@Frizzaper: And because they are typically built to be server-grade (ECC etc), they are horrendously expensive.

Mandatory_Field

@Frizzaper: Because RAM has to be continually refreshed in order to retain contents. That means that it absolutely always has to have power, or it loses all of the contents as soon as the refresh rate is exceeded -- say 26 nanoseconds with 25 nanosecond refresh RAM. You will see RAM often used as RAM disks (content copied from non-volatile storage like a hard drive on power-up, and then run from RAM which is much faster), but not for permanent storage. Flash RAM is different, as it maintains the content when the power is switched off. RAM drives have been around for a loooong time, but are typically used in big db server-type scenarios, where throughput and transaction rates are everything.

Mandatory_Field

The thing I'm really looking for is an iRAM type system that includes ram clocked for the max speed of SATA II. There's no point in using really highly clocked ram (any DDR2 RAM will saturate a 3.0gbps connection). Why isn't there an afforable product using this system? The ram it would use is tech that's 3-5 years old, I don't understand why there isn't an 8 gig iRAM system for under 250$ (including the storage.) I mean seriously, how much could it possibly cost to mass produce 1 gig Dimms of PC133 in 2008?

Frizzaper

@jibbly: Dagnabbit! You're right. I get too distracted by those clicks to notice the fan whirrrrrrRRrrrRRrrrr. I was actually pretty impressed with the latest Hitachi 1TB drives that recently came out. I upgraded all my 500 GB drives to 1TB and it actually got much quieter. I'm much more eager for the SS speed though. 7200 RPM needs to f@*ing die. I don't like waiting for shit to load.

johnnyabnormal

@bobide: you might wanna read this.
For gamers who are desperate to squeeze every last bit of performance out of a rig, then RAID on SSDs is almost a holy grail type of situation.

Step666

Thanks Giz, I found it informative and helpful to have this article.

Bruhaha

Giz explains... lol.

That's role reversal for ya'... typically Giz reports the news and then we explain to them what they are actually reporting about and why it's important.

Or, like 99% of their posts, it's about dumbed-down iDontcare products which are already dumbed down enough for journa... bloggers to understand.

snathanb

I've been using a Raon Everun UMPC with just a 6G SSD for a few months now. The boot time isn't that much faster (if at all). Though the time from standby is like an on/off switch. That device has a slower, low power CPU and a decent size battery so it can work on wifi or video playing for just under 5 hours. I think that they draw less juice but in terms of the contribution I think the spinning disk probably doesn't draw all that much more and low power processors is where you can save power the most (at an obvious cost of performance). The cool thing is that it's silent. There is a tiny little fan but you can't hear it unless you put your ear up to it. None of the clickity click of a regular drive. And the increased durability is nice. Those to reasons were what drew me to SSD. And it runs XP. I think the read write issues are not the big deal people talk about. I've heard the new flash memory is much more tolerant than previous generations. I'm not an expert on that. 6G is fine for a portable device that you just want to use for the functions of a computer and not a mass storage device. To be honest I don't get people wanting to carry around every bit of data, music or video they've ever downloaded at all times. But I am probably in the minority when it comes to tech dorks.

Brookespeed

File system development will change things a bit as well as there are certain aspects of spinning platters that have to be accounted for in modern file systems (latency being one) that just don't exist for SSD.

I'm far from in the loop on the FS front but I know an SSD optimized FS will help improve the practical use of these devices.

Tehrab

You could also argue that SSD write cycle limitations are less of a concern if you use it for your OS or fixed program files. Then use a platter HDD for doing the majority of your writing/re-writing. As long as you're not changing what's on the SSD a lot, you don't need to worry about write cycles.

I'll wait till they're more stable to get a mass storage device for my ever cycling porn collection.

OneMHz

@johnnyabnormal:

Yeah it helps, but I think noise from the HDD is minor compared to the CPU and PSU fans. Builders are taking note on DAW user concerns (finally!) and designing cases that dampen internal noise dramatically.

jibbly

Terabyte flash drives are only a few years away:0 Smile Don't Worry!

[tinyurl.com]

mmcdermot

In the current implementation they aren't worth it.

I have a 32 GB and 64 GB model and I cant really tell they are being used.

I dont know if its SATA limitations or OS limitations (vista)

Its quiet tho - in comparison to like a 15k SAS drives, the SAS drive stomps all over it.

I could have ordered another one, and I passed just getting a 7200 rpm drive for a laptop instead of 1/5 size SSD.

It works, its stable, its quiet - but its not any faster and not worth the crazy premium. especially for 1/5 the porn

twylight

I'm drooling for the day that all my drives have no moving parts. For us audio freaks, it will finally mean we don't have to shove our damn computers into another room/space to mix properly. Add on top of that the ability to load a whole orchestra in the snap of a finger...

johnnyabnormal

The short answer: It lasts long enough that you will not likely notice, or care when the effects are reached.

The explanation: Often these devices include some wear-leveling logic that spreads the effects of repeated writes over the array, thus increasing the time it takes to reach that failure point. The technologies in the works for 5-10 years from now are so absolutely drool-worthy you will not care if your puny 32GB dies.

