SSDs the size of a postage stamp coming soon

February 15, 2010 by Lin Edwards weblog
SSDs the size of a postage stamp coming soon

(PhysOrg.com) -- One-terabyte (TB) solid state drives (SSDs) are expected to be released in a couple of years, and they will be about the size of the average postage stamp.

A team of Japanese researchers from Toshiba and the Keio University in Tokyo, led by Professor Tadahiro Kuroda, claims to have developed a technique that will reduce the size of SSDs by around 90 per cent. Not only that, but the technology also increases their by 70 per cent and makes them cheaper to manufacture.

A prototype of the new consists of one controller chip and 128 NAND flash memory chips. The data transfer speed is said to be 2 GB per second, and Nikkei said that since the system is based on radio communication its production costs are lower. All this could help SSDs become the standard system for in the future.

The SSDs are expected to be available commercially in 2012, and by then their specifications may have improved even further. Their expected retail price is unknown at this stage.

More information: Nikkei: http://www.nni.nik … DA9J2093.htm (requires subscription)

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antialias
Feb 15, 2010

Rank: 4.5 / 5 (2)
If this turns out to be true then it's great. However using radio communication would make these types of storage susceptible to eavesdropping.

Needs a good shielding before it goes into any device that handles sensitive data.
Branden520
Feb 15, 2010

Rank: 3.3 / 5 (3)
Wouldn't it make sense to just mount these things to the motherboard? I think we'd have to move to a different bus to keep up with the disk. Especially for those of us who want RAID 0. Hmm I can only imagine having four of these striped up and pushing a full length DVD per sec.

Does anyone know the data handling rate of a quad core 3Ghz processor? Would this finally shift the bottleneck off of disk I/O?
Nik_2213
Feb 15, 2010

Rank: 4 / 5 (2)
"For more info, Subscription required."
Uh, thanks.

Other than that, I'd like a SSD as virtual RAM for my CAD tower.
antialias
Feb 15, 2010

Rank: 5 / 5 (3)
Wouldn't it make sense to just mount these things to the motherboard?

You can check bit rates from devices here

http://en.wikiped...ndwidths

For DDR3 that goes up to 52GB/s, so 'disc'-IO will still be the bottleneck.

(And no: not a good idea to replace RAM with this type of SDD unless you want to seriously slow down your machine. Also the number of rewrite cycles of SDDs are severly limited compared to regular RAM)
Branden520
Feb 15, 2010

Rank: 4.5 / 5 (2)
Oh well I'll have to settle with the slow I/O speeds set to come. *sigh* I just can't stand copying my library of 500GB in a couple minutes.

I want it done as soon as I think about clicking.
dirk_bruere
Feb 15, 2010

Rank: 1 / 5 (1)
Connecting with USB3 should solve the problem
Raygunner
Feb 15, 2010

Rank: not rated yet
Wire the chips as parallel read/write and you would have your speed - 10 chips = 20 Gbs, 20 chips = 40Gbs, etc. Right?
ShotmanMaslo
Feb 16, 2010

Rank: 1 / 5 (1)
Why not just plug it into PCI express? 2-4 GB/s...
Buyck
Feb 16, 2010

Rank: 4.7 / 5 (3)
The evolutions in hardware are rapidly increasing! We are moving from microelectronics to nanoelectronics.
jgelt
Feb 16, 2010

Rank: 1 / 5 (1)
I think it will be wonderful when my OS and data is in my pocket and any old computer can be a toaster for my USB stick.
With a read-only switch on my stick, there's nothing short of mugging that can hack it.
Adriab
Feb 16, 2010

Rank: 2 / 5 (1)
Current SATA allows for up to around 3GB/s, but the issue is not the connection speed limit as it is the physical media's. The storage device can only read/write so fast.

Even if you try to do a parallel write, you wouldn't gain too much speed. Introducing parallel writing would introduce more complexity, and the need to verify the write went properly.
Branden520
Feb 16, 2010

Rank: not rated yet
Just to verify. SATA II allows 3 Gbps not 3 GBps. Which comes out to roughly 360MBps. I can personally attest to this bus speed with 4x SATA II RAID 0 disks, I get R/W speeds of 180MB/s or 360MB/s of total throughput. Does no good to add anymore disks because the bus chokes on the data.
baudrunner
Feb 16, 2010

Rank: 4 / 5 (2)
What about the obstacles? The challenge is not so much in capacity as in power consumption and heat handling limitations. Has it occurred to anyone to factor into global warming all those server farms that consume over 1% of all power produced in America? Sure, they are in a cooled environment, but the heat has to go someplace. Law of conservation of mass and energy?
Adriab
Feb 18, 2010

Rank: 5 / 5 (1)
SATA II allows 3 Gbps not 3 GBps


Oops sorry, you're right, I held shift too long while typing.
phlipper
Feb 21, 2010

Rank: not rated yet
My guess is that this statement "since the system is based on radio communication, its production costs are lower" reflects an error in translation. Perhaps they mean the same technology that imprints modern silicon chips....that go into radios!! Just a WAG.
MorituriMax
Feb 22, 2010

Rank: not rated yet
I don't believe it. you never get smaller, more storage, and cheaper all at the saame time. the price ALWAYS goes up if you want any two of those things.
degojoey
Feb 22, 2010

Rank: not rated yet
sure the price of manufacturing will go down dramatically, but your correct as with any new technology, everyone has to stick their hand in the pot and grab what they can, which passes off a much much higher cost to the consumer. More money for corporate america, great!
lpbman
Feb 23, 2010

Rank: not rated yet
1tb drives ssd's are already available from OCZ, yours for the low, low price of $4000.
http://www.amazon...p;sr=1-1
Rank 4.6 /5 (39 votes)
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