640 Gb Flash Card

[Guest Reimar]

Many question about high capacity flash drive! Those will be available starting December this year but not be shocked about the price: US$ 30.00 per 1 GB!!

But read the article by yourself:

640GB flash card blows hard drives away

• 3rd October 2007
  
• Ian Grayson
  
• PC Hardware, Windows
  

Will flash kill off the humble hard drive?Utah-based start-up company Fusion-io has unveiled a blisteringly fast, 640GB flash-based PCIe storage card it says can out perform hard drives by a factor of one thousand.

The initial model is designed to slot into a data centre chassis, but it could also be used inside a workstation or suitable PC.

Called the ioDrive, the card can read data at 800 megabytes per second and write at 600 megabytes a second. Initially it will be available in 80, 320 and 640GB versions, however the company has plans to ship a 1.2 terabyte version a little further down the track.

The card's impressive performance, currently sitting at 100,000 IOPS (input / output per second) comes from a proprietary technology called ioMemory.

According to the company's documentation, ioMemory is a new-generation architecture that "combines today's higher density NAND with high speed switching and network protocols to effectively eliminate the performance gap between memory and storage".

Hard drive makers love pointing out the fact that flash memory has a finite life, wearing out after a certain number of read/write cycles.

However Fusion-io says it has incorporated complex error correction techniques to "minimise fatigue and extend the service life of the NAND components within the ioDrive". It says the result is a service life of eight years compared with the typical five-year service life of mechanical hard drives.

When the drive does start to feel its age, users will notice a gradual reduction in available storage space, rather than a sudden failure. This way, no data is lost.

The cards will be available in the US from December this year, however there is no date yet for Australian release. Linux drivers will be available at launch with Windows Vista, XP and Server drivers following shortly after.

Pricing is yet to be confirmed, however the company says it is aiming to ship them for less than $US30 per gigabyte. Sounds cheap? 640GB multiplies out to be $19200. Ouch... sounds like the humble hard drive will be around for a long time yet.

Source

Edited October 3, 2007 by Reimar

[cdnvic]

I think the first place you'll notice this technology available for consumers is when you can get a 50gb solid state HD Video camera for under $1000. That will pretty much make other camcorders obsolete, particularly the dvd ones.

[nikster]

I wonder why this is so expensive..

$30 / GB would make a 4GB flash stick cost $120.

The cheapest USB stick here costs EUR 0.006 per MB or ~$8.5 per GB.

Maybe very fast flash - as these guys are using - is that much more expensive? I'd be interested to get a very fast eSATA based ExpressCard with 16GB. Sadly the only Expresscards I have seen are based on USB and that's too slow to compete with a good hard disk.

Edited October 4, 2007 by nikster

[Tywais]

I'd be interested to get a very fast eSATA based ExpressCard with 16GB. Sadly the only Expresscards I have seen are based on USB and that's too slow to compete with a good hard disk.

If you lookup Solid State Flash Drives you will find several companies making them. Some are IDE compatible some SATA compliant. Don't know the price of them though, but wouldn't mind having my operating system on one.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_state_drive

http://www.adtron.com/products/A25fb-SerialATAFlashDisk.html

http://www.memtech.com/memtech_2.5-inch-id...s-products.html

[think_too_mut]

The biggest storage array, based on hel_l expensive Fiber Channel disks (2400 disks inside) available today would cost about 4 million US$.

That same monster, based on flash drive, as in this thread, would be 30 million US$.

Among those 2400 disks, it is expected that 2-3 per year would fail. Not bad at all, there is always some RAID level and no data loss.

Long way to go, flash drives.

See you in camcorders and and in laptops (one day when price of such a laptop drops under 4000US$).

[cali]

Flash is projected to drop to $2/GB in the next 5 years. So think about it, 5 years from now will you be willing to pay $20,000 for your 10TB hard drive? Of course not, you'll be buying a mechanical hard drive for $100. As the price drops down to $2/GB flash will find more uses, but your hard drive will not be one of them.

[think_too_mut]

Flash is projected to drop to $2/GB in the next 5 years. So think about it, 5 years from now will you be willing to pay $20,000 for your 10TB hard drive? Of course not, you'll be buying a mechanical hard drive for $100. As the price drops down to $2/GB flash will find more uses, but your hard drive will not be one of them.

This quarter, a 4TB hard disk based appliance for home use will become available. With internal RAID-5.

The price has not been disclosed yet but, as it is aimed at home market, it is expected to be around 400-500$.

If that is right, t's 100$ per terabyte. What's that: 10c per GB. Even if it is 800$ it's still 20c per GB.

Here, now, not in 5 years.

BTW, Seagate and Hitachi are investing more in their FC disk factories, the demand is booming and the growth won't slow down over next 5-7 years.

[cdnvic]

Flash is projected to drop to $2/GB in the next 5 years. So think about it, 5 years from now will you be willing to pay $20,000 for your 10TB hard drive? Of course not, you'll be buying a mechanical hard drive for $100. As the price drops down to $2/GB flash will find more uses, but your hard drive will not be one of them.

Wouldn't be out of possibility for high end ($1500 and up) laptops to have a 200gb flash drive and very long battery life.

[cali]

This quarter, a 4TB hard disk ...is expected to be around 400-500$.

Exactly, flash just can't hold a candle to that kind of pricing.

[cali]

Wouldn't be out of possibility for high end ($1500 and up) laptops to have a 200gb flash drive and very long battery life.

It is hard to imagine much popularity of adding $2000 to the cost of a laptop. If battery life is important, a second battery would give more life at a fraction of the cost. Flash is cool (it's also light & durable and in many ways quicker) but there's no getting around you have to spend dollars per gig when everyone is used to paying pennies per gig meanwhile hard drive capacities are continuing to surge.