@wayneinvt: Yes, such devices exist.

@bobide: RAID is never silly. Removing a single point of failure? Increasing throughput? Why would anyone want to do that? Besides, hard drive access is still one of the most (if not the most) limiting factors in modern computing.

Spintronics, baby.
Faster. Denser. Non-volatile. That's the trifecta.

soggy_cheerio

@MrBlahBlah:

Here's one. [techreport.com]

That's also the article that compares SSDs to platter HDDs.

jibbly

Yes. How much would a 1TB SS Drive cost?

Rain-man

at only 64 gigs, current SSDs are way too small to be the only internal drive. i'll have to wait until at least 128

MrBlahBlah

SSDs are the future. The hard drives we use today were once very new and very expensive just like SSDs, but time will make them cheaper, better and with higher capacity.

Statistically, 80% of the cost of a new technology comes before you even have a finished product roll off your line: R&D, production designing, etc. Once these high initial costs are paid down, more efficient means of production are made, and demand builds up to lower the margins, the prices will drop to reasonable levels.

GumbyJump

@wayneinvt:
I've heard many times that flash drives (USB, SD,etc...) cannot be used for RAM use or heavy disk use (as in SSD's).
They simply do not have longevity in read/write cycles required that SSD's have.
I've read reports that a USB flash drive used for swapfile duty will last about a week before permanent failure.
Hence the cost of SSD's today...they can take it.

aec007

@drum: Thank you.

ImTheKing

@ CLARKJW

1. Where is 32GB CF cards for $150?
2. The SanDisk Extreme IV which is very fast, is only 40MB/sec, which is about 15MB/sec slower then my 32GB SSD drive (Samsung 55MB/sec)...and mine isn't near the fastest at 97MB/sec (MTron)

For those saying the prices are high and not sure why...just look at RAM. 1GB for $20-25 (not counting rebates) is typical. Times that by 32 and you get your answer. Now, 32 sticks of RAM is too large, so come up with the tech to shrink it. AKA money.

tifosiv122

So then, this practically screams the question... since many of us have sticks and sticks of old RAM lying around, has anyone ever come up with a circuit diagram so that we can re-utilize that RAM as memory? I know that RAM, DRAM, DDR and DDR2 connectors are available for cheap.
Hmmmmm....too bad I'm not an EE

wayneinvt

@digitalpoet: I'm more curious as to what brings about this limitation.

Reilaos, Original Asus Fanboy

What about life of use?

How long will these things last?

resource

SSDs, from what I remember from techreport's article/testing, have awesome random access performance (good for webservers), but have really poor write performance. This was testing one of the best SSDs out there (fall of 2007).

The two biggest wins for SSDs are 1)no moving parts, and 2) very low power consumption. You can argue that the more storage the drive the more power it's going to use, but unlike to spinning disks, the idle power and usuage power is virtually the same.

jibbly

@OtterKing: RAID would be silly as SSD has much faster I/O speeds and also less data loss.

bobide

@ IMTHEKING

yep just plop it in, they come in the same form factor as reg. hard drives all you need to do is choose the right type meaning SATA or IDE

drum

I can't wait until price per gigs is more reasonable! RAID ARRAYS on SSD? The future is so cool!

OtterKing

@UofITom: all of the above! To get giant data storage like 500gig for example you need to squeeze everything in really tight. So extreme levels of percision are needed on the nano level, that sure isn't cheap to get done!

Engineering is getting really good at working on the nano level though and innovations are going to help drive down the cost. Materials aren't really the big issue, however as we keep shrinking these devices new materials will need to be used-like hafnium in intels 45nm penryn chips-to ensure everything works.

bobide

Compact flash can be easily adapted to 2.5 in Serial ATA. 32GB is $150.

clarkjw

thats pretty much it: No. Moving. Parts.

nutbastard

Thanks Matt for giving that brief. I've been watching the whole SSD build up. My only question open would be "if I have a current computer, say a MacBook Pro and SSD becomes a cheap solution to storage, can i simply change out my current harddrive for a SSD?"

Thanks,
Adam

ImTheKing

@UofITom: new process, new tech [even though they are using older tech to implement] plus, they have to build the routines so they are access and recognized as a hard drive [although most of that has already been done w/ the work on thumb drives].

I am really leaning towards "this is new, and hot, so let's make as much won,yen,dollar as possible while we can."

ltcmurray

How will flash memory impact Iomega's Zip drive market share?

j/k

One issue with flash is the finite limitation on the number of write cycles. For an iPod probably not an issue, for a hard drive....maybe? 10,000 or 100,000 write cycles equates to how many years of average computer use?

digitalpoet

Solid Snake Drives. Nice one, Matt!

Windhawk

There was talks of hybrid drives (I dont know if that concept cane to fruition yet) that store the OS on the flash section so it boots up lickity-split...

Hard Drives will soon be obsolete, thank christ.

exigent

Gadgets-For-Dummies section of Giz imminent? The question I want answered is WHY are these so expensive? Is it manufacturing process? Is it materials? Is it engineering? When can I have a 500gb disposable solid state iPod????

