IBM Files Flexible Capacity SSD Patent

Seems logical and good. Too bad itll cost a fortune for while.

See here Apple, this is what a REAL patent should look like.

Fantastic idea... hardly patent-worthy... and probably will be left on it's default setting by 99% of corporate users... but a fantastic idea all the same.

Sounds like an interesting solution for some business enterprise situations. Would it also be practical for gamers and enthusiasts?

Agreed

Why would it be better to have, lets say, a 128GB drive that acts like a 64GB drive versus a 128 GB drive that acts like a 128 GB drive that degrades down to a 64GB drive at about the same time as the other one runs out of reserve memory?

While I like both the tone and the content of your post, it is a bit of a flame bait. That's why I am continuing it one bit:

Wow, a drive that changes capacity, that's imagical...

I'm not sure I like the "Dynamic" idea, but the idea of changing it yourself sounds cool.

Man our patent system is so broken. This isnt a new idea, maybe with SSDs its new but not with HDDS. Weve been able to chose how to use the space forever. Choosing cluster size and partition size already changes how much real area you have on HDDs vs how much is reserved by the system, etc.

I guess somehow using the words SSD and 'spare area' make this patentable. What a joke....

That isn't what this article is about. You can presumably partition any SSD however you'd like.

This is about essentially letting you set aside some reserve space for when memory cells fail.

So that way you don't lose any of that data... If you were to use all 128gigs, and then have some of the cells fail, you just lost some of that stored information. This way, the ssd will (theoretically) detect any failures before they happen and transfer data accordingly. At least that is how I understand it.

Likewise though, if it detects a failue, it could just move the data to an unused cell [or a cell marked for deletion]...

I am not an expert but since SSD storage memory has certain a life span and may degrade over time a 128GB that is used as a 128GB will used all memory cells most of the time and those cell will degrade and might become inaccessible (died) around the same time.
A 128 that it is used as 64GB will only use half of the memory cells and when one of those becomes inaccessible because of degradation it will use one of the new ones you had in reserved; from the 64GB you did not used.

As I understood it it was that each cell had a rough number of write cycles before failing. If that is the case, then by limiting to using half the cells, you'd expect them to fail twice as fast.

I wonder if Apple tried to patent 'farting'.

The problem here is that the drive (and the OS attached to it) thinks it has 128GB of usable storage space. If, say, 8GB have gone bad, it would really only have 120GB of storage space. The drive would need some way of telling the OS that, hey, I have 8GB of bad sectors, don't try to write more than 120GB of data. There's no such mechanism, and instead, when the OS writes data and there are only bad sectors left, the drive can't do anything and that data is lost and the drive corrupted. Remember, flash memory re-writes whole sectors at a time, so you might lose the middle sector of a file, and better hope it's not your actual file system that's lost.

This is the case REGARDLESS of how much memory is provisioned on the drive. If you have a 128GB drive, provision 64GB for backup, that leaves 64GB for data. IF 70GB of the sectors go bad, the drive is now only at 58GB of actual capacity, but still thinks it's at 64. The OS writes 58.1GB of data and boom, drive is essentially dead.

Intel's patent doesn't fix that problem. What it does is it lets the customer decide how important data preservation is to their particular application. Average customers might only need 10% provision. Flash memory can sustain thousands of writes, and what home user is going to write 128GB thousands of times to a single drive? However, corporate scenarios (especially databases) might write out to a drive millions of times a day. In this case, provisioning a drive at 20%, 30%, 50% might be more cost effective than replacing the drive after only 10% has failed.

My experience with SCSI drives under IRIX is that when bad blocks are detected on a drive, they are flagged telling the OS not to write to them. Not sure if that is a feature of IRIX that allows for that, maybe a feature of SCSI drives, but it seems like if it is possible to work around bad blocks on a rotational drive, you should be able to implement something similar for SSDs.

eff this! where the waterproof 1 exobyte SSD patent that doubles as a neat coffee cup coaster!

@JerseyFirefighter - well, I don't want it unless it is powered wirelessly as well as wireless communication at gigabit or faster -- oh and it had better not cost more than $0.10 per petabyte!

