The 1 Terabyte SSD Arrives 237
An anonymous reader writes "Over recent years Solid State Drives (SSDs) have moved from luxury to affordable additions to one's PC, but mechanical hard drives are still king when it comes to capacity. That was until the revamped Colossus LT series Solid State Drive came along this week. With up to 1TB, the drive offers offers massive storage capacities of the level normally not seen in SSDs. While 1TB of SSD space hits right at the heart of the traditional hard disk market, it comes at a high price — at around $4,000 for the 1TB model, these drives are in the realm of aspirational rather than practical."
I'll wait a while. (Score:4, Interesting)
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I have a handful of friends who adopted Intel's latest G2 X25-m models at their release. With new firmware, they are all still reporting notably reduced performance over time. Everyone knows what causes it, it is entirely understandable given the storage technology in question, but that doesn't make it any less of a drag. I'll wait and see how things change before doing the switch.
Everyone knows what causes it huh?
Sorry, that's a really stupid assumption, because, I don't know what causes it.
So I guess not everyone knows what causes it.
Re:I'll wait a while. (Score:5, Informative)
google: why do ssd get slower over time. first answer: http://www.anandtech.com/show/2738/8 [anandtech.com]
no comment
Re:I'll wait a while. (Score:4, Informative)
But since he's so mysterious about it, perhaps it's not.
Re:I'll wait a while. (Score:5, Informative)
That article was low on logic and common sense.
The article's take-away that SSDs slow down over time may be right, however the reasoning behind the explanations doesn't even make sense.
> "Because they have a two-part write/erase cycle, unlike the single write cycle of mechanical hard drives, they wear out at least twice as fast as their spinning counterparts."
Umm, what? SSD writes are done in two stages, yes, but that has absolutely nothing to do with the way a traditional hard drive does writes. So how could you say SSD's wear out "twice" as fast as traditional drives because they have to write twice? It could be that an SSD could write a thousands times more or a thousand times less than a traditional hard drive before wearing out because they are completely different technologies.
> "This isn't helped by the architecture of most SSDs. Usually, data is laid down within a block of available memory, meaning that it might not take up all the available space--yet will still write to all of it"
Does the author think traditional hard drives write to byte-addressable boundaries? Hard drives write blocks and sectors too and have wasted slack space at the end of their blocks too.
> "Defragmenting or "defragging" a SSD takes up many write/erase cycles... which shortens the lifetime of an SSD, even if it's also cleaning up the drive."
No, defragging is not cleaning up an SSD drive. There is no reason to defrag an SSD because their is no latency getting to a further sector.
> "it's a delicate balance, how often you should defrag your SSD for optimum performance and lifetime"
How about "NEVER"?
> "Only defrag when necessary!"
Argh!
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Yes, yes I know:
s/their/there/
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Oh God no... I RTFA...
Do I get banned from Slashdot? Am I an outcast now?
(PS I was not criticizing you, just the linked to article)
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"This isn't helped by the architecture of most SSDs. Usually, data is laid down within a block of available memory, meaning that it might not take up all the available space--yet will still write to all of it"
Does the author think traditional hard drives write to byte-addressable boundaries? Hard drives write blocks and sectors too and have wasted slack space at the end of their blocks too.
Yes, but these blocks of memory might be much bigger than sectors on a hard disk.
And filesystem code in operating systems knows about the (small) sectors of disks, and might not be able to cope with the large blocks of SSDs. Meaning that the SSD must be sufficiently smart to read the entire block, change whatever range needs to be changed, and rewrites it. And this might happen lots of times, because the higher level code (filesystems) might not be aware of the issue.
There is no reason to defrag an SSD because their is no latency getting to a further sector.
There is no latency, but defragging may
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Does the author think traditional hard drives write to byte-addressable boundaries? Hard drives write blocks and sectors too and have wasted slack space at the end of their blocks too.
Novell was doing block suballocation as long ago as Netware 5.x, which came out in roughly 1998. It's not a completely invalid assertion.
Other than that, excellent rundown on the issues. Thanks.
Re:I'll wait a while. (Score:5, Informative)
That seems written by someone who really has little to no idea how SSD drives work. It should take years to see problems caused by flash wearing out even under intense use.
