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Data Storage Upgrades Hardware

Toshiba To Launch First 512GB Solid State Drive 256

designperfection9 writes "Toshiba said Thursday that it will show off a new line up of NAND-flash-based solid state drives with the industry's first 2.5-inch 512GB SSD. The drive is based on a 43 nanometer Multi-Level Cell NAND and claims to offer a high level of performance and endurance for use in notebooks as well as gaming and home entertainment systems."
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Toshiba To Launch First 512GB Solid State Drive

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  • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 18, 2008 @03:21PM (#26164437)

    Just $2,001,099!

  • Random read/write? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Timothy Brownawell ( 627747 ) <tbrownaw@prjek.net> on Thursday December 18, 2008 @03:24PM (#26164487) Homepage Journal
    I only see numbers for sequential access (240MB/s read, 200MB/s write). I don't suppose anyone knows how it does for random read/write speed?
    • Dunno about their drives but my EEE 901 isn't that bad at all I've got NetBeans and Tomcat running on it.

      I've uninstalled a lot of stuff and installed other bits. I'm sure my data is mixed around but appears to perform just as well as when it was new.
    • Random reads and sequential reads are the same for flash drives.

      A few flash drives cache random writes and batch write them. So, your random write speed varies with time. Plus, totally random random writes probably don't make much sense as an indicator of performance.

  • MythTV (Score:4, Interesting)

    by bogaboga ( 793279 ) on Thursday December 18, 2008 @03:27PM (#26164533)

    It's my intention to grab one of those Toshiba systems once they start shipping. I hope that a Solid State Drive will be able to handle the constant read/write operations associated with MythTV.

    Some folks here at Slashdot, have suggested that SSDs are not a good choice for applications like MythTV. This time, I will prove for myself.

    • Re:MythTV (Score:4, Insightful)

      by qoncept ( 599709 ) on Thursday December 18, 2008 @03:31PM (#26164597) Homepage
      I don't understand why you would do that. The only upside that I can see to a spinning disc would be noise, and if you're watching TV, how could you hear it? I'd spend a whole lot less money and get a whole lot bigger hard drive.
      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by bogaboga ( 793279 )

        I don't understand why you would do that.

        I currently run my computer system off solar panels. They (SSDs) consume less power as compared to systems that have hard disks. FYI, I live deep in the country.

        • Re:MythTV (Score:5, Funny)

          by Daimanta ( 1140543 ) on Thursday December 18, 2008 @03:57PM (#26165027) Journal

          "I currently run my computer system off solar panels. They (SSDs) consume less power as compared to systems that have hard disks. FYI, I live deep in the country."

          Well, I etch my data into massive stone tables. FYI, I live even deeper in the country.

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Surt ( 22457 )

          Not a huge difference though ... you'd be better off spending the price difference elsewhere in terms of wattage. Buy a more expensive power saving cpu or display and you'll save way more than the 1-2 watt difference between a conventional hard drive and an SSD. Though I suppose if money is no object, you do both.
          But if money is no object, why not just buy a few more solar panels?

      • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

        by vertinox ( 846076 )

        The only upside that I can see to a spinning disc would be noise, and if you're watching TV, how could you hear it?

        I watch silent films you insensitive clod!

  • Terrible Article (Score:4, Insightful)

    by neoform ( 551705 ) <djneoform@gmail.com> on Thursday December 18, 2008 @03:29PM (#26164557) Homepage

    Who wrote this garbage? The article repeats itself about 3 times on one page.

  • hmm... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by kabocox ( 199019 ) on Thursday December 18, 2008 @03:35PM (#26164661)

    I hate not to be all positive about this, but I'd much rather the prices drop rather than the sizes get bigger. Then again this is a huge sized solid state drive. I wonder if it is actually worth it. I'd like to see some real numbers comparing these drives to normal laptop drives.

    A part of me also wonders when something like this will be thrown into the next ipod or DVR. It'll most likely be a price thing that determines it.

