Smart introduces the Optimus 1.6TB 1000MB/s SSD | Hacker News Reader

Smart introduces the Optimus 1.6TB 1000MB/s SSD

geek.com

35 pointsadeelarshad8212 comments

1000MB/s is only achievable using wide port SAS, in other words there are 2 physical 6Gbps interfaces on the SAS connector of this SSD, one on each side of the PCB. There is a bit more info in the vendor's press release at http://www.smartm.com/media/press_releases/article360.asp

Without wide port SAS, the drive achieves only 500MB/s which is far from being remarkable. A handful of SSDs already achieve this throughput on one 6Gbps SATA or SAS link.

How does this affect the old rule that 'ram is always faster than a spinning disk" and trying to keep your whole database in RAM ? It's not there yet, but this hard drive is approaching the speed of RAM.

It is far from approaching the speed of RAM.

A medium-end Core i7 processor with triple-channel DDR3-1333 RAM has a theoretical peak bandwidth of 1333 MT/s * 3 channels * 64 bits = 32 GB/s. Compare this to this drive's 1 GB/s. And when considering latency, SSDs average tens of micro seconds, whereas RAM averages tens of nano seconds.

Another way of looking at it is that 1 GB/s is about the bandwidth of PC133 RAM that was commonplace about a decade ago.

It says it's a SAS interface, but the picture shows a SATA.

This page has a side by side comparison of SATA/SAS connectors.

http://www.serialstoragewire.org/Articles/2010_03/intel.html

Doesn't a 5 year warranty seem short for a super expensive item that has no moving parts?

Even a $50 drive can be had with a 5-year warranty and it's spinning metal with rare earth motors at 7200rpm.

In any case, I wonder if ebay is going "d'oh!" right now: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9218811/EBay_attacks_...

Total Bytes Written (the amount of data that can be written before the flash memory fails) is often associated with a Bytes/day for 5 years. Client SSDs are around a couple hundred GB/day for 5 years. Enterprise drives are more like 5 TB/day for 5 years. SSDs are designed around optimizing that metric, which is viewed as an aggressive use case. A warranty should reflect that use case.

NAND flash can only be written to a certain amount of times before it fails. This used to be around about 10000 write cycles, but is falling as process size shrinks. Current gen consumer grade NAND flash is good for about 3000 write cycles. This isn’t actually as bad as it seems at first glance: on a 1.6Tb drive you’d have to write 4.8 petabytes of data on average to kill every cell, and the drives are smart enough to fence off failed cells. Also, enterprise level drives use more expensive but more damage resistant cells. On the other hand, you’d expect enterprise level drives to be subject to a lot more write cycles so that balances out.

It doesn't really matter, as it will be dirt cheap in 5 years anyway.

Five years ago I bought an iBook with a what-felt-massive 80gb 4200rpm drive. Today I'd toss an 80gb drive in an electrostatic bag and probably forget about it. Five years is a sufficient warranty for my consumer use, even for cutting edge kit.

around 97 (give or take a year) i paid $500ish for a 6.5gb drive

After 5 years, businesses will have full depreciated the item for tax-purposes.

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