SPCR

Tom's Hardware has a video of the announcement of a new PCIe-based 640GB flash storage device.

Not that I normally indulge in Tom's Hardware, but this seemed interesting - especially if they can get the price point down. Looks as if it uses a standard PCIe x8 connection. Depending on how reliable and inexpensive it is, could be an ideal quiet desktop 'drive' (especially if you have a backup on standard magnetic media).

Supposedly they'll have a 1.2TB version by end-of-year (didn't specify calendar year or financial year).

Let the drooling begin!

-D

Great idea, but at $30/GB, totally out of my league.

I hope the competition will grow up in this domain (SSD, NAND on PCI-e) and we will get reasonable prices.

30$ * 640 = 19200$, too high, even if the performance seems to be very good.

30$/GB is ~100x price/GB of an 7200 drive. I would be interested in something that is max 10x the price/GB of a regular drive.

i'm drooling

finally something that would make me do a serious upgrade, since my current mobo doesn't have any PCIe slots. of course the price of this would have to come waaaaaaaaayyyyy down. maybe in a few years this will be affordable for mortals.

the video on that site is worth watching, btw. they run a very impressive benchmark.

Like a lot of other new products, they're just gouging. The contract price this month for NAND flash is down to $5.50/GB. If they set a fair price for their base engineering (the parallel flash controller, which is really bog-standard technology) I would expect the real market price to be around $10/GB. Still pretty pricey, but a more realistic indicator of where the prices should be in 6 months or a year's time.

Ever so slowly inching towards 3$/GB. Two years from now? Three? That will be the tipping point...

Why again PCI-E?

Why not standard SATA II?

Sounds like it needs a lot of juice and may generate lots of heat as well.

halcyon wrote:Why again PCI-E?

Why not standard SATA II?

Sounds like it needs a lot of juice and may generate lots of heat as well.

SATA II does not support read rates of 800 megabytes per second and writes at 600 MB/sec.

Flash drives do not produce much heat at all.

If this thing cost 19200$ now, and if we assume flash prices keep dropping exponentially 40% per year, then this device would cost 100$ by 2023.

Should have read the article. For dedicated corp. storage at this point and price range.

Wait till it's 0.50/GB or lower.

Hope the tech catches on. The current bulk of SATA/PATA flash drives are pathetic in performance, barely on the level of WD Raptor in many cases.

Of course, for us silence addicts the noise reduced is the key, but still.

halcyon wrote:Wait till it's 0.50/GB or lower.

Assuming you meant 0.50/MB? Yeah, I would pay that for a 16GB OS/APPs drive.

Would we even need ram with this?

Badger wrote:Would we even need ram with this?

An interesting question.

Because of the hardware architecture, RAM is expected and must exist.

We just need faster RAM

Badger wrote:Would we even need ram with this?

It's still way too slow. The fastest flash devices have c.a. 100 ns. access time. Standard DDR2 800 CL5 - 6.25 ns.

The IOdrive was mentioned at LinuxWorld


Most Innovative Hardware Solution

-- Violin Memory: Violin 1010 with 1 Million IOPS Linux Driver

-- Unicon Systems, Inc.: Helios Digital Signage System

-- Fusion-io: ioDrive

The low power consumption and DAS are a step in the right direction. Now the waiting game begins to see when $$/Gig hits the right point. I'd love to see a motherboard with a modest SSD for the OS and such.

2 second boot times

kabanan wrote:

halcyon wrote:
Sounds like it needs a lot of juice and may generate lots of heat as well.

Flash drives do not produce much heat at all.

Looking at that heatsink, something obviously takes a bit of power. (Probably the controller).

Actually I have been wondering about the power consumption question for flash drives. I notice that the USB flash drives get noticeably warm when they are plugged into a port (seems like warm up whether using or not).

Anybody have pointers to references on how much power flash drives (USB and/or otherwise) take - operating, idle, etc.?

Thanks

scdr wrote:

kabanan wrote:

halcyon wrote:
Sounds like it needs a lot of juice and may generate lots of heat as well.

Flash drives do not produce much heat at all.

Looking at that heatsink, something obviously takes a bit of power. (Probably the controller).

Actually I have been wondering about the power consumption question for flash drives. I notice that the USB flash drives get noticeably warm when they are plugged into a port (seems like warm up whether using or not).

Anybody have pointers to references on how much power flash drives (USB and/or otherwise) take - operating, idle, etc.?

Thanks

Good question, I'd like to know too.
This says that maximum for any USB device is 0.5 A @ 5V which counts for 2.5 W.
However, my USB stick doesn't warm up and definitely doesn't have a lot of surface to dissipate heat.

Review.

Sick.

Mention is made of the inability to use these as a boot drive "for now". Will be interesting to see if the forthcoming consumer version can be used as a boot device.

...could you imagine putting a couple of these suckers in RAID 0?

bgiddins wrote:Mention is made of the inability to use these as a boot drive "for now". Will be interesting to see if the forthcoming consumer version can be used as a boot device.

Since the price is $3000 for 80 GB, who cares?
Of course it can be fixed

Mats wrote:Since the price is $3000 for 80 GB, who cares?

...because like all other SSDs, the price should fall in time, and some of us might actually be interested when they hit affordability?

bgiddins wrote:

Mats wrote:Since the price is $3000 for 80 GB, who cares?

...because like all other SSDs, the price should fall in time, and some of us might actually be interested when they hit affordability?

Well everybody knows that, but the boot issue is not like it can't be fixed. Nothing to worry about, and don't wait tool long for that affordability, it will take years.

Mats wrote:

bgiddins wrote:Mention is made of the inability to use these as a boot drive "for now". Will be interesting to see if the forthcoming consumer version can be used as a boot device.

Since the price is $3000 for 80 GB, who cares?
Of course it can be fixed

Who cares about capacity in here? How much does your OS take? My < 20 GB with all programs.

m^2 wrote:

Mats wrote:

bgiddins wrote:Mention is made of the inability to use these as a boot drive "for now". Will be interesting to see if the forthcoming consumer version can be used as a boot device.

Since the price is $3000 for 80 GB, who cares?
Of course it can be fixed

Who cares about capacity in here? How much does your OS take? My < 20 GB with all programs.

I concur. My main gamming rig currently is using 18gb of storage in total.

Unless your recording/saving your DVD collection on your hard drive, or using your PC for a DVR, you really dont need much more than 100gb.

Aris wrote:

m^2 wrote:

Mats wrote: Since the price is $3000 for 80 GB, who cares?
Of course it can be fixed

Who cares about capacity in here? How much does your OS take? My < 20 GB with all programs.

I concur. My main gamming rig currently is using 18gb of storage in total.

Unless your recording/saving your DVD collection on your hard drive, or using your PC for a DVR, you really dont need much more than 100gb.

And it's no problem to buy a separate HDD for it. You'll get snappy OS and good capacity.

Aris wrote:My main gamming rig currently is using 18gb of storage in total.

What about the games? At least my games are 6 GB each?

http://www.fusionio.com/PressDetails.aspx?id=46

Look at that we're now down to $1000 for 80GB version Q1.

Still expensive vs Intel SSD but way better performance.