At CES this year, there was no shortage of storage talk. But we know that you want to hear about solid state drives (SSDs) and where they're going. Good thing because a company called pureSilicon just announced its 1 TB SSD. That's right: one terabyte.
pureSilicon claims that it is the first in the world with a SSD that breaks reaches the 1 TB barrier. SSD capacity has always been the technology's Achilles' heel, but that could all change. Changing fast is another issue however, as pureSilicon's line of Nitro 1 TB SSD drives are not for the consumer market--even though this is the "CES."
When the Nitro drive becomes available sometime in Q3'09, it will only be available for industrial applications, like military, medical and the like. Consumers like us will have to wait for other manufacturers to catch up. pureSilicon says:
This represents a major advance for the storage industry since it combines maximum density with high performance and low power demand. Four of these drives deliver 4TB in the same space as a standard 3.5-inch HDD, so server footprint requirements and energy consumption in data-intensive applications can be considerably reduced.
The 1TB Nitro SSD is the most compact SSD per gigabyte: 15.40GB per cubic centimeter in a 2.5-inch form-factor -- at least three times greater than any other SSD on the market. This high density in a small form factor has been achieved through innovative engineering techniques coupled with advanced industrial design that yields an exceptionally thin enclosure.
Currently pricing is not available, but we can only guess that pureSilicon's Nitro line will cost all your arms and legs. Despite this, pureSilicon has shown that high capacity SSD drives are possible in the same form factors that we're all use to. Just don't expect to see drives in this range available any time soon.
Some specifications of the Nitro 1 TB SSD:
Specifications - Nitro Series SSD:
Capacities: 32GB, 64GB, 128GB, 256GB, 512GB, 1024GB
Performance
-- Transfer rate: 300MB/sec
-- Sustained read: 240MB/sec
-- Sustained write: 215MB/sec
-- Random read (IOPS 4K): 50,000
-- Random write (IOPS 4K): 10,000
-- Latency < 100 µsec
Reliability
-- MTTF: 2.0 million hours
it's a no name company because they're aren't into consumer stuff....... doesn't make them "no name"
Oh, it's obvious why they are marketing to hospitals. They have more arms and legs to give.
though what they did is difficult enough, how to use all those memory chips and fit it in a 2.5" form factor drive.
probably will cost more than just the sum of multiple drives.
I like to back up all my films onto hard drive, I currently have a Western Digital 500Gb My Book esata and there's about 30Gb's left. Half the space is taken by my DSP9 seasons 3 to 7 rips the rest by DVD's encoded to XVIDS and I'm currently looking at buying a 1Tb drive to cope with my needs. As well as archiving and backup's, games take more and more space some upwards of around 20Gb's so don't dismiss high capacities are irrelevant to quickly.
He wasn't implying that having a TB of storage space is pointless. Naturally many of us have large media collections. Heck, my music alone takes over 100GB. His point was that storing your programs/audio/video on an SSD is a spectacular waste of SSD technology. An oldschool 7200RPM drive is more then enough for these. This is because your storage will have a "relatively" few number of very large files, with little writing to the drive going on beyond the initial storage period. Once its on there, sure an SSD can open your files a few miliseconds faster, but is that worth even 50% more then the cost of a traditional hard drive?
Hospitals and Military applications are more apparent. There is a lot of database stuff taking place with multiple access points to the same data from multiple users. A regular drive would choke up and die quickly. An SSD is perfect. And in these situations storage space AND access time is a factor since these organizations store thousands of mid-to-large sized files that need to be accessed accross the organzation very quickly.
Point is, for a CONSUMER, which most of us here are, a large capacity SSD is more or less useless for the next 2-3 years (when costs will come down enough for it to be warranted). It IS relevant to us however, since the envelope is being pushed in this area, meaning the tech will trinkle down to consumer electronics eventually, and that is of course a good thing. But for the time being, an SSD is great for your main OS partition and common applications. You will notice almost no difference between storing your media/backups on an SSD vs. an HD.
All that being said, these drives have pretty sweet specs. 240/215 Read/write respectively are really good numbers. Almost SLC numbers. Any word on what these drives are? MLC/SLC? When I win the lottery (should be any day now), definetly will look to pick one of these up I think...
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No, I think he was implying 1Tb was too much, look at what he wrote
He if had qualified that with your comment about the 7200k drives I would accept your point.
Well he specifically said "programs" not files/media/junk/what have you.
Either way, the grander point is that this is reserved for medical/military etc. use - not the typical computer geek.
i think that's the norm rather than exception. like physx nvidia and sony ps3 controllers, microsoft everything. The shame is that the bought up company will never make the millions it deserves.
-- MTTF: 2.0 million hours