The actual problem involves the way modern SSD drives write your new data to an unused portion of the disk before erasing the old flash to improve speed. If the drives think they are full then you are stuck waiting for the old blocks to be cleared before you can write your data.
TRIM was added to fix this problem by letting the OS tell the drive when blocks become unused but it only works on very recent drives and new operating systems. You are out of luck on that front if your running XP or a Linux kernel older than 2.6.33 but on the upside the problem only affects write speed.
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I recommend reading the Anandtech SSD articles [anandtech.com] as they are clearer, more informative, and less alarmist.
Re:I'll wait a while. (Score:4, Interesting)
It is only a slight performance improvement for large files. For large amounts of small files it's a huge gain thanks to the lack of head movement.
I picked up a 32gb SSD drive to handle the OS and apps and left my 1TB drive for movies. The difference in boot times and app load times are very noticeable.
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As someone who took the SSD plunge a few months ago, I can tell you that the performance delta entirely depends on two things: your multitasking habits, and the quality of the SSD controller chipset. Some are only good at sequential read/write (like conventional drives), but the better ones are also good at random access, and these are the ones that make your machine zippy. On a spinning platter hard drive, if you have two apps accessing the disk simultaneously, it has to seek back and forth between the t
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Ummmm, SSDs map disk sectors to physical flash cells dynamically as part of wear levelling.
Defragging will probably make it much worse.
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I have a handful of friends who adopted Intel's latest G2 X25-m models at their release. With new firmware, they are all still reporting notably reduced performance over time. Everyone knows what causes it, it is entirely understandable given the storage technology in question, but that doesn't make it any less of a drag. I'll wait and see how things change before doing the switch.
Um, You bought a MLC drive and are now complaining about drive wear?
You bought a cheap product. If you would of bought an SLC you wouldn't have the same level of drive wear. I want to say the difference is a factor of 10.
next time get a X25-E.
I'd love to know how the X25-V's are shaping up.
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What OS are they running? Without TRIM support on both the drive and the OS (Windows 7, Windows 2008 at the moment IIRC, or Linux with a kernel version 2.6.33 or above but I'm not aware of any distros carrying that as standard yet - even the beta of Ubuntu 10.04 is still at 2.6.32) the block fragmentation within the drive will cause write performance degradation over time.
I'm told that writing solid blocks of 0s will cause a drive's controller to mark the block as not needing erase-before-write next time (w
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at the moment, the only thing that might not support TRIM is OSX, which I suspect does. Linux and windows do.
Re:I'll wait a while. (Score:5, Informative)
They are Windows 7 and Linux users. TRIM seems to just ameliorate temporary.
Your friends aren't benchmarking. Welcome to subjective perceptions. As quantitative data has proven conclusively (see anandtech.com, pcper.com, etc.), TRIM does truly prevent lost performance over time.
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TRIM was only enabled on kernel 2.6.33. I don't know any distros that ship that version yet so unless your friends are custom compiling their kernels they don't have working TRIM.
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That's a much better deal than a 5GB Hard Drive! (Score:2, Funny)
Speed? (Score:2, Interesting)
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Slapping what I assume to be a ton of chips together wont make for an impressive benchmark.
Same as:
... I would rather raid together a bunch of and small fast ssd's than 1 big one.
SSD seek time is zero, there is no multi-spindle advantage. Unless you are trying to exceed a system thruput of 3 gigs/sec, the limit of a single SATA channel...
Yay (Score:3, Interesting)
Can we please get an affordable, 60GB one that is actually worth buying now? Last time I checked (two months ago), most of the less expensive drives were real spotty with their reliability.
Any suggestions for a decent 60GB SSD for under $120?
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You can get 60GB for under $120? Damnit, I considered an SSD recently and 30/40GB was £100 for the cheapest ones. Didn't get it in the end because of reports of degrading performance over time. That'd be one hell of a downer if you'd bought something that large and expensive!
Re:Yay (Score:5, Informative)
You can get 60GB for under $120? Damnit, I considered an SSD recently and 30/40GB was £100 for the cheapest ones. Didn't get it in the end because of reports of degrading performance over time. That'd be one hell of a downer if you'd bought something that large and expensive!
