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Solid State Hard Drives 69

Posted by CmdrTaco from the toys-for-the-future dept.
IcePick writes " Solid State Hard Drives made by Quantum. Installs and is recognized as a regular hard drive. Has a seek time of under 60 micro-seconds. Imagine using it as a swap disk for Windoze or other programs that need swap files. Some versions are even Non-Volatile! I wonder why Quantum has been so quiet about them? "
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Solid State Hard Drives More

Solid State Hard Drives

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  • Is the pricing right for robots? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Is the pricing low enough to be within the range of amateur hobbyists? If so, it would be a wonderful addition to a small robot, or for any electronic application requiring the stability of a solid state drive (I seem to remember a discussion about automobile computers a few days ago on /.).

    Brock Arnason
    M.Eng. Physics
    United Bank of Switzerland

  • SSD are old hat, and still as expensive (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    SSD have been around for decades, and have always been as expensive as this. I used a system with magnetic core emulating disks in the 1970s; semiconductor disks are nearly as old.

    For mostly read-only use, the flash disks made by companies such as SanDisk work fine. Laptop IDE connector. Using them as swap will wear them out too fast, as the number of writes is limited. Note that some of the smaller ones are starting to show up in the surplus market; $200 for 20MB.

  • If you can't add memory.... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    If you already have say 2 or 4 GB memory (why not on a quad Xeon ?). How can you improve things. You
    put a SSD. Remember on Linux you can only use 2GB RAM (instead of 4) because of the virtual memory.

    Non volatile version can be useful for putting important datas that need fast access for example
    databases (what a surprise). You wouldn't lose all your data, I suppose. Even though the transfer rate doesn't seem spectacular (">30MB/s") the access time is (two orders of magnitude at least)...

  • From an actual user (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I have two of prototype units on evaluation
    and they are just great for their purpose.
    These drives are designed to keep database
    logs.

    My only gripe with Quantum is that it drags
    its feet with FC-AL version of these drives.

    I suppose that it is not cost effective to
    use them for swap because they cost about
    the same as main memory, counting per megabyte.

    --P
  • Sometimes 1GB just isn't enough. There's at least one program we use here (FormZ, unfortunately running on Windows, but I'm sure it would be almost as bad were it ported to Linux), that routinely exceeds 1.5GB in memory usage. I don't find it too hard to imagine someone using such software in a way that uses more. Now, if you take a 2GB memory motherboard, and a 1.5GB rushmore as swap space, you're set for fast swap up to 3.5GB of total memory usage. That can come in handy when you're doing serious 3D rendering.
  • Um, of course it swaps. What do you expect it to do? Use up all the free memory with programs that are sleeping etc? I have a 128MB of RAM, and yes, I use swap under Linux. But compared to 98 where for some strange reason I've got 50MB of used memory on bootup and I start swapping pretty heavily after I open just one IE window....

    Nick

  • FWIW, I have a GNU/Linux with 96 megs of memory and I go into swap all the time.

    It will use swap even if you'll have more RAM than your current swap plus current RAM size -- try to disable swap, and you'll see that things will still work, unless you run something huge.

  • Posted by hansc:






    I called up Bell Microproducts (I guess they're suffering from the Analog Slashdot effect now).


    the RU5107 (1Gig) costs $25,918.-


    the RU3026 (300MB) costs $8,400.-


    Companies like SuperNews that curn so many small little USENET stories, have so many hits to the hard drives, that normal drives litterally break down in no time. They NEED to use Solid state drives, otherwise they're replacing hard drives constantly.
    --
    Proud member of SVLUG
  • Posted by The Apocalyptic Lawnmower:

    For losers that (have to) use NT (as I do ATM), since NT cannot work without a swapfile. We have a machine here that has 1GB of mem and if I set the swap to minimum (2MB) the machine goes bonkers when I start Njetscape.

    According to our sysadmin it is because of the way NT allocates memory. Anyone has more info on that? It'll probably be good for a laugh.

    - da Lawn
  • IF you're using it for swap, it becomes a lot more expensive than simply adding the same amount as main memory. Finging motherbaords to adress 1G is no big deal these days
  • Why not just common board and CPU, with 1Gb or so or RAM, and a 100Mb/s ether card, that boots linux of a floppy.

    Add a UPS and a harddisk for power-off memory retention if you require it. (don't need the floppy then). Much cheaper than SCSI and not much worse.

  • would be a cheap box with a bunch of simm slots in it, so I could finally put all those old 72-pin simms I have to good use.

    I must have a couple of gigs worth of 4meg 72-pin simms that would make a wicked-ass RAM drive.
  • It looks like the largest of these drives is 1.6GB. Still good for a swapfile, but not much else.

    --
    Timur "too sexy for my code" Tabi, timur@tabi.org, http://www.tabi.org
  • Everyone says they're expensive. Just how expensive are they? I assume they're cheaper than DRAM per-unit of storage, right?
    --
  • I remember an ad from ages ago for a device which supposedly would load C64 games in 8 seconds or something, from a CD. Supposedly you attached the CD player to the C64 with a special cable of some sort.

