How fast can SSDs become?

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blade52x

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I remember in 2006 when I built an e6600, standard mechanical hard drives were around 40-50mb/s read/write. Overtime they grew with higher density platters to 70-100mb/s. Now we're moving on to SSDs. I think initially the read/writes were generally around 200-250mb/s? But now I'm seeing drives pushing 400mb/s read and nearing 300mb/s write (like the M4).

Given that SSDs are still are maturing technology, does anyone have an idea of how fast these drives may become, or what the theoretical limit on SSD technology speed is? Could we ever see 1000mb/s on SSD tech? (Ignoring any SATA bottlenecks)

Just curious. :p
 
blade52x said:
Given that SSDs are still are maturing technology, does anyone have an idea of how fast these drives may become, or what the theoretical limit on SSD technology speed is? Could we ever see 1000mb/s on SSD tech? (Ignoring any SATA bottlenecks)
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It can get much much faster than that with phase change memory. :)
 
Could we ever see 1000mb/s on SSD tech?
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Yes and you can do this today with hard drives or SSDs by the use of raid.

As for a single SSD approaching 1000 MB/s that is more about how much raid they use internally and developing a controller for this amount of bandwith. Today this would be very expensive. Then there is the SATA III 600 MB/s limit. I do not see SATA IV anytime soon. Although PCIe solutions will not have this limit but then they do not need to be a single controller SSD. They can use an internal raid card and several consumer SSDs.
 
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They'll get pretty fast, for sure, probably into the gigabyte or two per second range in the next 2-4 years, but it'll be a long long time before they can touch what real RAM - meaning system RAM, not cache RAM - is capable of (15GB/s or more). Cache RAM is that incredibly fast stuff internal to the CPU core (especially L1) and it pulls some stuff in the 40GB/s range on most modern processors, or even higher. Crazy speeds... ;)
 
Jesse B said:
The new RevoDrives (http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227662) are already rated in excess of 700MB/s (not sure on real-world numbers), but that goes to show that we're already approaching this mark.
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That product line consists of nothing but a RAID HBA with some SSDs dropped on the same PCB. It is no different than getting a regular RAID card and plugging in some SATA SSDs.

With that aside, it is already possible to have SAS SSDs that are capable of over 1gb/s.
 
LightningCrash said:
load up a machine with 1TB of RAM
???
profit!
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Use a Linux-distro Live CD/DVD/FLASH, after the system caches all functions from it and everything is loaded into the system memory, then using purely the RAM can be done!

I've done this before and once everything is cached, you're only limited by the speed of the memory and the CPU. :D

Is it practical for everyday usage, hell no. Is faster than any HDD or SSD RAID array, hell yes. :cool:

For temporary usage, it beats buying a RAM drive and as long as your system has continuous power you can continue to run the OS on the system memory.

Just make sure to have at least 4-8GB of RAM for this to work decently though if you are using large apps.
 
Red Falcon said:
Use a Linux-distro Live CD/DVD/FLASH, after the system caches all functions from it and everything is loaded into the system memory, then using purely the RAM can be done!

I've done this before and once everything is cached, you're only limited by the speed of the memory and the CPU. :D.
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You can use tmpfs anywhere at any time on Linux from a hard drive.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tmpfs#Linux
 
Surely they can be as fast as you want them? Just depends on how many nand chips you are willing to pay for in parallel. They're nowhere near the physical limit of max # of nand chips in a given space.
 
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