No, you can't.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=2010150636%201421439415&name=60GB [newegg.com]
The lowest price for a 60GB SSD is $140, and that's from a no-name company. If you want quality for that spec, your wallet will be taking a hit of about $200
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You can get 60GB for under $120?
No, you can't.
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yes, in about two more years. hang in there.
and on that day I'll be getting by really cheap, as I only need about 20GB for a laptop
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That would be excellent, if those damn HP people didn't disable the virtualization support of the CPU in the BIOS, with no option to turn it on!
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Welcome back to the 90s (Score:5, Insightful)
Considering Flash is reaching the point with its feature sizes (32 nm) where its data retention rate (1 year) and number of write cycles (8,000) is dropping rapidly (enterprise SSDs use 65+ nm SLC Flash instead), it's hard to see how Flash-based SSDs are winning, exactly.
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Um, they are WAY faster. They are also growing in size more rapidly than traditional hard drives. They have gone from like 32gb to 1000gb in just a couple of years. They are also rapidly dropping in price.
Even now, a lot of people only use like 30gb worth of disk space. Sure, they have more, but they don't use it.
32 GB / $125 USD / Sequential Write: 187.5 MB/s / Sequential Read: 294.5 MB/s.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820211419
For a lot of people, that would be the largest upgrade i
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32 GB / $125 USD / Sequential Write: 187.5 MB/s / Sequential Read: 294.5 MB/s.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820211419 [newegg.com]
You do realise that sequential reads and writes are pretty much irrelevant to most people, right? The big benefit of SSDs is _random_ read and write speed, which is where HDDs really suck.
For a lot of people, that would be the largest upgrade in terms of speed they could possibly give there computer. Maybe reducing the time to load photoshop from 8 seconds to 2.
And how often do you load photoshop? For most people, saving six seconds on something they do once a day is hardly going to be 'the largest upgrade in terms of speed they could possibly give their computer'.
I put an SSD in my new HTPC because I wanted it to boot up fast, and while it probably halves the boot time there it'
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I put an SSD in my new HTPC because I wanted it to boot up fast, and while it probably halves the boot time there it's otherwise pretty underwhelming.
Isn't it quieter? When I installed a SSD in my mythtv frontend, hard drive noise went from noticeable, to gone.
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Isn't it quieter? When I installed a SSD in my mythtv frontend, hard drive noise went from noticeable, to gone.
True, but my MythTV backend with two hard drives is still sitting beside the TV until I get around to moving it, and while I can hear drive noise close up, I can't hear it from the sofa.
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My #1 storage delay is waiting for virtual machines to suspend and resume. That means writing or reading a 1GB (or whatever the VM's RAM is) contiguous file. Before SSD, suspend/resume to disk wasn't even worth the wait, now it is. Most people don't bother with VM's, but suspend-to-disk in general is a feature that millions of home users should be using by default to save power (compared to never shutting d
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My #1 storage delay is waiting for virtual machines to suspend and resume.
Then you're not most people. Most people boot up the PC, do some web browsing and email, watch some youtube video their mate on myspacebook sent them and then shut down the PC. Booting faster is a benefit, but since that's largely random reads, a higher sequential read rate might save them a few seconds of boot time... they'd save a lot more by wiping Windows and installing Linux.
Most people don't bother with VM's, but suspend-to-disk in general is a feature that millions of home users should be using by default to save power (compared to never shutting down) and reduce waiting (compared to rebooting just to grab an email).
So again you're talking about something people might do once or twice a day being slightly faster because the sequential read and
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The largest potential advantage for SSD drives, is clever redesign can allow for extreme expandability. Unlike harddisk drives, SSD drives can inherently be designed as more open units, with additional slots for additional memory cards ie, it is readily possible to manufacturer a SSD drive that starts with say 50 gig of memory to which you can add additional memory cards at say 25 gig a piece. All this done before adding the additional cost of another drive with it's own expanding memory slots.
As prices
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Which is why I hibernate, because unlike normal booting, it is a sequential read of the memory dump back to RAM (at least, if you reserve a partition for it).
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You know what I do a lot? Install apps. Install updates. Compile stuff. The huge increase in random access speed from an SSD makes all these things so much faster I hate going back to machines with spinning disks.
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Seconded.
Nobody who's actually used an SSD talks about how hard drives will remain relevant. Nobody.
