1tb Ssd...

[mDust]

I'm willing to trade a kidney for a few of these...
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227500
It won't be long and mechanical HDDs will be looked down on like floppies. And the way things are going, it looks like PCIe is the interface of the future. I'll bet the many jobs of the chipset will be distributed among the tens or hundreds of CPU cores in 5 years...similar to on-die memory controllers. Discuss.

+rep to anyone that puts 2 of these in raid 0.

[billygoat333]

0_0! I think I might have to go sell my kidney too! *drool*

[Trace]

I'll give part of my liver!

[Spawn-Inc]

there not that fast, i bought one off ebay for $10 and i took the metal cover as i was curious and a sheet of paper fell out saying 1000GB SSD on it. i installed it and it was soo slow.

hopefully prices will come down so i can get another vertex and go raid.

[d_stilgar]

It's hard to say that PCIe is the way of the future for everything. I think most everything that has been on PCI or AGP will only be on PCIe in the future, but hard drives will remain connected via some cabled interface.

SSDs still have a way to go, and they suffer from price fluctuations the way RAM does. Spinning drives go down in price and don't come back. Spinning magnetic drives are still getting higher capacity and faster as well, so it will be a little while before the cost/benefit ratio puts SSDs over the top.

Let's think about this for a second. For $3800 I could get many many 1Tb drives and put them in raid. I could also build a killer, over-the-top gaming machine and three 24" 1920x1200 monitors for some eyefinity madness. I think I would still have money left over for a DIY NAS. I would give my liver/kidney for that long before I gave it up for a $3800 1Tb SSD.

It's still cool though and I can't wait til they get cheap.

[mDust]

there not that fast, i bought one off ebay for $10 and i took the metal cover as i was curious and a sheet of paper fell out saying 1000GB SSD on it. i installed it and it was soo slow.

hopefully prices will come down so i can get another vertex and go raid.

lol, huh?

This one (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227393&cm_re=vertex-_-20-227-393-_-Product) is 79.99 after MIB...regularly $164. If you don't consider MIBs to be too much of a pain, you can order one and pay a friend 10 bucks to order another and save about $50. Otherwise, 110 bucks is still damn good. Even though they're small, 60GB should be fine for a raid 0 boot disk.

[mDust]

It's hard to say that PCIe is the way of the future for everything. I think most everything that has been on PCI or AGP will only be on PCIe in the future, but hard drives will remain connected via some cabled interface.

SSDs still have a way to go, and they suffer from price fluctuations the way RAM does. Spinning drives go down in price and don't come back. Spinning magnetic drives are still getting higher capacity and faster as well, so it will be a little while before the cost/benefit ratio puts SSDs over the top.

Let's think about this for a second. For $3800 I could get many many 1Tb drives and put them in raid. I could also build a killer, over-the-top gaming machine and three 24" 1920x1200 monitors for some eyefinity madness. I think I would still have money left over for a DIY NAS. I would give my liver/kidney for that long before I gave it up for a $3800 1Tb SSD.

It's still cool though and I can't wait til they get cheap.
SSD's are the future of storage, but they're still in their infancy and will mature in a few years. The memory chips are already just chips on a PCB, and could easily be changed over to the much faster PCIe interface for increased bandwidth over even SATA III and I'm sure SATA IV. Mechanical disks will never be able to spin fast enough to saturate SATA II so, there will never be a need to convert them. But unless some new interface is developed for PCs that can compete with the speed of PCIe (I'm not in the enterprise loop, so this could already exist), it will likely be the sought after connection for all our newfangled super high speed devices. They just need to shrink the PCIe footprint so they can fit more slots on the mainboard and then create processors that can dedicate cores to control the communication of all these devices to do away with "chipsets". In 20 years we can have 2nm architecture processors that "do it all". No need for anything else because it will all be "on-die".
And "new performance" always costs moolah. One of my professors used to talk about his 14k dollar 64 kilobyte beast. But you're right, buying bleeding edge is usually not worth it...unless you only need one kidney.:D

[d_stilgar]

I think the big limitation of having HDD on the motherboard is that it takes up space and slots that people use for other things. If you have three way SLI you will take up all six slots on a motherboard, and it is fine if you have Sata drives because you can put them in raid to get up to the extreme performance of a PCIe card. That could be either spinning or SSD, the raid will eventually catch up in performance and you can have higher capacity at the same time.

[nevermind1534]

I think the new interface that will be able to compete with PCIe is SATA3.