    • by D Ninja ( 825055 )

      512GB hard drive in an iPod?! At the risk of (mis)paraphrasing Bill Gates, who needs that kind of space on an iPod? Even if you ripped your songs at an extremely high quality, that's a lot of music. (Yes, I realize you can put other things besides music on iPods...)

      • by Pulzar ( 81031 )

        (Yes, I realize you can put other things besides music on iPods...)

        If you do, then why do you ask who needs that kind of space? Video files are quite large, it's pretty easy to fill up 40GB or so...

    • The leading edge ALWAYS takes the brunt of the cost. That's how it's always been... 2GB of RAM used to cost thousands, now you can get it for less than $100. I know you want everything and want it now, but an expensive 512GB SSD will force the prices of the 128 and 256GB SSD's down.

    • They are doing. 32GB drives are now quite cheap, 64GB ones will probably head that way when 512GB ones come out.
  • by Alzheimers ( 467217 ) on Thursday December 18, 2008 @03:40PM (#26164747)

    It may say 512GB now, but we all know that once marketing gets a hold of it, it'll be

    Tosiba's Brand New 550GB* drive.

    *1GB = 1,000 MB

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by maugle ( 1369813 )
      Considering how they seem to be able to define the units whatever way they like, I wonder if a hard drive company could get away with this:

      New 6TB* Hard Drive!
      Only $250!



      *1TB = 10GB
    • Tosiba's Brand New 550GB* drive.

      *1GB = 1,000 MB

      In my experience, consumer flash memory products such as USB pen drives, CF cards, and SD cards actually have their stated capacity available. For instance, I bought a 512 MB CF card that had 512,000,000 bytes; I guessed that the other 5% of the underlying 512 MiB chip was spare sectors used by the wear leveling scheme. (CF is just a parallel ATA SSD in a smaller form factor.) Likewise, if this SSD has 7% spare sectors, it would have 512 GB available out of 512 GiB.

  • ... didn't I read something about SSDs working best in Windows 2000?
  • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 18, 2008 @04:02PM (#26165123)

    http://www.toshiba.com/taec/news/press_releases/2008/memy_08_550.jsp

  • How long will drives like this last?

    Surely longer than mechanical drives with platters, but has anyone actually verified it?

    Also, when they fail, what is the most common reason for failing? Is it something that you could recover the data from?

    Maybe it is way too early to know the answers

    • I don't think very many failed drives have shown up in the real world yet, so we only have testing and voodoo to go on. I've heard with proper wear levelling the drives should last 50 years or more. But well, obviously we can't say if that's true or not yet with certainty. The most common type of failure on an SSD I believe is when erases stop working (because a block is too worn). It that point it becomes a read-only device (quite a nice side-effect, I think).
  • by ChienAndalu ( 1293930 ) on Thursday December 18, 2008 @04:11PM (#26165251)
    When are the small SSD drives coming? I just need to put my operating system on the SSD-drive, the mp3s and movies are doing fine on the spinning platter. 512GB are total overkill.
    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Overzeetop ( 214511 )

      16GB is available on microSD, and I've seen adapters which allow them to slip into a USB slot with almost zero protrusion (http://www.amazon.com/DATA-MICRO-Reader-microSD-interface/dp/B000VE2PCG). Speed isn't great - 48Mbps - but your just booting the OS, and maybe a small app or two, right? If you can go a smidge bigger, 64GB SD are expected "soon." Speed is still low, but many lappys have an SD specific slot (which would also work with a microSD-SD adapter, of course)

      Finally if you really need more space,

    • by tknd ( 979052 ) on Thursday December 18, 2008 @04:43PM (#26165779)
      They're almost here. $70 for 30GB SSD [newegg.com] is currently out of stock but I'm sure they'll get a new shipment within the week. With each new drive that hits the market profit margins are getting squeezed out. MLC NAND flash chips spot prices are about $1 a gigabyte so I wouldn't be surprised if there was a healthy 100% margin still built into these product prices.

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