It's not even about the streaming speeds. Going from 60 IOPS (typical SATA disk) to 6000 IOPS(*) is a night & day difference. There's just no comparison. Meanwhile, the latest SATA 6 Gbps drives can reputedly [anandtech.com] do 60,000 IOPS!
To put that in perspective, 60K IOPS is the same as a 350x 15K RPM drives in a SAN storage array. That's the kind of thing that banks buy for $millions, but it's still not as good as t
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i am not a hardware expert. However, I have a few uses for something like that in the small company where I work. $4k is pricey, but for applications that rely on huge file I/O and is sensitive to speed, this is viable.
I've already ordered a SAN solution.... but if I were making the decision again, and the price dropped by a factor of four, I would likely go with the SSD if I could mix and match with traditional hard drives.
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i am not a hardware expert. However, I have a few uses for something like that in the small company where I work. $4k is pricey, but for applications that rely on huge file I/O and is sensitive to speed, this is viable.
True, but I was just shopping for storage and considering a SSD.
Newegg ran a deal on a 2TB HD yesterday for $130. Standard price for many is $140-150. $150 for 7200 RPM.
At $4k, you can afford to have 20 of these drives and still have money for some fancy controllers. Run them in RAID-1 for the DB application to give you the necessary bandwidth/capacity. 20 Drives beat 1 SSD controller. Heck, for most applications 5-10 beat the SSD. Write doesn't matter much because, well, SSDs write about as slow as H
Re:Welcome back to the 90s (Score:5, Informative)
I guess I could pull out a stack of punch cards 1 km tall and claim it's got 1 TB storage capacity too, thus having 'caught up' with HDDs.
This being Slashdot, I'd expect better of you :-)
A 1km-tall stack of cards, which, according to Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] are 0.178mm thick and can storage 64 bytes with the most efficient coding, results in a measly 342.89 megabytes (assuming 1 megabyte= 2^20, which is admittedly uncommon when quoting storage, esp when a vendor does it. They'd use the 10^6 version, so 359.55 megabytes (I'm aware of the kibibyte/mebibyte etc scale, but I don't like using it))
For a full terabyte you're looking at slighly over 3058km worth of stacked punch cards (or 2781.25 km if using the storage vendors' definition)
(Disappointingly, Wolfram Alpha was no help doing the above calculations)
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This being Slashdot, you should know that storage manufacturers always exaggerate the data capacity of their products.
The _unformatted_ capacity of 5.6 million punch cards is 998,320,126,812 bytes.
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A 1km-tall stack of cards ... results in a measly 342.89 megabytes
... nice.
But you forgot a nice wording flame:
I could pull out a stack of punch cards 1 km tall and claim it's got 1 TB storage capacity too, thus having 'caught up' with HDDs.
You "catch up" with somebody how had a headstart. Given that HDDs are newer technology than punch cards, it's cute to claim the punch cards could "catch up" with HDDs, even if there was a way to make a 1TB stack of them.
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So at roughly $4/GB that'd place us where, back at the late 90s? I'm not sure what part of 'catching up' people seem to think of when they're talking about SSDs replacing HDDs.
I deployed a 586 based single board computer using a 4 gig CF as the boot drive about a year ago. Entire system draws about 4 watts total and no moving parts. I would call it vaguely mid 90s ish specifications. If you define HDD as advancing about one year per year, then SSDs seem to be advancing about half a decade per year, thus "catching up" at a rate of about 4 years per calendar year, and currently "about a decade behind" so figure SSD will pass HDD around the end of the world, late 2012-ish. Sign
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I deployed a 586 based single board computer using a 4 gig CF as the boot drive about a year ago.
I'll bet it's a Soekris box, and you've added a spinning 2.5 hard drive to it to as well. Did I guess right?
Did something similar about a year ago, too, but I opted for single 16GB Mtron MOBI SLC SSDs. All the units still work as expected.
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Around 2002 [mkomo.com]
They're thinking of SSDs previously being 12 years behind HDDs in $/GB (in 2007!) and now being 7 years behind. That's pretty good "catching up" by any measure!
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They're not faster in a number of apps; last time I looked (or, indeed, used a mechanical drive as a system disc) SSD's were the performance king by a nautical mile. I'm not aware of any type or number of hard discs that can compete on performance with even a mid-range SSD these days.