[mDust]

I think the new interface that will be able to compete with PCIe is SATA3.A single lane of PCIe 2.0 has a theoretical peak of 500MB/s while SATA3 has a theoretical peak of 600MB/s. PCI lanes can also be aggregated i.e. x4, x8, x16. PCIe x16 theoretically provides for 8GB/s (or 16GB/s depending on the chipset) throughput. Nothing else competes directly with this in the PC market that I'm aware of.
Since SSDs don't need access to the back of the case, PCIe slots can be placed up, parallel to RAM if space is an issue. And if PCIe SSDs become a standard, they can be made just as thin as the PCB they are built on. They only have a plastic case now so they can be mounted in HDD bays which today is the norm.
Another problem I thought of is concerning hardcore PC gamers. They're trying to maximize lane usage for just graphics information. So we just need to add more lanes! Or even better, another controller with just as many lanes!
Another thought is that PCIe 3.0 should be released in a month or two. It's bandwidth will be double that of PCIe 2.0! There have been talks of quad GPUs! Necessary? No, but it IS awesome. This also paves the way for some wicked PCIe SSDs with unimaginable throughput. Mechanical HDDs have been the PC's worst bottleneck for as long as anyone can remember...and we're currently witnessing the removal of that bottleneck.

[Spawn-Inc]

lol, huh?

This one (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227393&cm_re=vertex-_-20-227-393-_-Product) is 79.99 after MIB...regularly $164. If you don't consider MIBs to be too much of a pain, you can order one and pay a friend 10 bucks to order another and save about $50. Otherwise, 110 bucks is still damn good. Even though they're small, 60GB should be fine for a raid 0 boot disk.

lol, was a bad joke, meant to say "seriously though hopefully prices will come down so i can get another vertex and go raid."

i went with the 60gb vertex since it was about $50 more then the 30 after everything was said and done. though i'm still waiting for my dam rebate... (sent in the rebate on 12 of jan/10) though i just read that payment was sent friday.

[mDust]

lol, was a bad joke, meant to say "seriously though hopefully prices will come down so i can get another vertex and go raid."

i went with the 60gb vertex since it was about $50 more then the 30 after everything was said and done. though i'm still waiting for my dam rebate... (sent in the rebate on 12 of jan/10) though i just read that payment was sent friday.

Haha! It's funnier now that you say that. I was seriously bewildered when I first read it and wasn't sure what to think.

I hate mail in rebates with a passion. I think companies will still use them in 1000 years, and even more effectively. People already complain if they have to wait a few minutes for something so a lot of people already pass up on the rebate. In 1000 years, when we can instantly teleport to anywhere, companies can offer 90% off in the form of a MIB, and people will say "**** that! I don't have time."

[x88x]

Heheh, you think the m84's are fast, try the e84's (http://www.ocztechnology.com/products/solid_state_drives/ocz_z_drive_e84_pci_express_ssd). :twisted:


As much as the speed is insanely awesome, there are some problems with PCIe SSDs, some of which have been touched on already.

Physical space limitations aside, most north bridges right now are limited to either 16 or 32 lanes (I forget which). Several MBB manufacturers have gotten around this by putting two NBs on a MBB (ex, the 7 slot EVGA boards), but this is far from common behavior.

The other major problem is drive interconnect. With SATA/SAS/etc drives, you can link multiple drives together to a RAID card with a dedicated chip to provide the best performance, but when each drive is connected to a PCIe interface, in order to connect multiple drives you have to (currently) work on the other side of the NB (ie, software RAID), resulting in a much smaller performance boost, especially since each of these drives is actually just a RAID controller with storage on the same PCB. This could be rectified by having a dedicated RAID controller built into the NB or as a separate chipset (new south bridge anyone ;) ), but again, it would take a lot of manufacturer action.

An interesting offshoot of this is that in the enterprise environment with a large number of high performance HDDs, equivalent or greater speeds can already be attained for a storage unit (in this case, several HDDs connected to a single PCIe RAID card, instead of a single SSD). For this reason, as well as cost and a tendency to distrust new tech for sensitive stuff, I don't really see SSDs replacing HDDs any time in the hear future (read, at least the next decade or so), at the very least in the enterprise environment.


Mechanical disks will never be able to spin fast enough to saturate SATA II so, there will never be a need to convert them.

