Carpet Bomberz Inc.

Category: flash memory

  • Birck Nanotechnology Center – Ferroelectric RAM

    Schematic drawing of original designs of DRAM ...
    Image via Wikipedia

    The FeTRAMs are similar to state-of-the-art ferroelectric random access memories, FeRAMs, which are in commercial use but represent a relatively small part of the overall semiconductor market. Both use ferroelectric material to store information in a nonvolatile fashion, but unlike FeRAMS, the new technology allows for nondestructive readout, meaning information can be read without losing it.

    via Discovery Park – Birck Nanotechnology Center – News.

    I’m always pleasantly surprised to read that work is still being done on alternate materials for Random Access Memory (RAM). I was following closely developments in the category of ferroelectric RAM by folks like Samsung and HP. Very few of these products promised enough return on investment to be developed into products. And some notable efforts by big manufacturers were abandoned altogether.

    If this research effort can be licensed to a big chip manufacturer and not turned into a form of patent trolling ammunition I would feel the effort was not wasted. I think too often most recently these patented technologies are not used as a means of advancing the art of computer technology. Instead they are a portfolio to a litigator seeking rent on the patented technology.

    Due to the frequency of abandoned projects in the alternative DRAM technology category, I’m hoping the compatibility of this chip’s manufacturing process with existing chip making technology will be a big step forward. A paradigm shifting technology like magnetic RAM might just push us to the next big mountain top of power conservation, performance and capability that the CPU enjoyed from 1969 to roughly 2005 when chip speeds began to plateau.

    Related articles

  • AnandTech – OCZ Z-Drive R4 CM88 1.6TB PCIe SSD Review

    In the enterprise segment where 1U and 2U servers are common, PCI Express SSDs are very attractive. You may not always have a ton of 2.5″ drive bays but theres usually at least one high-bandwidth PCIe slot unused. The RevoDrive family of PCIe SSDs were targeted at the high-end desktop or workstation market, but for an enterprise-specific solution OCZ has its Z-Drive line.

    via AnandTech – OCZ Z-Drive R4 CM88 1.6TB PCIe SSD Review.

    Anandtech is breaking new ground covering some Enterprise level segments of the Solid State Disk industry. While I doubt he’ll be doing ratings of Violin and Texas Memory Systems gear very soon, the OCZ low end Enterprise PCIe cards is still beginning to approach that target. We’re talking $10,000 USD and up for anyone who wants to participate. Which puts it in the middle to high end of Fusion-io and barely touches the lower end of Violin and TMS not to mention Virident. Given that, it is still wild to see what kind of architecture and performance optimization one gets for the money they pay. SandForce rules the day at OCZ for anything requiring the top speeds for write performance. It’s also interesting to find out about the SandForce 25xx series use of super-capacitors to hold enough reserve power to flush the write caches on a power outage. It’s expensive, but moves the product up a few notches in the Enterprise level reliability scale.

  • Angelbird Now Shipping SSD RAID Card for 800 MB/s

    If you want more speed, then you will have to look to PCI-Express for the answer. Austrian-based Angelbird has opened its online storefront with its Wings add-in card and SSDs.

    via Angelbird Now Shipping SSD RAID Card for 800 MB/s.

    After more than one year of being announced Angelbird has designed and manufactured a new PCIe flash card. The design of which is full expandable over time depending on your budget needs. Fusion-io has a few ‘expandable’ cards in its inventory too, but the price class of Fusion-io is much higher than the consumer level Angelbird product. So if you cannot afford to build a 1TB flash-based PCIe card, do not worry. Buy what you can and outfit it later over time as your budget allows. Now that’s something any gamer fanboy or desktop enthusiast can get behind.

    Angelbird does warn in advance power demands for typical 2.5″ SATA flash modules are higher than what the PCIe bus can provide typically. They recommend using their own memory modules to add onto their base level PCIe card. Up until I read those recommendations I had forgotten some of the limitations and workarounds Graphics Card manufacturers typical use. These have become so routine that there are now 2-3 extra power taps provided even by typical desktop manufacturers for their desktop machines. All this to accommodate the extra graphics chip power required by today’s display adapters. It makes me wonder if Angelbird could do a Rev. of the base level PCIe card with a little 4-pin power input or something similar. It’s doesn’t need another 150watts, it’s going to be closer to 20watts for this type of device I think. I wish Angelbird well and I hope sales start strong so they can sell out their first production run.

    Related articles

  • OCZ Launches PCIe-Based HDD/SDD Hybrid Drive

    By bypassing the SATA bottleneck, OCZs RevoDrive Hybrid promises transfer speeds up to 910 MB/s and up to 120,000 IOPS 4K random write. The SSD aspect reportedly uses a SandForce SF-2281 controller and the hard drive platters spin at 5,400rpm. On a whole, the hybrid drive makes good use of the companys proprietary Virtualized Controller Architecture.

    via OCZ Launches PCIe-Based HDD/SDD Hybrid Drive.

