Solid State Drives?

[Intelman07]

When will se see solid state drives at 20GB and at a fair price?

 

[BD231]

LONG time, HD manufactures will milk IDE and SCSI for all its worth before the switch is made.

 

[ai42]

Solid state drives are crazy to start off. Your basically talking 20gb of ram plus a controller to run it. Solid state is impractical because even though ram prices have decreased per MB we are still far off from this. Finally what honestly needs that kind of speed today? Can you name me a single application that would benifit from loading in 10ns as opposed to 500ms?

You want a solid state drive get one of those pointless usb flashdisks.

 

[pulse8]

Can you name me a single application that would benifit from loading in 10ns as opposed to 500ms?

Video.

The ability to edit uncompressed video without dozens of loud and mechanical drives would be a dream.

 

[bluemax]

Heh. Windows would love it too.

 

[aircooled]

It'll happen in our lifetime, but marketing will dictate when it happens. We all know that the technology is here today, but the demand not. Once the price/performace ratio is here it'll happen.

 

[BD231]

Can you name me a single application that would benifit from loading in 10ns as opposed to 500ms?

I think the right question would be, "Can you name me a single application that wouldn't benifit from loading in 10ns as opposed to 500ms?"

 

[ai42]

The ability to edit uncompressed video without dozens of loud and mechanical drives would be a dream.

Heh I doubt any processor or even most SMP machines can process fast enough to max out physical limitations of current drives. Also Video uses massive amounts of storage space so it is almost impractical to uses solid state drives in that application due to the extreme cost.

I think the right question would be, "Can you name me a single application that wouldn't benifit from loading in 10ns as opposed to 500ms?"

It's all about practicality it would be NICE if things would load that fast but would you notice? Hey my applications opens 10 times faster but it still less than 1/2 second and I would barely notice. And I pay 5-10x (being VERY conservative considering 1gb solid state disks runs 2-3 grand) more for a solid state drive.

You pipe dreamers are crazy I swear nothing is fast enough.

 

[AdamDuritz99]

You pipe dreamers are crazy I swear nothing is fast enough.

Now ya get it!

peace
sean

 

[DanFungus]

Originally posted by: pulse8

Can you name me a single application that would benifit from loading in 10ns as opposed to 500ms?

Video.

The ability to edit uncompressed video without dozens of loud and mechanical drives would be a dream.

oh man...that'd be sweet

 

[Ben50]

Solid state drives are already used in mission critical database servers where speed and access times are extremely important. Solid state drives would not exist if there was no application for them. Obviously they are in a niche market and will remain there for the foreseeable future. I think holographic storage will become the next mass storage device.

 

[Pauli]

Can you name me a single application that would benifit from loading in 10ns as opposed to 500ms?

Sheesh! [extreme sarcasm]I can tell you are a person who has breadth of computer experience[/extreme sarcasm].

If your view of the world only has UT2K3 and burning MP3s to CD, then I guess I can see why you would think it pointless. However, in the world I live and work in, some of us have applications that produce reports from 1,000,000+ database records that often take hours to run, primarily limited by the hard disk.

Do us all a favor and stop commenting on things that are beyond your narrow view of the computing world.

 

[dszd0g]

I have been looking into building one. My hold-up at the moment is finding a SCSI Ultra 160 interface ASIC. I guess I'll go IDE if I have to, but I like SCSI better. The most I've found thus far is Chipdir: SCSI and most of those chips are plain SCSI-2 and discontinued. I could design one in Verilog (would take a bit of work) and load it into an FPGA or CPLD, but I'll need to use one with a fast clock. Sending out a chip to manufacturing is beyond my means. Sending a PCB board out to manufacturing is within my means (a couple hundred bucks), which I will probably have to do.

I have found some USB 2.0 to SCSI-2 bridges, but I haven't found any USB 2.0 to Ultra 160 bridges. Anyone know of Ultra 160 interface ASIC solutions?

 

[Dug]

Heh I doubt any processor or even most SMP machines can process fast enough to max out physical limitations of current drives.

What are you smoking?
You better look at the speed difference between ram and hard disks and get back to us.
And you obviously haven't used Photoshop.

Your basically talking 20gb of ram plus a controller to run it. Solid state is impractical because even though ram prices have decreased per MB we are still far off from this.

Actually no. This is from BiTmicro

"E-Disk® all-electronic SCSI flash disk solid state drives require no device drivers for installation and operation, and boast I/O rates of up to 50,000 IOPS, up to 230 MB/sec sustained random read and write rates, up to 320 MB per second burst data rates, do not need hard disk drive, battery back-up nor UPS for data storage non-volatility, and have capacities up to 155 GB in 3.5-inch standard HDD form factor."

This is true for their IDE and Fiberoptic drives.

