Fusion IO 640GB hdd
- Thread starter Bloodust
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Associate
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Sounds too good to be true... what's these babies going to cost?
Caporegime
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sounds good and bad. will be as expensive as the slowest normal memory around. so say you can get 4gb for what, £80-100 for really bad ddr2, this will be 640gb's of that cheapo mem on a pci-e board. so even the smallest 40gb model is likely to be, £1000.
gigabyte have done it already, the i-ram iirc(and apple didn't sue them
) . but gigabytes was, errm, i think it just accepted 2 sticks of ddr mem, so you could put 2gigs in , probo 4gb. but the downfall is, its great for always on servers with redundancy and hard drive backups in raid to rebuild on the fly. but power goes off, and your data goes bye bye. gigabyte put a battery in that gave the memory about a 20min supply if power goes or you turn off.
its still fairly useful IF someone makes a decent app/os embedded feature so you could boot up windows, then while browsing the net for the first few mins you can have essentially commonly used files transfered to the memory/pci-e device and load a games data/photoshop or whatever you want to use over to the device and run the app from there.
so a webserver could say right click a shortcut and say run from harddrive or run from pci-e drive, or at home you can choose to run a benchmark/game from the pci-e drive and have it run faster. would be quite cool, but i mean, say for crysis or i guess an average game next year you'd need a 16gb drive, 16gb of extra system mem ain't cheap and again with stuff like games, yes load times are a pain, but in general once its loaded you've got that level in system mem, so framerates are about as high as they'll get and a faster hard drive won't hugely affect fps at all, just the load times. so dropping a level load from 30 seconds to 5-10 seconds after initially installing/moving game to the pci-e drive, basically doesn't help much.
servers that cost 16k, never turn off, a 2-3k pci-e mem based hard drive is a great thing, for us home users, little to no use at all
, massively internally raided solid state drives when they get cheaper is the way forward for home use.
gigabyte have done it already, the i-ram iirc(and apple didn't sue them
) . but gigabytes was, errm, i think it just accepted 2 sticks of ddr mem, so you could put 2gigs in , probo 4gb. but the downfall is, its great for always on servers with redundancy and hard drive backups in raid to rebuild on the fly. but power goes off, and your data goes bye bye. gigabyte put a battery in that gave the memory about a 20min supply if power goes or you turn off.its still fairly useful IF someone makes a decent app/os embedded feature so you could boot up windows, then while browsing the net for the first few mins you can have essentially commonly used files transfered to the memory/pci-e device and load a games data/photoshop or whatever you want to use over to the device and run the app from there.
so a webserver could say right click a shortcut and say run from harddrive or run from pci-e drive, or at home you can choose to run a benchmark/game from the pci-e drive and have it run faster. would be quite cool, but i mean, say for crysis or i guess an average game next year you'd need a 16gb drive, 16gb of extra system mem ain't cheap and again with stuff like games, yes load times are a pain, but in general once its loaded you've got that level in system mem, so framerates are about as high as they'll get and a faster hard drive won't hugely affect fps at all, just the load times. so dropping a level load from 30 seconds to 5-10 seconds after initially installing/moving game to the pci-e drive, basically doesn't help much.
servers that cost 16k, never turn off, a 2-3k pci-e mem based hard drive is a great thing, for us home users, little to no use at all
, massively internally raided solid state drives when they get cheaper is the way forward for home use.
Associate
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Just an observation: It's high density NAND flash RAM based so isn't the same as Gigabyte's IRAM. Listening to the specs, this to me sounds exactly like "massively internally raided solid state disks"... (edit: I was going to say, except they went one better by apparently putting their own "controller" on a PCI-E card together with the actual storage itself, thereby given themselves access to the PCI-E bus bandwidth, sidestepping limits of SATA, SCSI etc, and probably reducing costs as well...) edit2: linky edit3: linky edit4: linky
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Caporegime
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well yeah, i-ram was more a concept device, not entirely sure it ever saw the light of day outside of tradeshows. this would be the next step, though, i'm not sure it is nand flash ram, because of the speeds. so far all the flash mem we've got is pretty damn slow compared to system mem, and these speeds are way way way ahead of current flash drive speeds.