In the 90's your only option other than an array the size of a fridge was an enterprise ramdisc (and try getting either of those into your laptop). Depending on which metric is most important to you (and it should be random rea
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Why yes, if you completely ignore the performance difference, which is the main selling point for flash drives.
It would be similar if I complained about how my tricked out Honda Odyssey is no cheaper than a new 1980's Chevy van was.
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First 1GB hard drive came out around 1994 or 1995. It took 10 years until the first 500GB HD came out in 2005. Then the first 2TB drive came out in 2009, 4 years later. So basically, what the hell are you talking about?"
First, I need links.
First 100gb, 2001 [xlr8yourmac.com]
First 500gb, 2005 [ehomeupgrade.com]
First 2tb, 2009 [wdc.com]
I'd love to find older stories but any page before 2000 doesn't rank well on Google.
Anyway,
Solid State of the Art (Score:5, Funny)
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great scot! (Score:5, Funny)
Not so sure about the "aspirational" line (Score:2, Informative)
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Yea. Only a few hundred bucks more expensive for the entire laptop, which may not seem like much...but is it really worth it? Of all the things you could have spent that money on, it went to the hard drives? You're adding a few hundred bucks for a part that is usually under a hundred bucks.
Uhmm.... (Score:4, Interesting)
This has been on newegg for a very long time: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227500 [newegg.com]
I've been waiting forever for its price to drop, but nothing seems to be happening. I don't think SSDs will be of any consequence to mainstream users before memristors become all the rage.
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Considering how much variety and mindshare there's been around SSDs and the competition with HDDs, I find that the prices have
stayed much too high for far too long.
I wonder if we are going to hear about another PC/IT price-fixing scheme.
Not 400x (Score:4, Informative)
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Snow Leopard (Score:2, Interesting)
Not so bad, compared to: (Score:3, Informative)
Paying $4000 for a thousand gigabytes is not so bad. Some of us have worked on:
DEC DF-32: 32K 12-bit words for around $5000 (1971)
DEC RKO5- 2.5 megabytes for $10,000 ( 1973 )
Mac HD-20: 20 megabytes for $1000 ( 1985 )
All those were like, 1000x or more per byte. AND WE WERE PERFECTLY HAPPY. (Well, a little cramped on the DF32)
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Is this a new play on "When I was young..."? ;)
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Paying $4000 for a thousand gigabytes is not so bad. Some of us have worked on:
DEC DF-32: 32K 12-bit words for around $5000 (1971)
DEC RKO5- 2.5 megabytes for $10,000 ( 1973 )
Mac HD-20: 20 megabytes for $1000 ( 1985 )
All those were like, 1000x or more per byte. AND WE WERE PERFECTLY HAPPY. (Well, a little cramped on the DF32)
Wow. I will be getting of your lawn now, sir.
Affordable (Score:4, Informative)
When I can get a 1TB 3.5" SATA drive [ebuyer.com] for £61.33 (approx $94.58), I'm not sure how something which is 42 times more expensive can be considered "affordable".
Maybe I have a different definition of the word.
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Yes, you do have a different definition; your definition is entirely wrong. One item's affordability is in no way affected by the price of another item, regardless how similar it may (or may not) be.
Many SSDs are quite affordable for many people. A $100 1TB drive is just cheap -- in price and, I suspect, in quality.
Price. (Score:2)
Sweet! Maybe now I can replace the 1.3TB of hard drives in my desktop with some solid state!
Oh wait. Nope. I can barely afford a 30GB drive. Let me know when SSDs are less than $1/GB.
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Come back in a year or so.
we paid that for a megabyte in late 1970s (Score:3, Insightful)
Reference Articles (Score:2)
disapointing (Score:2)
You could already get half this capacity in a laptop sized drive and a desktop drive is more than twice the volume of a laptop drive.
Use as cache? (Score:2)
Can't we use a smallish SSD acting as cache in front of a large spinning disk? This is old technology, that may need to be modified somewhat to take the particulars of SSDs into account, but surely this is feasible? Any reason why not?
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Re:That's a lot of money..... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Yeah, like my video server trying to feed multiple HD streams at the same time.
