10^6 is right. mega=2^20 is wrong. End of story. It happens that it is technically convenient to manufacture and use RAM in powers of 2. No such constraint applies for hard drives, so there is no reason to use the base-2 prefixes. Stupid OSs should be changed to use the SI prefixes when reporting file sizes. RAM should be labeled using the "base-2" prefixes, but they are admittedly somewhat annoying due to lack of familiarity, and since nobody uses base-10 ram, it isn't a big deal.
Re:I bet the HD makers are going to be pissed! (Score:5, Interesting)
IO has always been a mixture and compromise. Punched cards could hold 12 * 72 bits (7094 row binary) or 12 * 80 bits (column binary, but don't try to read it with the main card reader). Try to fit THAT into your "powers of 10" scenario!
For the current set of IO devices, capacity measurement was defined by marketing. I saw arguments about it in the trade journals when it was being fought out over hard disks. AFAIK, companies decided independently the choice that was, to them, most advantageous. It was powers of 10. This was not appreciated by any single customer that I was aware of. Some despised it, some didn't care, nobody was in favor. (Yeah, it was a small sample, but it's one that I was aware of. Most didn't care, and many of those weren't interested in understanding.)
But block allocations of RAM are done in powers of two, and these are frequently mapped directly to IO devices. So having a mis-match creates problems. Disk files were (possibly) created as an answer to this problem. (7094 drum storage didn't have files. Things were addressed by drum address. If a piece went bad, you had to patch your program to avoid it. UGH! Tape was for persistent data, drum storage was transient...just slightly more persistent than RAM.) Drum addresses were tricky. I never did it myself, but some people improved performance by timing the instructions so that they would have the drum head right before the data they wanted to read or write to limit lagging. (Naturally this was all done in assembler, so you could count out exactly how many miliseconds of execution time you were committing, and if you know the drum rotation speed, and the latency...
So things tended to be stored in powers of two positions on the drum, unless a piece went bad.
Disks, when they first appeared, were slower than drums, but more capacious. (They were still too expensive and unreliable to use for persistent storage.) But the habit of mapping things out in powers of two transferred from drums storage to disk storage. When files were introduced (not sure about when that was) the habit transferred. This wasn't all blind habit, lots of the I/O techniques that had been developed were dependent upon powers of two. So programmers though of capacity in powers of two. This didn't make any sense to accountants, managers, etc. When computer equipment started being sold by the Megabyte it made sense to the manufacturers to claim powers of 10 Megabytes for stroage, as they could claim larger sizes. (This wasn't as significant for Kilobytes, as 1024 is pretty close to 1000.) It not only made sense to the manufacturers, it also made sense to the accountants who were approving the orders. And when the managers started specifying the equipment...well, everything switched over into being measured by powers of 10.
No conspiracy. Just system dynamics. And programmers still think of storage in powers of 2, because that's what they work in. (This is less true when you work in higher level langauges, but if you don't take advantage of the powers of two that the algorithms are friendly with, it will cost you in performance, even if you don't realize it.)
unprofessional (Score:4, Insightful)
Disk capacity is reported to my mother in powers of 2. This simply does not make sense.
Technical details should not trump users. This makes us look like geeks with a binary fetish instead of professionals.
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That said, if she's not a computer professional, the answer to "Is it big enough?" is almost certain to be "Yes", unless she's using Vista, or some other recently-released giganticaly-humongous OS. (I'm counting animators, architects, etc. as computer professionals. They have legitimate reasons to wonder whether the disk is big enough, But such people proba
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Re:I bet the HD makers are going to be pissed! (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, the HDD manufacturers did it because it was a cheap 5-10% savings, but the excuses were plenty and not all bad. It was confusing every time computer science bumped into one of the other sciences and telecommunications in particular, which inevitably used the SI prefixes. However, instead of actually fixing a problem it became only an even greater mess, invalidating pretty much every rule of thumb because the OS would invariably report something else. That's pretty much proof they didn't want to fix anything, just grab some extra profit.
After that, it was a big mess and with next to no interest in solving it. That's when the people at IEC, not SI, and certainly not pushed by HDD manufacturers, finally said that these units are FUBAR, and the only way to make a long-term solution is to abandon the SI-prefixes and make new and ugly ones, particularly the names. At that point, we're talking 50 years of computer science use against 200 years of other sciences, and with retards messing up the boundary. I think they're ugly as hell, but they're also the only way to go forward from here.
No.. where did you learn this? It's wrong. (Score:2)
Then came flash cards. Here's a thing a lot of people don't know: flash actually DOES come in binary sizes. That's how it's manufactured.
Uh, no. You can make flash in any size you like. It's just a number of NAND or NOR cells, and there's no reason at all that they have to be in power-of-two sizes. Most of the size limits (SD = 2GB, SDHC = 32GB) are actually power-of-two counts of 512-byte sectors, but the media can be any size up to that.. any number of sectors.
The basic pages and blocks of flash are themselves not powers of two! Most 512-byte page NAND devices have some number (~16) bytes of extra area in each page for bad block mana
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This is all very well but you are totally wrong. Go download a datasheet of a popular FLASH part. Guess what? The capacity is an exact power of 2.