that could be done by basically having a big ass raid 0 style array of slower chips but. i dunno, theres no real reason that you couldn't a flash mem style raid in a drive, have multiple drives attached to multiple sata ports at 300mb's each you could match it with 2-3 drives easily enough. the other thing would be, at the io rate it claims, hitting the read/write limits of flash mem wouldnt' take long as currently flash mem seems to have a fairly low limit. the big jump between hard drive and flash mem speeds would be what makes this worthwhile.
if it is flash mem, its what i've been saying in a bunch of solid state drive threads, why not make a 32/64gb drive which is internally raid0'd amongst many chips making solid state stupidly cheap. i mean, it shouldn't be hard to do, would use an incredibly cheap on the drive, due to size of chips its easy to do. it can't be done really on normal drives, moving parts, limited space . solid state drives out now should all be 10 times as fast a sata drives and be maxing out the sata 2 connection easily.
that could be done by basically having a big ass raid 0 style array of slower chips but. i dunno, theres no real reason that you couldn't a flash mem style raid in a drive, have multiple drives attached to multiple sata ports at 300mb's each you could match it with 2-3 drives easily enough. the other thing would be, at the io rate it claims, hitting the read/write limits of flash mem wouldnt' take long as currently flash mem seems to have a fairly low limit. the big jump between hard drive and flash mem speeds would be what makes this worthwhile.
if it is flash mem, its what i've been saying in a bunch of solid state drive threads, why not make a 32/64gb drive which is internally raid0'd amongst many chips making solid state stupidly cheap. i mean, it shouldn't be hard to do, would use an incredibly cheap on the drive, due to size of chips its easy to do. it can't be done really on normal drives, moving parts, limited space . solid state drives out now should all be 10 times as fast a sata drives and be maxing out the sata 2 connection easily.
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Associate
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Well they're actually stating it's NAND, so in that case they're lying to the world. Anyway, it seems to me they've done exactly what you suggest (which also explains the transfer rates,) but instead of making just 32GB or 64GB disks, they're going a little bigger...
(Actually on their site they say they'll start shipping in Q04/07 in 40GB, 80GB, 160GB and 320GB configurations. Hopefully the smaller ones will not be too expensive...)
Caporegime
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ah do'h, checked the news page and it says nand flash. i was just checking the tech specs which no where in the specs does it actually say nand flash, gits
so yeah, i can't see it being anything but noticeably more expensive than comparable sized solid state drives due to, most likely extra chips, ability to raid across cards, software needed for the OS and development costs which hard drives don't really have. say samsung SSD, no software team needed, basic controller thats probably not different from other drives they already make, which would be made on massively higher scale as they'll sell millions more drives than these would sell. and development costs will be spread out over the larger number of drives, and future drives, cheaper manufacturing.
but the main issue is, we kinda need these things. in the future maybe mobo's with a specific high speed connection slot for a i-ram/fusionio future version thats kinda standard in systems, and that the OS completely supports.
really need to be able to do something like, right click on crysis shortcut, option 1, play as normal, option 2, transfer needed data to the mem based hard drive jobby, and run from there. without a kinda semi seamless usage it will be a complete pain in the ass to use for anything except always on servers.
tbh, hopefully at some point samsung will just do this internally in hard drives, so a singel solid state drive would just constantly max out the 300mb/s connection, smack a 2nd drive in and boom, we've got silly silly fast loading and without the need to transfer data and use up pci-e slots.
so yeah, i can't see it being anything but noticeably more expensive than comparable sized solid state drives due to, most likely extra chips, ability to raid across cards, software needed for the OS and development costs which hard drives don't really have. say samsung SSD, no software team needed, basic controller thats probably not different from other drives they already make, which would be made on massively higher scale as they'll sell millions more drives than these would sell. and development costs will be spread out over the larger number of drives, and future drives, cheaper manufacturing.
but the main issue is, we kinda need these things. in the future maybe mobo's with a specific high speed connection slot for a i-ram/fusionio future version thats kinda standard in systems, and that the OS completely supports.
really need to be able to do something like, right click on crysis shortcut, option 1, play as normal, option 2, transfer needed data to the mem based hard drive jobby, and run from there. without a kinda semi seamless usage it will be a complete pain in the ass to use for anything except always on servers.
tbh, hopefully at some point samsung will just do this internally in hard drives, so a singel solid state drive would just constantly max out the 300mb/s connection, smack a 2nd drive in and boom, we've got silly silly fast loading and without the need to transfer data and use up pci-e slots.