Consumer grade Flash in an SSD package - WAIF

RegHardware mentions Raidon's Compact Flash in a 2.5" SATA disk form factor which can be loaded up with cheap CF cards (32 Gig for $100 at the time of writing). The Raidon package holds two CF cards which can be mirrored for safety, or striped/concatenated (its not clear which) using "NRAID" which doesn't require both CF cards to be the same size.

I'd like to see a similar concept go even further using microSDHC, it should be possible to get a Wide Array of Inexpensive Flash (WAIF) based drive with consumer based pricing and very high storage capacity and bandwidth. Its going to be appropriate for read-mostly workloads such as personal use in laptops, static content web serving and archival storage.

Flash based SSD from Samsung

A nice review of a Flash based SSD in Engadget. This 64GB drive from Samsung is a drop-in replacement for a 2.5" hard drive. Its fast, but still too expensive for common use.

New advances in non-volatile memory - PMC, PRAM and NRAM

The end is in sight for spinning rust....

While flash based memory is nibbling at the edges of the disk industry, some new techniques are opening up prospects of even greater capacity and speeds in the next few years.

PMC stands for Programmable Metallization Cell, see this MIT review article.

PRAM stands for Phase-change Random Access Memory, some recent news seems to indicate that good progress is being made on PRAM as well as larger and faster Flash memory.

Update:

This SC07 article from The Register states that NRAM stands for Nanotube RAM, the makers claim that they will beat Flash on every metric in a few years time, and several of the big semiconductor companies are looking into the technology.

The Flashiest Storage for the Millicluster

Per-module Flash uses the tiny microSDHC format which is about half an inch square (the picture shown is about three times actual size), see http://www.getflashmemory.info/category/microsdhc/. The older microSD format limits to 2GB (available one off for less than $20 each), and microSDHC expands this limit to 32GB using a FAT32 derived on-card filesystem. At present 4GB cards are available and 8 GByte cards have been announced. Streaming read and write performance for microSDHC is much higher than before at about 20MByte/s. Writes are just as fast as reads, and the file-system automatically avoids wearing out any one location in the flash memory.

There is no seek time! Random access at 1000’s of IOPS is only limited by the device driver efficiency, and will be benchmarked. Raw performance is 112 x 4 GB = 448 Gbytes/RU, 18.8 TB/Rack. 112 x 20 MB/s = 2240 MB/s/RU, 94 GB/s/Rack. The implications for storage performance in general are profound. The reason it is so fast is that the storage capacity is solid state, in a single chip and it is directly connected to the CPU chip. There is nothing getting in the way!

Flash Solid State Disk (SSD) for Millicomputers

The days of keeping bits on spinning rust are coming to an end....

Both Samsung and SANdisk have announced 32GB SSDs. SANdisk's comsumes 0.9W max (competing disks take 1.9W) and fits in a 1.8 or 2.5" drive form factor with ATA interface. The sequential performance of these SSDs is similar to normal disks for reads, a bit slower for pure writes, but as soon as you start doing random reads or writes they are an order of magnitude faster than disks. The smaller the random accesses the bigger the relative speedup. The latest announcement from Samsung is a 1.8" 64GB version, and there is some discussion about the growth of this market in the press release.

This makes perfect sense for millcomputers. Small millicomputers can be directly connected to gigabytes of NAND flash via the SDIO interface, and larger millicomputers can use ATA interfaces to connect to flash-SSDs. The extra random performance of the SSD offsets the lack of disk spindles in a compact design and will make IO intensive workloads extremely competitive for millicomputing.

The MTBF (reliability) of SSDs is also far higher than disks. A mirrored pair of disks may be replaced with a single SSD since it has much higher reliability. This helps offset the current price premium paid for the SSD.

In the past SSDs have been built using technologies that were far more expensive than disks. Flash based SSDs have now reduced the gap, and the trend is that SSDs will eventually become bigger and cheaper than disks, the only question is when, and my answer is sooner than you think!

Update: here is a detailed benchmark review from Tomshardware.com.