Haha, never say never when it comes to computer tech. ;) With the performance coming out of some new performance HDDs, I would not be at surprised if in a couple years we have HDDs saturating and surpassing 3Gbps speeds (SATAII). If manufacturers keep increasing platter density at rates at least as fast as they have in the past (or faster...see this thread (http://www.thebestcasescenario.com/forum/showthread.php?t=22441) for why), and keep increasing the cache size... Think about it; just 10 years ago we were still using the IDE-133 (~1Gbps) interface for our fastest consumer drives, none of which could come anywhere near saturating that connection (or rather, saturating half of it if you had two....gotta love IDE :P ). Compare that to modern consumer HDDs, that can..ok, can barely saturate 1Gbps.. But still, compare the performance increase over the past 10 years, and (assuming HDDs are still in common use then) imagine how far we'll go in the next 10!


EDIT:
I forgot about these, but there's also the 1TB OCZ Colossus (http://www.newegg.com/product/product.aspx?item=n82e16820227502) drives. Not quite the performance level of the e/m84's (260MBps for both read and write), and the same price (http://www.amazon.com/OCZ-Technology-Colossus-3-5-Inch-Solid/dp/B002X8DZDG) (~$4,000), but you can use them with existing RAID controllers... :D

[mDust]

I think that if MB manufacturers would just stop putting things like floppy and IDE headers or normal PCI slots on mid- to high-grade boards they could put a second NB on there with a row of, say, PCIe x4 slots dedicated to just SSD or similar storage technology. It could be made to control RAID and other nifty things. I'm not for phasing out mechanical HDDs...yet. But in a couple years, SSDs will have caught mechanical drives in capacity and they already exceed them in performance. Saying that 5 HDD in RAID0 will outperform an SSD is not a fair fight, as 5 SSDs in a RAID0 will likely tear a hole in spacetime, which will swallow and free those HDDs from existence.
After SSDs become mainstream the prices will fall and become 'more in-line' with the prices of the 'lower performance' mechanical drives...which will be developing a crusty dust-layer on a dimly lit shelf at your local Best Buy.
SSDs have been around for decades, but just in the last 6 years, consumer level SSDs have decreased in price from about $500/GB to ~40cents/GB. HDDs have decreased from about 55cents/GB to 6.6cents/GB over the same time period, and capacities have exploded from 60-120GB to 1500-2000GB.

Interestingly enough, I found an enterprise level 1TB SSD from 2003ish that was over $1.6 million. That makes the drive in my OP a bargain considering its performance is much better than the 2003 drive. The prices of SSDs and HDDs are converging.

[x88x]

Saying that 5 HDD in RAID0 will outperform an SSD is not a fair fight, as 5 SSDs in a RAID0 will likely tear a hole in spacetime, which will swallow and free those HDDs from existence.
I was thinking more along the lines of 20+ drives in a RAID01. At that point your bottleneck stops being the drives and starts to move over to the system bus, to actually communicate with the drives. I think at least for the next ~10 years or so, HDDs will continue to reign supreme in the enterprise environment, where they will continue to be the best balance between cost, performance, storage, and proven reliability (remember, enterprise IT is very wary when it comes to new tech). Heck, SSDs haven't even really made it into mainstream enterprise stuff yet (special purpose stuff, sure, but not mainstream).

The home/enthusiast market is always a lot faster to evolve though, so I think that is the market that will be most interesting to watch...especially with cloud storage and insanely fast internet connections getting more common, storage might become increasingly unimportant to the average user (even more so than it already is), making the transition easier (read: cheaper). I think SSDs also need to become more standardized and easier to understand/use before they'll be accepted by the general public (or even the general enthusiast market). I know talking to some of my friends about stuff I've had to do to get my SSDs up to date and working optimally has actually turned some of them off making the switch. HDDs have the benefit of being a very mature technology, to the point where they are truly almost plug-and-play...SSDs have a long way to go before they are there, imo.



Interestingly enough, I found an enterprise level 1TB SSD from 2003ish that was over $1.6 million. That makes the drive in my OP a bargain considering its performance is much better than the 2003 drive. The prices of SSDs and HDDs are converging.

Heheh, I remember seeing those (or similar)...some specialist shop that made SSDs specifically for big-ticket enterprise customers that needed fast, huge storage, no matter the cost. I wanna say it's the same company that still makes RAM drives.

[mDust]

I know talking to some of my friends about stuff I've had to do to get my SSDs up to date and working optimally has actually turned some of them off making the switch.You need some geekier friends...