I'm not just making this up. NAND is naturally base-2 capacity sized. Yes, there is sparing, but pages are normally 2048 byte (or larger these days) with a few extra bytes per 512 for ECC. The non-ECC areas are still power-of-2 based, and the chip area itself is square and ends up being another power-of-2 pages. End result, a power-of-2. I've been working on this
Consumers expect base 10. (Score:2)
People don't fucking care about the manufacturing process or memory adressing details. Non-techies always count in powers of ten, and I and you will do nothing but making ourselves look like retards if we try to argue that 512 + 512 = 1k.
Does power stations redefine a kilowatt to 978W? Does butchers sell kilos of meat by the 1012th gram? Nope. Would I allow them to redefine these terms based their maufacturing process? Nope.
This is probably harder to
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In a great example of NIMBY hypocrisy in action, geeks who praise the metric system for everyone else won't accept metric units of storage capacity. Tell me: How is standardizing 'Kilobytes' (1024 groups of 8 bits) any different than standardizing Miles (5280 group
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Now, doesn't it strike you as fundamentally stupid that it differs? Doing stupid things just because they are tradition is really one of humanities more unfortunate flaws.
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Strangely enough, once everyon
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When people drive a kilometer, they drive 1000 meters, not 1024.
Just because you've been living with inches, miles and pounds all your life doesn't mean the rest of the planet doesn't use base 10.
A kilo means 1000. Just because programmers stole the term kilo and redefined it to "1024" doesn't mean they were right.
Hey, let's start using "miles" to mean "431 inches". That would make as much sense as "kilobyte = 1024 bytes".
P.
You're fucking kidding me... (Score:3, Funny)
Ugh. And I though that they had seen the light and decided to go in base 10 and count the actual bits.
What about IOPS? (Score:3, Interesting)
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Does anybody know how well flash SSDs perform in RAID arrays? 15kRPM SAS drives are horrendously expensive so if I could plug a couple small flash drives into my RAID card (RAID 0) I'd be a happy camper. Can't find benchmarks anywhere and flash drives have horrible write speeds which means they have terrible OLTP performance.
Individual flash chips have terrible write performance, mostly due to the slow block erase time. However, you always use multiple chips in high capacity storage devices (anything larger than an MP3 player), and you can start doing fancy tricks with interleaving, or just plain have way more buffer memory to hide the erase time. If you really want to crank out even higher performance, then you stick multiple NAND interfaces of the controller chip and drive it all in parallel.
If you stack about 4-8 chips in
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They are truly random access devices, so you can use throughput/blocksize to get IO/s. Of course write IO/s and read IO/s are very different.
I don't see the point about OLTP. Normally you don't write a whole lot of data and since the access time is virtually zero, for random writes they might still be superior to disk drives. Together with write caching that should make them very suitable for this kind of application - as opposed to streaming
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I hope this is for a test/dev or a personal learning server; if 15Krpm SAS drives are 'horrendously expensive' for a prod
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iPhone (Score:3, Funny)
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They're going right to a terabyte... (Score:2)
Its never enough for less..... (Score:4, Informative)
anyways, if we had 1000 terabyte solid drives for $10 then you'd hear wining for the yet to be released Googleplex drive for $5...
Like damn, anyone using up their new 100 gig drives faster than the next size is out for less money?
To back up very large drives today, it near cheaper in time/labor and costs to just use hot swap drives, where the back up is the removed drive, plugged in and run for 15 minutes a few times a year, if even that. Or a rotation system as was done with tape.
What's up with MRAM? (Score:2)
So solid state disks are all about NAND flash memory, right? I thought that SSDs would be all about MRAM, and that MRAM SSDs would be viable by the late 2000's. What's up with that?
Longevity (Score:2)
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I believe the problem is only with writes, not reads. Which, with a windows machine means that as long as there is a hardware switch to disable writes, it is more secure as well as faster to boot off a flash drive.
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It is actually not even that bad. The problem is clearing bits, not setting them, so the system can spare a small marker for every so many chunks of data and mark it as "bad" when it is unable to erase it again. Thus you don't get sudden failures of the entire drive, rather you will get a reduced
I already boot from a 4GB memory card. (Score:5, Interesting)
I already boot/run my main Internet-facing server (Ubuntu) from a 4GB memory SSD card to minimise power consumption, and I have more than 50% space free, ie it wasn't that hard to do.
http://www.earth.org.uk/low-power-laptop.html [earth.org.uk]
I'm not being that clever about it: using efs3 rather than any wear-leveling SSD-friendly fs, and simply minimising spurious write activity, eg by turning down verbosity on logs. And laptop-mode helps a lot of course.
Now that machine does also have a 160GB HDD for infrequently-accessed bulk data (so the HDD is spun down most of the time and a power-conserving sleep mode), and it would be good to get that data onto SSD too. But a blend, as in many memory/storage systems, gives a good chunk of maximum performance and power savings for reasonable cost.