    Anyone know how that may have worked? My suspicion would be an interface from the digital output of a CD player to the C64's bus, writing directly to its RAM. Though most CD players didn't have digital outputs, IIRC.
  • According to Stephen C. Tweeedie, when we finally get journaling for ext2, the journal will be able to live on a separate filesystem, e.g. a non-volatile ramdisk. That will make for an awfully nice fileserver :-)

  • "I wonder why Quantum has been so quiet about them?"

    Because they're EXPENSIVE. NEC makes SSDD's, too. Basically, they're intended for systems that need fast workspace and can't manage memory effectively, but can't be upgraded in other ways. Banks and other transaction-heavy, legacy-hardware operations eat 'em up.

    Often, it seems cheaper and easier to retrofit old systems rather than port code to newer, faster systems. Devil you know vs. devil you don't and all that.

  • Flash, like EEPROM has a finite write/erase cycle endurance. It used to be around 10,000 writes, then as processes improved manufacturers guaranteed 100,000 write/erase cycles, and now 1,000,000 cycle endurance is common.

    But 1M-writes is a matter of a few seconds with the right program. Once a cell has gone beyond its endurance of writes it stops remembering your data correctly.

    There are remapping algorithms for moving writes around the total amount of memory, but if you will be committing a lot of writes over a long period (fifo type applications, for example) then these devices are not for you.

    However, if your data changes seldom, but is read a lot more than written, they can make a lot of sense.
  • we use DiskOnChip2000 here at works, M-System make also SSD like quantum's one (IDE)

    check m-sys [m-sys.com] it's cheaper than quantum i think
    --
  • Can we get a SCSI-3 host adapter to behave as if it were a client disk drive? If so, put said SCSI card in a system with a gig of SDRAM, a processor fast enough to handle both, a UPS and a magnetic drive for power-down/power failure backups and suddenly you've got a solid state disk with .2% of the seek time for 20% of the cost...
  • Yes, and Lynx -- even running in 8 instances in 8 xterms under X -- won't make it swap as
    easily as 8 Navigator windows would.

    Navigator under Windows isn't happy about having 8 windows open either.

    Your point was what, to compare browsers?
  • RAMdisks used to be popular in the pre-Windoze days. Is there a technical reason you don't hear much about them now?

    I understand the basic issue you don't want to take memory away from cache and the os/application space... my question assumes the computer has enough memory to operate correctly, and the reason you even want a RAMdisk is because many applications -always- create .tmp files on the disk regardless of how much memory is available and unused.



  • Using a RAMdisk *strictly* for application and system temporary files. Like for the print spooler if it uses disk space, or other files not created by the user and which should if the app doesn't forget, be deleted.

    Ever open a Word document with graphics and linked objects? It creates a ton of tmp files and they're not always deleted when you exit. Another example is WinZIP, which for SOME reason will still use your TEMP space even if you open zips on a system with lots of memory. If you have 1.5 GB RAM I don't see why a compression utility should use the hard disk as scratch space.
  • I miss the "Commodore-64 2-second boot" days.

    Kythe
    (Remove "x"'s from
  • There was a nice little fastloader I "borrowed" from the game "Impossible Mission" that cut loading time by a factor of about 10. It worked like a charm for virtually any file one wanted to load.

    The real speed demons were the old tape drives. What was the throughput on those, 'anyone remember? Maybe about 10 kB/minute? Kids today just don't know how easy they've got it... ;^)

    One could do some pretty funky things with those 1541 drives. The on-board processor and memory made for some fun times.

    Kythe
    (Remove "x"'s from

  • ACC (Score:1)

    by Akira1 ( 5566 )
    What happened to American Computer Corporation's plans to release SSD drives that were near the cost of a standard magnetic hard disk drive. I remember reading about it. Course something could be said for the fact that the company claimed the technology was taken from aliens, and that AT&T invented the transistor by reverse-engineering parts from the Roswell crash..... but hey, everyone is a bit eccentric sometimes

  • ACC (Score:1)

    by Akira1 ( 5566 )

    btw, URL is

  • ACC (Score:1)

    by Akira1 ( 5566 )
    btw, url is http://accpc.com/tcapdisplay.htm

  • uh duh (Score:1)

    by foog ( 6321 )
    Sheesh, if you're swapping you should add more RAM.

    One of these would be great for your / partition though if you want to boot fast... then again, considering the prevalence of the uptime fetish...
  • Back in the DOS days, with my whopping 8mb memory, my autoexec.bat would create a 500k ram disk and copy utilities like pkzip, list, zdir et al to it. Made the machine really snappy! It's no longer useful due to good disk caches.
  • These would make the ultimate mp3 storage for in-car players. Of course, with the prices being as high as they are, they would probably only be at home in ultra-expensive cars...

    All you would need is a motherboard with built in sound and scsi, one of these, and some hack of an interface to the serial or parallel port. With a low profile socket-7 processor, you could probably fit the entire contraption under the passenger seat!!!
  • There used to be a company that sold something similar to that, it had 4 72 pin simm slots, a narrow scsi interface, and a nicad batery pack...Maximum 256 megs..

