Texas goes large with supersize SSD
Texas Memory Systems has announced its biggest flash SSD yet - the 5TB RamSan-620. This product comes as a 2U rack shelf and uses single level cell (SLC) flash. It is, TMS claims, the highest capacity SLC SSD on the market, as well as the fastest at 250,000 sustained I/Os per second (IOPS) for random reads and random writes. The …
...computers had moving parts in them. Imagine that! Hahahaha
My first computer needed a desk to put it on and you had to plug it into a wall socket.
And when your grandma wanted to watch a movie she had to put a disc in a special device. No, really! we used to have to use magnetic tapes before that..."
Looks like the end of disk storage is nigh then. Whaddya reckon? 5 years? 10?
And what's the longevity/reliability of SSD like?
It says how much the opposition is. How much is it?
Paris, 'cos she knows the value of hard currency.
How long till it gets down to a decent price, Probably silly money at the moment but give it a few years and bye bye disk storage (maybe)
You we're lucky
when I was a lad we had to be careful not to trip over the sodding great cable trailed across the living room floor for the VHS "Remote" control
(Of course when I say living room I actually meant our other hole in the ground we could use if it weren't raining... young people just take walls and roofs for granted these days)
To get on with digitising my vinyl.
Ahh well... the price will come down to domestic levels one day.
And I'll actually start on those LPs *one* day!
We are using RAID10 on our whirly drives. Is this thing in any way redundant?
To answer the question of longevity, it depends on a variety of factors including the number of disks used, how the drives achieve wear-leveling, temperature, and, of course, the disk technology. SLC flash is said to endure up to 100,000 writes, whereas MLC flash is said to endure up to 10,000 writes.
For those who (like myself) don't really know too much, Super Talent has a good white paper on SLC vs MLC:
http://www.supertalent.com/datasheets/SLC_vs_MLC%20whitepaper.pdf
EDN has an article on SLC vs MLC ("http://www.edn.com/article-partner/CA6319917.html") which tries to make 10,000 writes sound like a lot by saying "a USB drive application that used the 10,000 write/erase cycles would enable the user to completely write and erase the entire contents once per day for 27 years, well beyond the life of the hardware." Of course, most systems will write to a drive more than once per day. Imagine how many times your OS writes to its swap file. And keep in mind that as free space decreases, so does the effect/benefit of wear-leveling.
Also, don't believe the BS from this press release. First, they claim that a comparable HDD-based solution would cost over half a million, but then they conveniently fail to mention how much their kit is going to cost. They also massively inflate the number of HDDs which would be needed, and even more so the power required (they're obviously completely ignoring 2.5" HDDs which run at about 1/4 the power of 3.5" drives). Don't get me wrong, I'm sure this array has legitimate uses which will be worth the cost, and it IS an impressive array. But I can't stand it when a company compares their new technology to the worst contenders of an old technology just to make their product sound better. If your product is so good, then it should stand out on its own merits.
Procedure for digitising vinyl records.
1) Check if available on bittorrent
2) Download from bittorrent
This only works if you don't have really obscure stuff of course. I have what I consider to be some obscure tastes yet I still manage to find 90%+ of my (~500 or so) LP's on BT sites.
Of course, a massive number of hard drives would be required to match the throughput on a flash array, there is virtually no latency when there are no spinning platters!
I would love to see ZFS on some of these guys!
WOW!!!