Rgds
Damon
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Then you would be able to swap out your high-access part of the system without touching your OS and other setup.
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Reducing logging, etc, hasn't taken much effort at all anyway.
Rgds
Damon
PS. Plus more USB devices is more power draw, and this project is minimising power draw.
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And there are Linux filesystems that are designed to be wear-levelling, but I wanted one that I could simply dd from the HDD master if the memory card failed. After months of use I see no trouble at all so far. I'm sure that laptop-mode makes any enormous difference by consolidating writes.
Rgds
Damon
Time to buy stock (Score:2)
Forget Flash (Score:2, Informative)
A thumb drive using [programmable metallization cell memory technology] could store a terabyte of information
http://www.wired.com/gadgets/miscellaneous/news/2007/10/ion_memory [wired.com]
I Fell Off My Chair over @ Dynamism (Score:2)
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There, I fixed if for you.
Re:number of writes still limited? (Score:5, Informative)
Throw in the fact that the controllers for these chips spread writes around and you can be certain that the endurance is not a problem.
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8GiB (64gbit) capacity, 1GiB/s write speed, 8 seconds to write every bit on the chip.
31,536,000 / 8 = 3,942,000
So, you would completely rewrite the chip almost 4 million times per year. Scale it back to 100MB/s writing constantly and you'd generate almost 400 thousand writes per year.
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Your example usage and my example usage are the two corner cases, the endurance problem and it's effect depends on what the drive is used for. Still, I just wanted to illustrate that your scenario is an optimistic one.
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This is what I ment by a corner case. I was actually quite generous since I didn't presuppose utilities that check whether a file has changed every second. The bottom line is, I can see the drive failing under relatively uncommon but normal operating c
Real World numbers: Sold State Disk in a TiVo (Score:2)
4724 Kib/s * 31,556,952 seconds/year = 149,275,041,248 Kib/year.
Assuming a 128 GB flash drive is actually 128 GiB (as you would assume for a storage medium that is always sold in capacities that are powers of 2 before the units)
128 GiB == 134,217,728 KiB == 1,073,741,824 Kib
and assuming perfect distribution of the rewrites and no recordin
Re:number of writes still limited? (Score:5, Insightful)
Debunking SSD life cycle issues (Score:5, Informative)
I think you will find that even in very heavy use applications (e.g. working with HD video or using the SSD for virtual memory) that the lifespan of these drives be longer than a decade (and longer than mechanical HDs). Moreover, they will fail gracefully as blocks become tags as worn.
Re:number of writes still limited? (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:another reason to hate Vista... (Score:5, Informative)
Today's operating systems (OSX, Vista, etc) are not big because the software is bloated with meaninglessness, but because there is not a living soul out there who is considering XP, Vista or OSX but cannot get it because their hard drives are too small. Is it not obvious that developers want to make full use of the current generation of hardware?
I'm sure Microsoft could strip down Vista to something the size of 300 MB or so if only they wanted to remove drivers, icons and other graphics, sounds, media players, web browsers, etc. On the other hand, that would kind of kill the whole purpose of the operating system.
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The only reason you're bitching is because you really want your entire computer to run perfectly fine on a 32 GB flash drive. Let's face it, 32 GB is ridiculously small for a hard drive even if you're running a stripped down dist of Linux. Regardless of how many GB Vista requires, y
Re:another reason to hate Vista... (Score:5, Funny)
Well, umm. Vista takes up more processor time, runs the computer hotter.
Computer running hotter means more power used.
Power generation contributes to global warming.
Global warming contributes to increased forest fires.
Therefore, it follows:
Vista is responsible for the fires in California.
What could possibly be more logical?
Please report to the Re Education camp immediately (Score:2)
We find you in violation of Slashdot's EULA. Specifically you have.
[x] Written something reasonable and / or based in factual knowledge.
[x] Written something supportive of Microsoft
[x] Written something supportive of Vista
[x] Dissed a Lunix distro
[ ] Written something bad about Apple.
Wow, 4 out of five. You need to repent your ways and fast.
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Slightly optimistic numbers, there. The USB connectors, packaging and controllers are nowhere near $15 (more like $1-$2). Even so, the $8:GB ratio only holds for small numbers. The biggest problem with flash at the moment is scaling.
Each flash chip needs board space, soldering, and bus routing. So, each chip has 20 or so (depending on bus width) bus lines connecting it. That's just for 8GB. Now for a big drive, we'll need 16 of those. That's 16 chips stuck down on the board, making it a fair large board wi
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The 2.5 inch magnetic drives are much more effective on a $/GB basis if you look at the larger 120/160/200 GB drives. And I'm not sure how you came up with $6.50:GB...
80GB for $60 = $0.75/GB
120GB for $70 = $0.58/GB
160GB for $90 = $0.56/GB
200GB for $170 = $0.85/GB
For current solid state drives:
8GB for $155 = $19.37/GB
16GB for $180 = $11.25/GB
32GB f
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Scratch all that: how far Flash has to go until parity is actually about 10.4x.
But those microdrives are looking like roadkill.