News RiData makes 128GB SSDs

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2008/01/10/ridata_128gb_ssd/1

CES 2008 - RiData, the oldest company in SSDs, has released a 128GB version that will be finding its way to OEM builders soon. Oh, and did we mention that this one loads up Crysis levels in 16.8 seconds?

 

woo baby! I'd like them to concentrate on making the 128GB version cheaper, and also concentrate on higher capacitities. it looks like speed has reached a high point, and although I'm sure they can do better given time, i'd rather they get these babies out in high numbers so we can get our grubby mitts on em!

 

This looks like stuff that will make computers truly boot in seconds. Even my raid'ed HD's take about a minute (oh noes) for vista to load. Data fetching, data handleing, data period becomes more fluid. Becoming what the CPU's, and RAM have started to become already.

Really this stuff is just begging to be used by current computer technology. Only thing now is the cost, once its down to a more reasonable price, it'll spell the end of the normal typical HD tech.

 

have they ever got over the hump of the lower read/write cycles of solid state memory? I know they have algorithms and such to evenly disperse data across all sectors on the drives. (as there's no penalty, in terms of seek time) However If I remember correctly the read/right cycles for modern SSD's are still quite lower than the extremely high cycles of a modern HDD. such that after a year or so of use as an OS drive things like swap files and such would eventually kill the drive

 

I've read it somewhere that, under normal usage, a SSD drive would last about 10 years. Naturally, the bigger the capacity, the more gates you have to go around (each gate being good for about 1.000.000 cycles), the longer it would take for the drive to degrade.

128gb is an important milestone - it is enough to convince me to swap my macbook's 60gb hd for a SSD drive.

How about some "internally redundant" SSDs? Since there are no longer the physical limitations of platters and arms and heads, why not assemble two flash drives in the same casing and have them on RAID 0 or 1? Something the end-user can choose by means of a jumper, BIOS, firmware or whatever...

 

i give it 2 years until everyone around here has at least one of these SSDs.

 

fudge... $3,000?????

if thats a typo and its actually $300 ill buy one in a heartbeat lol

ah, one can only dream...

 

wow, this is sweet! I never really looked into SDD, since it didn't seem usable...

How big are these drives, physically speaking? same size as normal HDDs?

 

they are designed to replace hard drives, you remove the old one and insert the new one.

 

Its all plusses really:

+ no moving parts
+ less power needs
+ less heat
+ no noise
+ faster seek times
+ faster acces times
+ longer lifetime
+ less/not sensitive to shocks
+ Fast and in the future faster still

- price

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive#Disadvantages I'm not sure about this particular drive, but the average is still around 500,000 writes, firmware and file systems can mitigate this. but still some files and such can go over this. Not to mention the price.

still though this is the future and we'll probably be seeing these slowly take over the market over the next few years.

 

i want two of them now thou

 

I'd love one if I could afford it.

 

The problem with the limited write cycles is due to how the technology works, essentially its forces electrons through an insulator into a cell, or pulling them back through, this in effect causes physical damage to the device where as a magnetic Hard drive rotates particles which has little to no effect on the durability of the HDD platters. When reading, the drive "senses" whether there are electrons in each cell and then reports either a 1 for electrons present or 0 for no electrons. SSDs therefore have a practically infinite read life.

Or something like that anyways.
Good going for continuing to improve on the tech.

 

This makes me think how big are the SSD's in ipod's and how much would they cost standalone? If this technology is already present in iPod I'm sure in a few years time or less it will be available to the mass ..

 

The lifecycle for Ridata drives (due to the controller mechanism and ECC) is about 10 years according to the engineer So, longer than an equally used hard drive

 

How did they calculate that?

Because normal HDD's wear over time, whereas SSD's have a finite number of writes - therefore, they must have assumed that you only use the SSD so much per day/whatever