Solid state hard drive.

I remember seeing one of these at E3 a few years ago (ah, Kentia...), although the price point was ridiculous. I think it's a great idea, and one that's been way too long in coming. (Robot arms in your computer, manually accessing the data!?) Keep in mind, though, that a 32 GB hard disk hasn't been reasonable for quite some time, and having one of these and a hard drive doesn't provide many of the benefits of having just solid-state.

Quote:

Original post by Sneftel ...having one of these and a hard drive doesn't provide many of the benefits of having just solid-state.

With a 0.12ms response time you could set it as swap space and store large programs that take above average to load off a normal harddrive. Other than that though, 32GB would be useless. Still impressive though.

People underestimate the bottlenecks caused by IO blocking from seeking when multiple programs are reading/writing a disk at once.

Game developers: Now that we have dual core development machines and 2 gigs of RAM, it's the disk that's bottlenecking our productivity. Imagine being able to build code and data without having an IO seek bottleneck.

Quote:

Original post by Sneftel [...]having one of these and a hard drive doesn't provide many of the benefits of having just solid-state.

It's like a RAM drive, but permanent. The size is just right for a large swapfile and a few programs you want to start quickly. If only more porgrams were portable-friendly. It'd be great to have visual studio on a portable drive and have it just work without having to reinstall it on each computer you come to. Of course, you could just install an OS and some programs and use it as a complete bootable solution. It's not going to be your portable movie collection by any means, but it's large enough to have several development suites etc.
Also, I'm guesing it'd go well with laptops since it would reduce the chance of impact-induced data corruption from very low to basically nil.

I would bite. My macbook only has a 60GB sata drive built in and I have an external 400GB firewire for my big stuff, so when 64GB flash disks come out, it becomes realistic to use flash as the main HD. If I could get an extra hour or two out of battery life because of using a flash drive, it might be worth a bit extra money.

Quote:

Original post by lethalhamster Quote: Original post by Sneftel ...having one of these and a hard drive doesn't provide many of the benefits of having just solid-state. With a 0.12ms response time you could set it as swap space and store large programs that take above average to load off a normal harddrive. Other than that though, 32GB would be useless. Still impressive though.

It's not large, no, and not worth $600, but useless? Ok, I'm out of the gamer loop, but I'd be shocked if my parents' use much more than half of that. I do computational modelling and, if I'm reading "df -H" right, my workstation's got a 40GB drive.

If you look at the specs the people who will pay 600 USD for this are the military. It would be great for battlefield laptops as it

a) Uses less power and so runs longer.
b) Massive g-shock survivability.
c) Greater thermal range.
d) works at a greater range of air pressures (no HDD breath hole).

I'd bet good money that some spec-ops people have these on pre-order.

Quote:

Original post by lethalhamster With a 0.12ms response time you could set it as swap space and store large programs that take above average to load off a normal harddrive. Other than that though, 32GB would be useless. Still impressive though.

If you're going to be using it for swap space, you'd be better off with slow-ish non-persistent memory. Accelerating application loading could work, but $600 is a pretty big chunk of change to spend on saving eight seconds during startup.

Quote:

Original post by lethalhamster With a 0.12ms response time you could set it as swap space and store large programs that take above average to load off a normal harddrive. Other than that though, 32GB would be useless. Still impressive though.

How big of a swapper do you need? Upgrade to four gigs of system memory, which is many times faster than this solid state HDD, for about half the cost (assuming you've already got a gig).

Quote:

Original post by smr Quote: Original post by lethalhamster With a 0.12ms response time you could set it as swap space and store large programs that take above average to load off a normal harddrive. Other than that though, 32GB would be useless. Still impressive though. How big of a swapper do you need? Upgrade to four gigs of system memory, which is many times faster than this solid state HDD, for about half the cost (assuming you've already got a gig).

Stuff has to get into RAM first. It might not make an ideal swap drive but loading your OS and some of those core aps might go smoother. It would be interesting to see it fire tested in a few tasks.

Anyone know what the reliability of something like this in contrast to a standard HD?

Quote:

Original post by Sneftel Keep in mind, though, that a 32 GB hard disk hasn't been reasonable for quite some time, and having one of these and a hard drive doesn't provide many of the benefits of having just solid-state.

...

I've been using (solely) a 40GB HDD for the past 30 months without having any problems. The only reason I can see for needing a larger one is to have a bigger 'to-offload' cache - right now I can only hold about 15GB of downloaded anime/'assorted video'/etc before needing to burn it to DVD+R; however, that still gives me more than enough time to watch everything.

Granted, I question the performance gain on a personal computer - I was under the impression that this was primarily developed for large databases/servers which *need* the quick HDD access speeds, but the discussion in this thread suggests otherwise.

Also, shouldn't this be in the Hardware Discussion section?

Quote:

Original post by Goober King Stuff has to get into RAM first. It might not make an ideal swap drive but loading your OS and some of those core aps might go smoother. It would be interesting to see it fire tested in a few tasks. Anyone know what the reliability of something like this in contrast to a standard HD?

Absolutely. I was only commenting on the swap.

As far as reliability, there is a caveat. They have limited write cycles. Excessive paging could reduce the life of the drive faster than what could be deemed acceptable. This could also have a negative impact on their usefulness as a database storage medium.

Quote:

Original post by smr As far as reliability, there is a caveat. They have limited write cycles. Excessive paging could reduce the life of the drive faster than what could be deemed acceptable. This could also have a negative impact on their usefulness as a database storage medium.

IIRC, SanDisk made some comments about that awhile back when I first read about this, how they have some system set up where the wear on the disk is distributed such that it dies evenly, and how that limitation is basically a thing of the past, and that their solid state drives will last longer than conventional ones or something. Lemmie see if I can dig the article up.

Oh, its also in the article posted by the OP -

Quote:

Although flash memory can be known to eventually "wear out" due to writing to the same area repeatedly, modern flash memory controllers have automatic "wear-leveling" to ensure longevity of the device by making sure that sectors are being written to evenly and bad sectors are dynamically remapped to good ones. According to SanDisk, the SSD UATA 5000 is rated at "two million hours mean time between failure (MTBF)."

I'm not sure how accurate that is, or what they mean by 'two million hours', but they seem to suggest that it isn't a problem. Grain of salt, of course.

It occurs to me that we have a hardware forum now. May as well use it.

Quote:

Original post by MushuAccording to SanDisk, the SSD UATA 5000 is rated at "two million hours mean time between failure (MTBF)."

Two million hours playing solitaire or two million hours playing world of warcraft on 256 megs of ram?

Now that's pretty impressive.

I don't think it will become widespread until the price drops, but it's a great concept. The computer I'm on at the moment actually has a 32GB hard drive, and doesn't need any more, and it's a desktop. On a laptop, especially, this would be a great change.

Quote:

Original post by smr Quote: Original post by MushuAccording to SanDisk, the SSD UATA 5000 is rated at "two million hours mean time between failure (MTBF)." Two million hours playing solitaire or two million hours playing world of warcraft on 256 megs of ram?

Expect solitare.

Quote:

Original post by Thermodynamics The price tag looks like $600 right now but it should come down.

For a PC (assuming U$D 60.00 per Giga and if I could install them all togheter) I would rather expend that money in 10GB of RAM and have a smaller but a hell of a fast RAM-Disk.

The technology is going to be good, but only for some specific markets. The power usage, heat-generation, and lack of moving parts will make it very reliable and portable, but until the price comes down (and it will come down -- just look at how solidstate manufacturing prices have dropped in 20 years...) significantly, it will be overlooked by many.

Technologically, it's probably superior. But so was the betamax.