I wish I had a few million bucks or some investors to start up a MB manufacturing company that would allow me to make such 'specialty' boards as I described. I would get rid of all junk connections that hardly anyone uses anymore, and put some connections dedicated to new technology on there. The best part is that I wouldn't charge an arm and a leg 'because I could'. My goal is to start a revolution, so I'd try to keep it priced to sell to everyone.
Meh, I'm lazy though...maybe I can just convince ASUS or someone to do it all for me. I'll trade them the idea for a couple of these SSDs and the first board that comes off their assembly line.:)

[x88x]

Hmm, we'd probably want to redesign the connector so that the cards could actually be locked in place... I wonder what it would take to convince a manufacturer to actually try something like this?

[mDust]

Hmm, we'd probably want to redesign the connector so that the cards could actually be locked in place... I wonder what it would take to convince a manufacturer to actually try something like this?PCIe x8/x16 slots usually have a plastic connector that locks in heavy graphics cards...it usually breaks off the first time you try to take the card out though. If they beefed it up and put one on the back side of the slot as well...that would work.

I hear that profits are a pretty big motivator in the corporate world; especially when there's relatively low development costs leading up to those profits...the technology already exists, it just needs to be implemented differently. ARE YOU LISTENING, MANUFACTURERS??? Build me this!

We could be loading game levels (or important files) in milliseconds...a simple youtube video of this is all the advertising this would need. Why has the world put up with the HDD bottleneck for this long? I can't help but think of the Office Space scene when he's trying to sneak out but gets caught due to the save sequence taking a couple minutes. That should have struck a chord with someone out there and solved this problem long ago.

[x88x]

I was thinking something more along the lines of a RAM-style slot, with sturdier locks that can actually be unlocked easily but stay locked if you leave them alone.

You make a good point about the corporate world...maybe that should be the first target? Picture this:
Quad-Socket-F board, with no normal expansion slots or drive controllers. Instead, covering the entire lower half of the board is a crapton of PCIe x4 3.0 slots, with securing locks at each. Into each of these, an SSD module can be plugged in. In one corner is a swappable RAID controller chip (think CPU-style socket) with a RAM cache slot (DDR3 should be fine for that).

[mDust]

I was thinking something more along the lines of a RAM-style slot, with sturdier locks that can actually be unlocked easily but stay locked if you leave them alone.

You make a good point about the corporate world...maybe that should be the first target? Picture this:
Quad-Socket-F board, with no normal expansion slots or drive controllers. Instead, covering the entire lower half of the board is a crapton of PCIe x4 3.0 slots, with securing locks at each. Into each of these, an SSD module can be plugged in. In one corner is a swappable RAID controller chip (think CPU-style socket) with a RAM cache slot (DDR3 should be fine for that).
Exactly! I'm sure that thing could serve files like no other! Add fibre optic networking along side Ethernet to avoid bottlenecks there and it's a masterpiece. Does something like this already exist (and is being sold for $1.6 million ;)) or are manufacturers just unimaginative? Hell, I'll sell one of those bad boys for $1.6 million...who wants one?

[x88x]

It would probably be most marketable for database servers, for customers who can't afford/justify RAM-based drives (I forget what company it is that makes them, but they're insanely expensive). A fileserver wouldn't really benefit much, but database applications need to have as fast as possible access to as much data at once as possible. This is normally accomplished by piling ridiculous amounts of RAM into a system, but this could be an alternative (or maybe an improvement, especially if you're dealing with a database larger than 512GB).

[mDust]

Perhaps a database is what I was envisioning. I was imagining hundreds or thousands (or more) requests a second. And the larger the file or data size is, the more benefit that can be reaped, as the transfer time is now less than 10% of what it once would have been.

And in the gaming arena, imagine playing games like Crysis or either Assassin's Creed game and not waiting for anything to load. Becoming immersed in fully fleshed-out environments will be much easier with no "loading screens". Waiting a minute and half for that 2GB Photoshop file to open? Maybe in 2009 you were. Now it's instant!

"Slow" SSDs on SATA II already make things ridiculously fast... Giving faster SSDs the bandwidth to transfer their entire contents in just seconds is life-changing. It will probably breed a new generation of impatient jackasses, and contribute to the downfall of humanity.:think:

[burntheland]

my liver and kidneys are shot. how much can i get for a testie? lol

[mDust]

my liver and kidneys are shot. how much can i get for a testie? lol

Probably 70% of the elderly male population will fight to the death to be the first to pay you exorbitant amounts of money for it. Supply and demand suckas! Name your own price for them to pay.