+ here's the other benefits

Operating Temperature
Commercial 0 to +70 degrees C
Extended -25 to +75 degrees C
Industrial -40 to +85 degrees C
Military -60 to +95 degrees C
Storage Temperature -65 to +125 degrees C
Humidity (Non condensing) 5% to 95%
Operating Shock Half Sine, 50G, 11ms; Half Sine, 1,500G, 0.5ms; Per MIL-STD-810C
Operating Vibration 16.4 G rms; Per MIL-STD-810E, Method 514.4-21
Operating Altitude -1,200 to 120,000 ft
Airflow None required

MTBF >1.9 Million Hours
Undetected Data Errors <10^-30
Data Reliability Built-in EDC/Interleaved Reed-Solomon ECC
Corrects up to Six Random Byte Error per 528-Byte Block
Detects Burst Errors up to Nine Bytes Long
[/b]Write Endurance Typical:[/b] 1 GB E-Disk® - 27 years @ 100 GB/day write cycles;
28,000 years @ 100 MB/day write cycles
Typical: 4.6 GB E-Disk® - 123 years @ 100 GB/day write cycles;
124,000 years @ 100 MB/day write cycles
Read Endurance Unlimited
Power-up Self Test Built-in
Diagnostics Self-Monitoring Diagnostics Database Built-in

 

[Tanked]

Heh I doubt any processor or even most SMP machines can process fast enough to max out physical limitations of current drives.

What are you smoking?
You better look at the speed difference between ram and hard disks and get back to us.
And you obviously haven't used Photoshop.

I second that. Want some numbers?

Absolute fastest IDE sustained transfer rate: 50 MB / sec
Absolute fastest SCSI sustained transfer rate: 100 MB / sec

Those estimates are, in my view, generous.

CPU Cache (Intel P4 2.0 GHz) sustained bandwidth: 70.4 GB / sec
Memory subsystem (Athlon with DDR266): 2.1 GB / sec
Seagate Barracuda IV 60 GB (My system): 32 MB / sec (Sandra)

I'd be hard pressed to find a hard drive pushing 70 gigabytes a second.

Not only would solid state devices improve bandwidth, it would also improve latencies, heat dissapation, noise, and hardware failures. All mechanical devices are destined to fail.

 

[Dug]

I'd be hard pressed to find a hard drive pushing 70 gigabytes a second.

Yes- there does seem to be a small difference between Mega and Giga.

 

[Pariah]

"Actually no. This is from BiTmicro....."

I didn't know Bitboys moved into the storage market... Why do all the product specifications have asterisks, or preliminary next to them? I couldn't find a mention of any of their products that wasn't on their website. That and it appears that the fastest drive they have that uses a "standard" interface is UW SCSI which is only 40MB/s, not 230MB/s. For $60 I can get an ATA drive much faster than that that will perform better in Photoshop and video editing.

 

[Tanked]

I didn't know Bitboys moved into the storage market... Why do all the product specifications have asterisks, or preliminary next to them? I couldn't find a mention of any of their products that wasn't on their website. That and it appears that the fastest drive they have that uses a "standard" interface is UW SCSI which is only 40MB/s, not 230MB/s. For $60 I can get an ATA drive much faster than that that will perform better in Photoshop and video editing.

Not necessarily true. A solid state drive will have dramatically better latencies and seek times. Also, mechanical drives get slower as they near the center of the disk - not true with a solid state drive.

 

[Pariah]

"Not necessarily true. A solid state drive will have dramatically better latencies and seek times."

It depends on the application, when dealing with huge files in photo/video editing, the access time isn't particularly important. They would perform phenomenally well in high transaction server environments and other applications with a high number of random accesses.

"Also, mechanical drives get slower as they near the center of the disk - not true with a solid state drive."

True, but even year old SCSI drives bottom out around 45MB/s which is faster than UW SCSI. The realworld limit of UW SCSI is around 33MB/s, well below current SCSI preformance levels.

 

[ai42]

What are you smoking?
You better look at the speed difference between ram and hard disks and get back to us.

Read it in context, he was talking video editing, most high end processors can only push 50-60fps a second and say you have a pretty high resolution video and are talking 400kb per frame (which is pretty rare considering DVD quality is around 200kb) per frame thats still 24MB a second. Most current IDE drives can handle that.

I still stand on my statment that Solid state drives are basically a bunch of ram because no matter how it is packaged it is still RAM in there (probbably flash ram).

 

[pulse8]

Originally posted by: ai42

What are you smoking?
You better look at the speed difference between ram and hard disks and get back to us.

Read it in context, he was talking video editing, most high end processors can only push 50-60fps a second and say you have a pretty high resolution video and are talking 400kb per frame (which is pretty rare considering DVD quality is around 200kb) per frame thats still 24MB a second. Most current IDE drives can handle that.

I still stand on my statment that Solid state drives are basically a bunch of ram because no matter how it is packaged it is still RAM in there (probbably flash ram).

