Corsair Trots Out World's First 6Gbps, 90GB SSDs

[Nflight]

The Article: http://www.dailytech.com/Quick+Note+Corsair+Trots+Out+Worlds+First+6Gbps+90 GB+SSDs/article22487.htm

The Price tag is what I like just $159.oo not too shabby and that Io speed, well we all know more is better! :blob3:

[NeoGen]

I would say that 6Gbps they advertise it's because it's SATA 3, and more than likely will never actually reach that speed... 6Gbps is equivalent to 0.75GB/s, or 768 MB/s. I think I've seen some of the best SSD's out there can give about half of that value on their peak maximum transfer, but I may be wrong, technology is always going forward.

And I can't believe they advertise it as "World's First".. I'm pretty sure there are other SATA 3 SSDs out there already... I think the "World's First" might be because of the size, 90GB is not common, as SSD makers like to play with numbers of powers of 2...Common SSD sizes are 2...4...8...16...32...64...128...etc

[AMDave]

Yeah I think you are right NeoGen.
If that is not an old ad re-posted then someone is making up stuff.

This 250GB Intel SATA3 SSD has been around for 6 months already and there are bigger newer models since then.
http://thessdreview.com/our-reviews/intel-510-series-250-gb-sata-3-ssd-review/

Of course these are just the Consumer models.
There are Enterprise models that we have not seen on the market that are manufactured just for specific enterprise customers.
Did you read the articles about eBay's upgrade to SSDs (http://nwlinux.com/ebay-upgrades-virtualization-storage-with-100tb-of-ssds/)?
I'll bet there was some fancy gear at an unbelievably 'good' price in that deal.

The benefit of this to us is that SSDs are starting to see a lot more uptake and sizes are increasing and prices are starting to come down.
Give it a year or two and the spinning disk may begin to die.
Except that we know that a HDD is good for about 10 years of low useage (long term storage) and about 1 year max useage (raided cache disks)
We don't know yet how SSDs last at those extremes.

How long can an SSD hold data when not being used?
Theoretically it could be forever (NAND).

How long can an SSD remain useful at max data I/O raites (eg Raided cache) ?
Although there are formulae to determine degradation over time - this is not yet fully determined for large scale installations.
There may have been larger installations in Gov't use that we might never hear about, so it could already be known by the vendor, but we'll mever know that.

These are highly interesting questions and these big enterprise installations will be being monitored very closely, for sure.

On the server:
The speed is actually phenomenal as long as the bus and the controller between the SSD and the RAM can deal with the rate of transfer.
Of course in server land is where this hardware really takes off.
Where servers have a 10Gbps backbone or higher the World Wide Wait begins to dissapear (the time between making a HTTP request and recieving the response).
We have seen implementations in the past where web servers were fitted with massive amounts of RAM so that the product or application database could be fully loaded into RAM for instant access.
That is no longer necessary with SATA3 SSDs because the SSD to RAM transfer rate is so high.
The RAM solution is still more expensive than the SSD solution.
Of course a blend of both would be wonderful but expensive.
For servers if the network I/O is less than 10Gbps then you might think that there's not going to be much benefit seen by the end user.
But that's not right. The first response back from the server is what counts and any improvement in generating that response makes a huge difference.

On the desktop:
For developers who compile massive amounts of code on a workstation, or database developers, or graphics and video editors the SSD speed is a tremendous benefit.

For Joe Schmoe and John Q. Public there's really no point in having a SSD yet.
The PC / Laptop will boot and shutdown quickly but most of the time the machine is idle.

For you and I, though, in the land of DC, there are some client apps that are disk I/O heavy but most just complete in RAM.

Well that's my observations so far.

I read some of the early papers on SSD hardware implementations about 2 years ago.
There were pro's and cons for using various SSD storage tech inside the hardware illustrating the application depending whether size (MLC) or speed (DRAM/I-RAM) or degradation (SLC) rate mattered most.
I feel the need to dig that paper up again and find out which one is winning now that these devices are hitting the market.
The lower part of this wiki barely scratches the surface of that topic (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive#Early_SSDs_using_RAM_and_similar_techn ology)

Will the SSD replace the HDD forever, or not?

An oddly exciting moment in hardware geekdom :)

[EDIT -
Oh and I forgot to mention the 'hybrid' devices: HDD + SSD in the same device.
Watch out for those.
They could be the best implementation yet.
- EDIT]

[AMDave]

I think I remember Bender10 (***) messing with compact flash cards as bootable devices plugged into mini/micro ATX boards a year or two ago.
Hazy. Could be wrong.
I know others have done this though for DC arrays.

[EDIT -
good lord my memory still works! -ish. It was 4 years ago.
http://amdusers.com/forum/showthread.php?4868-CF-Cards&highlight=Bender10
These days with the larger USB sticks available it's probably even cheaper now using USB-boot with Live images that you can modify.
- EDIT]

*** who is still very much active btw and has resumed roasting my back on RC5-72 (http://stats.amdusers.com/active_personal_non_boinc_stats.html) ;) He's gaining on me today.

[Brucifer]

Interesting stuff. :-)