I'm sorry this is not patent worthy. Problem, Ways to handle memory cells failing in a fixed amount of cells. Solution, don't use all the memory cells so when one dies there is another to use. Give this to a 100 CS students and you would get this result from one of them. This is not an invention but just standard wear management. Taking a simple and standard idea, is not what patents were for (but now you can patent anything if you make the application long enough, and then sue anyone for that idea).

If my math is right you'd be able to store over 30 million uncompressed blu-ray movies in one exabyte... Perhaps one exabyte is a bit of overkill right now

This method seems not as good as they claims. SSD cells can sustain 3000-5000 writes. Hiding some capacity would not help SSD life at all.

It's kind of like buying a 12-pack of socks, but only using six pairs. You'll have extra socks in the top of your closet in case you get a hole in one of the 'active' pairs, but ultimately you will be wearing each pair twice as often, so you will wear those socks out more quickly than you would have otherwise.

If you don't understand how spare cells will take the place when cells die it would seem more than hardware cells are fried!

All these companies are going way overboard in what they want to patent.

Is the actually physical make up of the SSD hardware "unique" or "new"? That's what you are "allowed" to patent. This just seems to be slapping a programmed BIOS into the SSD to tell it to do x, y and z.

A "process" for doing something "might" be able to be copyright'ed, but then it would only be for that EXACT programming. They still wouldn't be able to get anything if someone figures out a different way to do the same thing.

i.e. - an Author can Copyright his work - but ONLY the exact order in which is words are put down and the "characters" involved. He can't copyright each actual word he uses. So if someone put those word together in a different order it would be a different story. The same as any author can write a "girl falls in love with boy" story - thus the ending is the same, but the words used to get to that ending are different (and of course the characters are different too).

Yes Very and for workstation use that is what I been looking for. I use a 30gb SSD for swapfile/virtual memory due to certain requirements such as video production that has a very large footprint that mechanical drives just can't keep up with. At the end of the day it is wow or some other games. All I need is high random 4k read & write and a long life. Mine seams to be going south after 3k hours of use.

WTH?

How about work on extending SSD life instead of sticking a band aid on it????

You can still partition a SSD: this is completely different. The reserved space on a HDD isn't used for anything. The reserved space on a SSD is.



They may sustain that many now, but get to a smaller size, and that number will decrease. Also this:


Compare it set to having 28 GB reserved, so the OS sees 100 GB: if you get 8 GB of bad sectors now, it is still fine. It won't actually extend the length of time you can use x GB for, it extends the length of time you can use the drive when it is full.

"reduce the size and reserve some of the memory cells as a safety net when other memory cells fail"
Isn't it possible to just shrink the drive size when cells go bad? Or mark that part of the drive as used? If not, does that mean when cells die on current SSDs the drive becomes unusable?

I think people are thinking this will impact capacity a lot more than it really will. Someone mentioned reducing a 128GB drive to a 64GB capacity. We're talking about a 64GB drive partitioning as 58GB instead of 51GB for the average user. That would work for most, but typically drives are over provisioned in case they're used in write heavy I/O applications.

That's a big deal because 51GB might not be enough for typical laptop useage, but that extra 10% you could add could make the difference. Same goes for 128GB drives.

I'd be much happier to buy a drive knowing that I could use an extra 10% free and they system would just give me some kind of warning if the over provisioned space was running out. Then you could just convert it to a dynamic drive and reduce the size.

This feature has existed for 2 decades or longer.
Mechanical drives use a "low level" format, this type of format can modify the amound of reserved space. We just typically don't get options to play with.
It's also called "FIRMWARE". and guess what? there's updates for that too.
So while it's not something a consumer can do, it's definately "prior art/work". It's always been dynamic, the vendors just chose to not let us edit it directly because for the most part, consumers typically = retarded, except for the few that actually know *why and how* hardware works at all. It was just something you grew up with if you used a computer before the internet. It used to be common practice to know you DMA hardware address in hex, and IRQ (processor's interrupt request #), and the type of chip just to set up the sound to play wolfenstein lol...

apple - lets patent the shape of the ssd, the weight, the way we installed it, and lets make damn sure to call how we connect it to something trade markable so we can charge per usage of the word.
ibm - lets patent the innovative way we found to increase the ssds life, so other don't reap the benefits of our hard work without compensation.

a clear difference