    Those three pieces of technology should date the little bugger for ya.. I haven't seen one in several years...
  • How about using 150 NS DRAM instead of 10 NS SDRAM???? Even with "slow" DRAM, the device would obliterate a head/platter unit.... the place I would like to see something like this is indeed for those programs the use /tmp or some other such temp files... Obviously putting swap space on the drive would be worthless instead of spending much less money on additional system memory, but some programs MUST use temp files...
  • Quantum has been making solid state drives for quite some time. They are effective for some purposes. They are usually cheaper than RAM and have higher throughput than traditional disks. They have gotten less popular over time as disks have gotten faster and cheap memory technology hasn't as much. Back in the late 80s, a solid-state drive could really be a system boost.

    Anyway, yes they exist. They are a bit expensive, and several media makers (seagate, quantum) sell them.
  • Solid state disks are generally used with I/O critical database servers like Sybase and Oracle. You can place your OLTP critical data on them instead of a regular disk and see some immediate improvements in performance and throughput.

    With DRAM prices having been in the tank lately, they ought to be almost reasonable (considering what they used to cost). Of course, working in the DRAM business, I say buy 'em!
  • Digiteck has a rushmore quantum 950Mb for
    $15,000. You could buy more than a dozen GIGS
    for that much of PC100 DIMMs...
  • CALL EH38J-YF QUANTUM CORPORA SOLID STATEDRI 1+ 12944.000 CALL
    CALL EH54E-TY QUANTUM CORPORA ESP5047 475MB W 1+ 10824.000 CALL
    CALL EH54E-YF QUANTUM CORPORA SLDSTATE 475MB 1+ 10190.000 CALL
    CALL EH54F-TY QUANTUM CORPORA ESP5047W 475MB 1+ 10824.000 CALL
    CALL EH54G-TY QUANTUM CORPORA ESP5047WD 475MB 1+ 10824.000 CALL
    CALL EH54G-YF QUANTUM CORPORA ESP5047WD 475MB 1+ 10190.000 CALL
    CALL EH59E-FP QUANTUM CORPORA SOLID STATE DRI CALL CALL CALL
    CALL EH59E-TY QUANTUM CORPORA ESP5095 950MB W 1+ 19645.000 CALL
    CALL EH59E-YF QUANTUM CORPORA ESP5095 950MB W 1+ 19011.000 CALL
    CALL EH59G-TY QUANTUM CORPORA ESP5095WD 950MB 1+ 19645.000 CALL
  • You see ads for these drives in computer magazines
    like COMPUTER SHOPPER all the time! There is no
    reason to really push advertisement of these items
    because they are extremely expensive and very few
    of us can afford them.

    This article about solid state disk drives is not news in any way whatsoever. There is nothing new here...
  • Another place where I think it would serve a useful purpose is in maintaining the local cache for the AFS cache manager. The CODA file system
    has a similar process, but I don't remember if
    it's called a cache manager or not. Also, and
    this is really repeating what a couple of people
    have already said, if a job is IO bound, then
    actually using it for a filesystem would not be
    unreasonable. Like all things, an engineering
    decision would need to be made on the cost/benifit
    ratio. I do think they are cool, but last time
    I saw prices I shuddered!
  • Being an engineer that actively maintains a supercomputer SSD, and having built one for home once upon a time, I think I can safely comment here. SSDs are dieing out due to high prices and the cheapness of disk and memory today.

    In some fields such as supercomputing they will
    be with us for a while. When 2 gigs of memory
    costs upwards of $2million USD, SSDs are worthwhile.

    For home use their used to be a few companies
    that sold enclosures that were SCSI-1/2 compat. and took standard 30 pinn simms. The first I recall was on Mac, and used mac simms (ugh)
    Later I built one myself using 30 pin parity
    and built the parity into SCSI parity.

    Wish I could find a home kit to reuse all
    these 30 and 72 pinn simms, sipps and dimms...
    It would make a NIFTY addition to an online
    server for something like Tribes or quake.
    AFS cache or NFS cachefs space...

    fly on the wall...
  • These drives are old news. They've been around for several years. We had a few installed in our VAX 3000/4000 cluster around 1994...but the technology hasn't particularly matured and the pricing is astronomically high. They are a dying breed. We dumped ours in favor of magnetic media and the amount of hard drive space that we were able to buy for the money was significantly greater than the amount of solid state "drive" space. Count me out.
  • Solid state disks cab be bought from almost any self-respecting electronics manufacturer... They're typically delivered either as a single chip, or as a small unit with IDE interface. There's also lots of manufacturers of PCMCIA based solid state disks, up to about 300 MB I believe.

    And most are non-volatile. Actually I can't remember seeing ads for anything but non-volatile solid state disks... After all, it's meant to replace a normal harddisk, not RAM.

  • There was talk of 'how to make a computer that can withstand are cars environment (hot/cold extremes, humidity and extreme vibration).

    One place SSD's are VERY useful is in embedded systems - no mechanical motion will affect them, they work on low power - great for logging data that's being collected (drop a PIC with an SSD into a shipping container to monitor heat/humid/vibration and make the shipper honor agreements (not an uncommon use). Don't use them for Swap - RAM is a gazillionth the price and just as useful.

    C

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