UofITom

They need to make a 128 and 256GB 1.8 in NAND SSD for pmp's, then we can throw around our Zune's, ipod's and other pmp's around without worrying about the HDD. All we'll be worrying about is the screen. (And maybe the ipod's metal easily-scratchable back)

Crazysamz

SSD's, as they are now, are NOT the future.

Not even close. This is a 1st gen product that only shows us what the future could LOOK like.

First off, RAID is ALWAYS a good idea. It can greatly increase performance and/or add fault tolerance. Whoever says that it is not is just a noob. No offense intended, but they are clearly a noob if they cannot understand the benefits of a RAID on storage, ESPECIALLY RAID ZERO.

IMHO, data storage without multiple points of failure is just STUPID. It does not matter whether your are a corporation, or some poor slob with 200 gigs of porn. Depending on the hour of the day, I'm BOTH :)

I like the idea of not losing my data. I like the idea of not losing my porn even more.

Secondly, SSD's suffer from 2 HUGE drawbacks.

1) Longevity issues. The more you write to it, the less effective storage space you have. That's just physics. The energy that it takes to go across that silicon barrier to manipulate the data elements ALSO slowly destroys it. Now it might be better then some flash memory, but still suffers from it ultimately. To be fair, most of the SSD flash drives should last at least a decade before they become unusable, but you will notice less space long before that. Ohh, and this is just a guess.... but I don't think RAIDs react real well to drives that change their size over time. I'm sure there would have to be a TON of firmware updates for a RAID array to recheck the size capacity and dynamically adjust the space across all the drives. Just a guess....

2) Write speeds are a fraction of read speeds. Most benchmarks show an average of 8x-10x slower sustained write speeds then a spinning hard drive. They even state lower write speeds then read speeds in the specifications. However, it is usually much worse than even the stated speed. With the normal amount of random writes that occur, and file systems that are not optimized for flash on SSD, you will find that the real world tested write peformance on an SSD drive is lacking.

There are some solutions, but it will be 2nd gen, or even 3rd gen SSD that get these fixes.

Ever notice why people that actually have an SSD on their notebook are not that impressed with it?

A lot of the posts and articles I see seem like propaganda. Google for all the real world tests of these drives and you will see what I am talking about it. People have just got to stop looking at these things with rose colored glasses.

P.S - For corporate use... these things are a joke. If you had a huge database with 30 million rows in it, an SSD would seem like a godsend with the reads. If you need to write to it..... 10x slower inserts and updates per second then what you would get with a normal drive.

ed207

Actually, longevity isn't an issue - with good wear levelling, it'll last as long as a spinny hard disk. And no, your space won't disappear. As blocks go bad, they get replaced from the spare sector pool - nominally 2% of blocks are allocated for bad and spare blocks. That's why you automatically lose 2% of space on any NAND flash device - it's either bad, or used by the flash translation layer as a spare block.

2) Read and write throughput are sucky on SSD. True, but the only way to get good read/write throughput on a spinny hard disk is to do big transfers. If you do little ones, the hard disk is equally slow. Take a hard disk, and let's say it has a 5ms access time (seek time predominantly). Guess what? You can only do 200 I/O requests a second. If you read 16kiB at a time (32 sectors, a typical request size for random reads/writes), you'll get a stunning... 3.2MB/sec. An SSD has a much lower seek time (nil, effectively), so it can sustain more I/O operations a second.

You won't notice it when you copy that 1GB file (unless your disk is badly fragmented), but it certainly makes it up in application snappiness, especially from pagefile swapping.

If you need throughput and know how to use it (video editing), a spinny hard disk will be better.

The problem with a hard disk is that it's become a lot less random-access and more linear access (like tape). Random I/O sucks, which is what the "average user" does more of.

The excitement over SSDs is that they are now sufficiently large and cheap enough that they are a contender. Remember when tape drives were the most effective way to get large storage cheap? Gigs of storage for a buck? Now they're not. SSDs were like that, and they'll get cheaper. Heck, go back nearly a decade, and remember when MP3 players had a pathetic 32 MEGABYTES of space? Or when a 128MB thumbdrive cost several hundred bucks? Now you can get 4GB thumbdrives for $20 on sale, flash-based MP3 players aren't so pathetic and now useful, etc. As once the only way to hold a decent music collection used to be an MP3 player with a hard disk, now you can buy them with flash media...

However, the main problem is that SSDs only get cheaper and increase in capacity with Moore's Law. Spinny hard disks increase in density far faster than that (about doubling every year, instead of 18 months for SSDs (Moore's Law)).

Bulk storage will continue to use spinny disks for the time being, but SSDs are starting to become interesting. There may be a point in maybe 5 years where the average user will have SSDs for their OS and a 10TB hard disk for their videos/music collection. And laptops may move to SSDs because they're big enough for corporate use, or UMPCs.

SSDs are new and they're becoming practical. There was a point when digital cameras used floppy disks and CD-R's because they were cheap media, but now flash has taken over. It's a competing technology, and innovations happen when there's competition. Maybe we'll have faster hard disks - always a good thing, right?

Worf