Solild State Disks

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HokieEngineer

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Oct 13, 2003
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FYI, this is John Kotches not Hokie Engineer...

There have been a number of Solid State Disk announcements here at CES so far.

SanDisk is showing their Gen2 drives on 43nm lines. Capacities are currently announced up to 256GB.

Pricing for 128GB is $199 with 256 coming in linearly priced at $399.

Toshiba is also showing new generation drives (also on 43nm lines. They have announced capacities up to 512GB. Pricing is the same for 128 and 256GB SanDisk drives. The 512GB drive is shipping in sample quantities for $1699 in the first quarter and will come down significantly from there when it is shipping in production quantities. Not announced but expect it to be around $1K. The highest capacity drives always carry a pricing premium.

More in a followup post.
 
I saw a 1TB solid state drive from pureSi, but they wouldn't give me a price on it.
 
Intel is showing their SSDs, rated as the fatest for data transfer. I own an 80gb version, and can testify that it is very quick.

They were showing the 80gb and a new 160gb, price typically $500 & $900 respectively.
 
This is the future of hard drives (will replace the hard drives) as they would end up being cheaper after they end up being mass produces, take up less space, and will be great for laptops and portable devices. I can see an adapter being made available to convert a regular hard disk drive into solid state drives and having multiple solid state drives be able to be added like you would add memory.
 
Power consumption will go down too, and it will be totally shock resistant. It will also last longer. A hard drive is in principle like having a 70's era FM Stereo analog receiver. It works nice, but it's an mechanical tuner. Or an analog watch with gears and springs. It's ancient technology
 
Stargazer said:
This is the future of hard drives (will replace the hard drives) as they would end up being cheaper after they end up being mass produces, take up less space, and will be great for laptops and portable devices. I can see an adapter being made available to convert a regular hard disk drive into solid state drives and having multiple solid state drives be able to be added like you would add memory.
Click to expand...

How are you going to convert a HDD into a solid state drive????
 
What is the read/write cycle life on a solid state hard disc versus that of a traditional magnetic platter hard disc?

Removable flash storage devices (thumb drives, CF cards for D-SLR cameras, etc.) don't have anywhere near the read/write cycle life as that of a hard drive. I've had Jump Drive USB thingies and MiniSD cards for cell phones go bad.

I guess my concern is over long term reliability of a solid state drive. The lack of moving parts is a plus. But the read/write cycle limits could be another issue.

One of the big things solid state drives could deliver is "instant on" boot times for personal computers. It might also make the process of fixing bugs in the system a little easier.

Is anyone working on RAID-based setups with solid state drives. Tasks like editing uncompressed HD-quality video demand that sort of thing.
 
Bobby H said:
What is the read/write cycle life on a solid state hard disc versus that of a traditional magnetic platter hard disc?

Removable flash storage devices (thumb drives, CF cards for D-SLR cameras, etc.) don't have anywhere near the read/write cycle life as that of a hard drive. I've had Jump Drive USB thingies and MiniSD cards for cell phones go bad.

I guess my concern is over long term reliability of a solid state drive. The lack of moving parts is a plus. But the read/write cycle limits could be another issue.

One of the big things solid state drives could deliver is "instant on" boot times for personal computers. It might also make the process of fixing bugs in the system a little easier.

Is anyone working on RAID-based setups with solid state drives. Tasks like editing uncompressed HD-quality video demand that sort of thing.
Click to expand...

This is a good question, and one that has been keeping me from investing in a Solid state drive for quite some time. To the best of my knowledge even the best Flash Memory has has a maximum write life cycle of about 100,000 writes per block. Good wear leveling can help extend the life of a device by readdressing regularly written to blocks, but if you have a program or OS that regularly pages data, this could severely limit the life of one of these drives. I was really hoping that MRAM ([ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MRAM"]Magnetoresistive Random Access Memory - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia@@AMEPARAM@@/wiki/File:MRAM-Cell-Simplified.svg" class="image"><img alt="" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f9/MRAM-Cell-Simplified.svg/300px-MRAM-Cell-Simplified.svg.png"@@AMEPARAM@@commons/thumb/f/f9/MRAM-Cell-Simplified.svg/300px-MRAM-Cell-Simplified.svg.png[/ame]) Would take off as it seems more resistant to write related wear, but it is still too expensive to be competetive with Flash.
 
ralfyguy said:
Power consumption will go down too, and it will be totally shock resistant. It will also last longer. A hard drive is in principle like having a 70's era FM Stereo analog receiver. It works nice, but it's an mechanical tuner. Or an analog watch with gears and springs. It's ancient technology
Click to expand...
Gotta say that in the instance of the old watch and the 70's stereo that some ancient technologies are more reliable and durable than current technologies atleast from my experience with cars and watches and various other things.
 
Agonizing Fury said:
This is a good question, and one that has been keeping me from investing in a Solid state drive for quite some time. To the best of my knowledge even the best Flash Memory has has a maximum write life cycle of about 100,000 writes per block.
Click to expand...

The flash we are using on the Boeing 787 program is rated at a couple million write cycles. Of course, that isn't cheap stuff, but it likely is the best available.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
SLC process is faster and more reliable. Rated 1-2+ million writes. But is costs a lot more than MLC which has a write rating in the 100,000s.

But, the controllers are supposed to spread around the writes, so even if you think you are writing to the same spot on the disk over and over it actually moves it around to balance out the writes. This is not visible on the computer, only the controller of the SSD knows for sure where your data is located.

The other advantage of the SSD is that when the end of life occurs it stops working and is in a read only state. You do not lose the data on the drive, you are just no longer able to change it.
 
My first recollection of a discussion about the upcoming demise of the "spinning metal" goes back some 15 years, after a Jerry Pournelle article in BYTE.
We paid about $1/MB then and pay 1/10 of that for 1000 times more storage today. And the drives' performance is not even in the same league...

Around the time DVD was introduced, there was an almost consensus that the dual layer version will kill hard drives dead.

I wouldn't rush to write off hard drives just yet...;)

Diogen.
 
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