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Solid-State HD?

L

Little Grabbi

Gawd
Joined
Aug 15, 2003
Messages
565
A few weeks ago someone posted his case in the Gallery, and this guy said that one of his HDs was solid-state, I.E. Flash chips on speed. Can anyone tell me more about this?

kthx,
Grabbi
 
There are lots of solid state drives. Was it PCI based? PCI-X? Fiber channel? ATA?
 
I use SSDs here at work.

Think of a igant cluster of RAM hooked to a memory controller.....now imagine that memory controller was hooked up to an Bridge (whether IDE/SCSI/SATA/PCI/PCI-X/fiber-channel/etc).

The advantages of this is practically none-existant data access times. Your drive's data thoroughput is extremely high as well (limited to the bridge chip, or the bus...whichever is slower).

The bad part is it's volatile memory...so you have to transfer data to it. One of the SSDs I used here at work had a 2GB ide hard drive on it for archival purposes....it would copy data to the hard drive and save it, only modifiying the changes. The SSDs we used were ultra 160 SCSI LVD with that backup drive option. The drive itself was a 3.5" form factor.

Other bad part....cost....the 2GB SSDs we used were about $20k a peice. Very few are even remotely affordable for the average person.
 
There are some people who can run Win98 or so off a thumb drive. With MicroDrives approaching 4 GBs it will be possible.
 
Originally posted by djnes
There are some people who can run Win98 or so off a thumb drive. With MicroDrives approaching 4 GBs it will be possible.
Click to expand...

What's the point of that? Then you're just limited to USB's speed.
 
Originally posted by angrybusdriver
What's the point of that? Then you're just limited to USB's speed.
Click to expand...
The flash memory used in thumbdrives also limit the speed quite a bit. There are other uses for SSDs, though. There are no moving parts so it can be used in situations where there are high g-forces or something. Also, there is lower power consumption. And it is silent.
 
If they are only $1000 per gig, that's a bargain.

Keep in mind if you want one with a HDD backup, you have just added an extra zero to your price.

Really only places I see these being of any use are special machines that have to have certain disk I/O performance. The audio drives on telephone bridges being a major one.
 
SSD Buyers Guide

there are a few smaller SDRAM solutions that are almost affordable, and then there are software RAMDisks as well
if youve the memory to spare
 
for starters Microdrives are not solid state...they are actual hard drives just miniturised.

a company called go-l use something called PuRAM in their machines and that is essentially what you want. But its just too costly at the moment. Give it some time and it will be mainstream i reckon.
 
Originally posted by Syphon Filter
a company called go-l use something called PuRAM in their machines
Click to expand...

try to find it

and try to find someone that actually owns an go-I while your at it

the whole shooting match is widely considered vaporware
 
Originally posted by mustang_steve
...

Keep in mind if you want one with a HDD backup, you have just added an extra zero to your price.

...
Click to expand...

If you were using it to hold database files and reads heavily outweighed writes, you could roll your own HDD backup by using two identical databases, one on a SSD and the other on a HDD. Do all reads from the SSD db and do writes to both within a transaction.

I actually have a database I use that is populated nightly (because aggregating the data for a report on the fly is ungodly slow (CPU bound on a dual 1.13GHz PIII)... better to pay a somewhat bigger price once per night than a big price on every report generation) with data aggregated from other databases and is accessed only for reads (for web pages) throughout the day, so I could get away with storing it on a SSD with no backup at all. It wouldn't be worth it (yet) though, as the pages already are served very quickly.

I'll eventually need to explore better ways of preparing my data, before I get completely buried in data... I've already got > 800,000 records in one table and that number, while steadily increasing as it is, will go even higher if I add more ways of aggregating the data...
 
there are estimates that with the widespread adoption of RFID
data storage needs are going to skyrocket (and of course managemant issues as well)

what kind of database is that?

strange synchronicity, as I was just reading this :p
Big Databases Are Big Challenges
As databases bulk up, tasks such as administering access and managing data integrity become more difficult
 
Originally posted by Ice Czar
...

what kind of database is that?

...
Click to expand...

DBMS: SQL Server 7

Content: course evaluation survey data, grade data, and supporting data (course/location/instructor/etc.) for the courses in the distance learning portion of a Division I university. The system only contains about 1.5 years worth of data right now. There has also been at least some interest expressed in adapting the system to university wide use. The grant that partially funds my position runs out at the end of this summer, but I doubt they can REALLY afford to axe my position as I originally expected when I took the job. The system has become quite complicated (as a consequence of too damn many exceptions to "rules"... I tried to design the system to be as generic as possible, but I had to slap on ad hoc solutions to oddball issues; one example: "A class instance is taught by an instructor" turned into "A class instance is taught by one or more instructors" after the system was built) as it is, I haven't done a completely stellar job of documenting the system, and my way of doing things (favoring performance over simplicity) would probably make the other programmers' heads pop if they tried to take over responsibility for the system (and they'd probably break it as soon as they touched it). Also, if the system were to be used university wide, it would require quite an assortment of modifications to be made. Additionally, there's also a massive project underway that's redoing the way other university data is being stored that will likely have ripple effects on my system.

There's also more to the entire system than that, including: data entry; automated e-mailings; etc.
 
SQL7... ugh, you're giving me flashbacks. I hate to say it, but make as many many-manys as you can. Reality pokes holes in our little theoretical world very quickly and superiors have this habit of asking to track more and more data.
 
You could use a separate drive for a cheap backup, but you will be using up even more system resources. An SSD with an integrated drive backup will do this using its own internal bandwidth...which is always greater than what your PC can access the drive at.

I wish I could give you a link to the guys who made our...but they went the way most dot-coms did....oh well our drives are still happily pushing out gobs of data :)
 
I can't wait till good, inexpensive, solid state drives become mainstream. Current drives scare me.
 
Originally posted by Whitebread
I can't wait till good, inexpensive, solid state drives become mainstream. Current drives scare me.
Click to expand...

im sure they will come with their own problems...
 
Originally posted by Jason711
im sure they will come with their own problems...
Click to expand...

I'm sure they will, but hopefully those problems will be less than those of conventional storage technology.
 
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