You have absolutely NO idea what's involved in editing uncompressed video. If you can walk into any situation where you're dealing with a professional, uncompressed editing or online machine and tell me that they are using IDE drives, you should never be allowed to sit in front of a computer again.

As for pushing 50-60fps, where do you get that number from? If you're editing no matter what video your editing, whether it be for film finishing or video finishing, you're either working in 29.97 or 24 fps. There's no 50 or 60 fps in video unless you're talking about fields per second. Then that statement would be accurate, but no one really speaks in fields.

I'm talking about UNCOMPRESSED video here. Not DVD because that is HIGHLY compressed video. An uncompressed video could be about 1 or 2 megs at the very least per frame. Multiply 1MB times 29.97 frames in a second and you get about 30MB a second of SUSTAINED transfer that's needed. Now, this is ONLY for video. Add uncompressed audio and that increases the transfer rate needed as well as the access time needed for the drives. Also, unless you can tell me that an editor worth anything who edits in only one video track, then you'd probably have to add 30MB a second needed per stream if you're dealing with real-time, uncompressed video. This is all with only standard definition video. Add HD into the mix and I wouldn't be surprised if the per-frame size increased by at least 3 or 4 times.

Solid state drives, while at this stage would be VERY expensive for this amount of storage, they could definitely be taken advantage of to its fullest capabilities in this manner.

 

[TonyB]

Besides usage in high-end enterprise servers and databases, Solid State devices are also used by the military. One reason being that they have no moving parts and can withstand the brutal conditions by the military, like high G's and stuff.

I remember reading about hyper raid arrays back when Quantum was still alive and making the Rushmore SSD's. imagine 20 solid state drives working in Raid 5.

 

[BD231]

One real extra benefit of solid state drives that I want is the lifespan, IDE is CRAP on the lifespan side, and SCSI is better, but still crap when compared to solid state.

 

[Goosemaster]

Originally posted by: pulse8

Originally posted by: ai42

What are you smoking?
You better look at the speed difference between ram and hard disks and get back to us.

Read it in context, he was talking video editing, most high end processors can only push 50-60fps a second and say you have a pretty high resolution video and are talking 400kb per frame (which is pretty rare considering DVD quality is around 200kb) per frame thats still 24MB a second. Most current IDE drives can handle that.

I still stand on my statment that Solid state drives are basically a bunch of ram because no matter how it is packaged it is still RAM in there (probbably flash ram).

You have absolutely NO idea what's involved in editing uncompressed video. If you can walk into any situation where you're dealing with a professional, uncompressed editing or online machine and tell me that they are using IDE drives, you should never be allowed to sit in front of a computer again.

As for pushing 50-60fps, where do you get that number from? If you're editing no matter what video your editing, whether it be for film finishing or video finishing, you're either working in 29.97 or 24 fps. There's no 50 or 60 fps in video unless you're talking about fields per second. Then that statement would be accurate, but no one really speaks in fields.

I'm talking about UNCOMPRESSED video here. Not DVD because that is HIGHLY compressed video. An uncompressed video could be about 1 or 2 megs at the very least per frame. Multiply 1MB times 29.97 frames in a second and you get about 30MB a second of SUSTAINED transfer that's needed. Now, this is ONLY for video. Add uncompressed audio and that increases the transfer rate needed as well as the access time needed for the drives. Also, unless you can tell me that an editor worth anything who edits in only one video track, then you'd probably have to add 30MB a second needed per stream if you're dealing with real-time, uncompressed video. This is all with only standard definition video. Add HD into the mix and I wouldn't be surprised if the per-frame size increased by at least 3 or 4 times.

Solid state drives, while at this stage would be VERY expensive for this amount of storage, they could definitely be taken advantage of to its fullest capabilities in this manner.

Intersting....I guess "BOXX" computers might not be a ripoff after all

 

[Pariah]

"Solid state drives, while at this stage would be VERY expensive for this amount of storage, they could definitely be taken advantage of to its fullest capabilities in this manner."

Using SSD for video editing would be dumb for a number of reasons. Cost for one makes it completely impractical. 2, even if they were $5 a pop they would still be a terrible idea because they don't make them for recent storage interface standards. What you described above is pure throughput. When you're limited to UW-SCSI, it doesn't matter how fast the drive is capable of transferring data. Even if they made U320 SSD drives it still wouldn't be a practical solution for video editing. For $4000 I can build a SCSI RAID array that will exceed U320 throughput at the slowest parts of the drive and have over 200GB of storage that can hold about an 100 minutes of uncompressed DVD resolution video with audio. Anyone want to guess how far into the 5 digit range 200GB of SSD storage will cost? Using a drive capable of GB/s transfer rates won't yield any performance advantage when it's the interface dictating performance. The benefits of SSD and where mechanical drives cannot compete under any conditions is in high random I/O environments which video editing is not a part of.