How many HD streams at the same time?
Right now it'd be cheaper for you to get 2 drives in raid 1 and a raid controller smart enough to queue requests seperately to the two drives.
Unless you don't have enough movies to make HD's economical - HD's scale up well, Flash scales down better.
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It would probably be much less expensive to buy some HDs (four 250GB, instead of a 1TB SSD) and use raid0.
Re:I can seem some enterprise paying for this. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I can seem some enterprise paying for this. (Score:5, Informative)
As a mass storage option, SSDs are pretty pitiful. As you note, even 15k RPM SAS stuff, hardly the cheap seats, is substantially cheaper per gigabyte. If you can step down to 10K RPM, or even the nicer grade of 7200RPM SATA(SAS/SATA compatibility can be quite convenient), the difference gets even starker.
If you are talking IOPS/$, though, SSDs passed the "economically viable" point some time ago and were last seen running for a location somewhere between "not even fair" and "Good God, man, it's like curb-stomping a puppy!" in their competition with even the zippiest of mechanical drives.
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It might save them on power infrastructure as well as electrons...
(By switching to SSDs they might be able to add a couple more servers without changing any cables and/or upgrading the UPS and backup generators).
Re:I can seem some enterprise paying for this. (Score:5, Funny)
It's 4000 AUSTRALIAN dollars, not human dollars.
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Bah! You and your "prudent company"! Obviously you have no understanding of the marketing power of being able to say your company is "green". Check out this video from Google [youtube.com] and just imagine the millions spent on the solar panels and free electric cars for employee use. Like she says "socially responsible company" is the hot buzzword right now.
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Well, you'd need to factor in the additional cooling costs associated with the higher power drives too, so you'd recoup in closer to 41 years...
With cooling you pay for that power twice (Score:2)
For instance, I have a single SSD in one machine because the only other way to get the same performance is to have yet another file server with a few more mechanical drives and a decent interface card (cheaper now than it was). In that case it was just cheaper to get one SSD, add it to the existing box (pulled out the slimline DVD) and make sure it isn't the only place where that data lives.
At relatively small v
Re:I can seem some enterprise paying for this. (Score:4, Interesting)
The other thing you need to look at is lifespan. A 15k drive should last a company at least 3 years (I know some companies replace them yearly, but a typical rotation is 3 to 5 years based on what I've seen). Can an SSD (that's under high I/O) last that long? Or are you going to be replacing them yearly because of wear leveling issues? Again, I'm not saying that they are not worth the money. All I am saying is that it's far from a simple math problem to determine if they are the right fit for an enterprise...
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You have a strange sense of economics. Reduced demand usually means reduced prices and vice versa. Reduced consumption means less need for more power-plants and other related expenses. On the flip side, much increased demand means that the power companies have to build new plants or upgrade old ones, or upgrade infrastructure. The fact is, using resources costs money and the more you use, the more it costs somewhere. Reducing consumption does not make costs go up unless there's a false economy created
Re:I can seem some enterprise paying for this. (Score:4, Interesting)
As a media producer who uses DAW and video editing apps, solid state storage is a dream for me. I'm using much smaller SSDs now and although the power savings don't mean much to me, they are certainly quieter and faster than magnetic or optical media.
My 15k rpm drives are too loud and too warm.
When a 1TB SSD hits $1000, I'm in for two.
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Ouch dude! Leave the PCjr alone! That computer was my geek larval stage. While my buddies played games on their C64's, I was messing around in DOS on my PCjr. Trying to get drivers to load and still have enough RAM to play a "game".
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One of the first things I got my dad to buy for me was the corded, regular keyboard. the infrared was neat but on the kitchen table - at certain times of the day - the sun would keep me from using the computer.
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So it's the first SSD to have a 3-voice soundchip?
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This is the IBM PC Jr of SSDs.
No one will buy it, but it will usher in the age of the SSD. Who are you and what have you done with BadAnalogyGuy?
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Yea, it's only _40 times_ the cost of a regular hard drive.
Why not buy a crapload of regular drives...then you can RAID a bunch of them and have a crapload more left over for when any of them fail. Guarantee 40 TB regular drives could be set up to be both faster and last longer than a 1TB SSD. Would be a bit bigger though....
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