    RevoDrive Hybrid PCIe
    Image from: Tom's Hardware

    Good news on the Consumer Electronics front, OCZ continues to innovate on the desktop aftermarket introducing a new PCIe Flash product that marries a nice 1TByte Hard Drive to a 100GB flash-based SSD. The best of both worlds all in one neat little package. Previously you might buy these two devices seperately, 1 average sized Flash drive and 1 spacious Hard drive. Then you would configure the Flash Drive as your System boot drive and then using some kind of alias/shortcut trick have the Hard drive as your user folder to hold videos, pictures, etc. This has caused some very conservative types to sit out and wait for even bigger Flash drives hoping to store everything on one logical volume. But what they really want is a hybrid of big storage and fast speed and that according to the press release is what the OCZ Hybrid Drive delivers. With a SandForce drive controller and two drives the whole architecture is hidden away along with the caching algorithm that moves files between the flash and hard drive storage areas. To the end user, they see but one big Hard drive (albeit installed in one of their PCI card slots), but experience the faster bootup times, faster application loading times. I’m seriously considering adding one of these devices into a home computer we have and migrating the bootdrive and user home directories over to that, using the current hard drives as the Windows backup device. I think that would be a pretty robust setup and could accommodate a lot of future growth and expansion.

    Related articles

  • OCZ samples twin-core ARM SSD controller • The Register

    OCZ Technology
    Image via Wikipedia

    OCZ says it is available for evaluation now by OEMs and, we presume, OCZ will be using it in its own flash products. Were looking at 1TB SSDs using TLC flash, shipping sequential data out at 500MB/sec which boot quickly, and could be combined to provide multi-TB flash data stores. Parallelising data access would provide multi-GB/sec I/O. The flash future looks bright.

    via OCZ samples twin-core ARM SSD controller • The Register.

    Who knew pairing an ARM core with the drive electronics for a Flash based SSD could be so successful. Not only are the ARM chips helping to drive the cpus on our handheld devices, they are now becoming the SSD Drive controllers too! If OCZ is able to create these drive controllers with good yields (say 70% on the first run) then they are going to hopefully give themselves a pricing advantage and get a higher profit margin per device sold. This is assuming they don’t have to pay royalties for the SandForce drive controller on every device they ship.

    If OCZ was able to draw up their own drive controller, I would be surprised. However, since they have acquired Indilinx it seems like they are making good on the promise held by Indilinx’s current crop of drive controllers. Let’s just hope they are able to match the performance of SandForce at the same price points as well. Otherwise it’s nothing more than a kind of patent machine that will allow OCZ to wage lawsuits against competitors for Intellectual Property they acquired through the acquisition of Indilinx. And we have seen too much of that recently with Apple’s secret bid for Nortel’s patent pool and Google’s acquisition of Motorola.

    Related articles

  • Atom smasher claims Hadoop cloud migration victory • The Register

    Image representing SeaMicro as depicted in Cru...
    Image via CrunchBase

    SeaMicro has been peddling its SM10000-64 micro server, based on Intels dual-core, 64-bit Atom N570 processor and cramming 256 of these chips into a 10U chassis. . .

    . . . The SM10000-64 is not so much a micro server as a complete data center in a box, designed for low power consumption and loosely coupled parallel processing, such as Hadoop or Memcached, or small monolithic workloads, like Web servers.

    via Atom smasher claims Hadoop cloud migration victory • The Register.

    While it is not always easy to illustrate the cost/benefit and Return on Investment on a lower power box like the Seamicro, running it head to head on a similar workload with a bunch of off the shelf Xeon boxes really shows the difference. The calculation of the benefit is critical too. What do you measure? Is it speed? Is it speed per transaction? Is it total volume allowed through? Or is it cost per unit transaction within a set amount of transactions? You’re getting closer with that last one. The test setup used a set number of transaction needing to be done in a set period of time. The benchmark then measure total power dissipation to accomplish that number of transactions in the set amount of time. SeaMicro came away the winner in unit cost per transaction in power terms. While the Xeon based servers had huge excess speed and capacity the power dissipation put it pretty far into the higher cost per transaction category.

    However it is very difficult to communicate this advantage that SeaMicro has over Intel. Future tests/benchmarks need to be constructed with clearly stated goals and criteria. Specifically if it can be communicated as a Case History of a particular problem that could be solved by either a SeaMicro server or a bunch of Intel boxes running Xeon cpus with big caches. Once that Case History is well described, then the two architectures are then put to work showing what the end goal is in clear terms (cost per transaction). Then and only then will SeaMicro communicate effectively how it does things different and how that can save money. Otherwise it’s too different to measure effectively versus a Intel Xeon based rack of servers.

    Related articles

  • Artur Bergman Wikia on SSDs @ OReilly Media Conferences/Don Bazile CEO of Violin Memory

    Image representing Violin Memory as depicted i...
    Image via CrunchBase

    Artur Bergman of Wikia explains why you should buy and use Solid State Disks (strong language)

    via Artur Bergman Wikia on SSDs on OReilly Media Conferences – live streaming video powered by Livestream.

    This is the shortest presentation I’ve seen and most pragmatic about what SSDs can do for you. He recommends buying Intel 320s and getting your feet wet by moving from a bicycle to a Ferrari. Later on if you need to go with a PCIe SSD do it, but it’s like the difference between a Formula 1 race car and a Ferrari. Personally in spite of the lack of major difference Artur is trying to illustrate I still like the idea of buying once and getting more than you need. And if this doesn’t start you down the road of seriously buying SSDs of some sort check out this interview with Violin Memory CEO, Don Bazile:

    Violin tunes up for billion dollar flash gig: Chris Mellor@theregister.co.uk (Saturday June 25th)

    Basile said: “Larry is telling people to use flash … That’s the fundamental shift in the industry. … Customers know their competitors will adopt the technology. Will they be first, second or last in their industry to do so? … It will happen and happen relatively quickly. It’s not just speed; its the lowest cost of data base transaction in history. [Flash] is faster and cheaper on the exact same software. It’s a no-brainer.”

    Violin Memory is the current market leader in data center SSD installations for transactional data or analytical processing. The boost folks are getting from putting the databases on Violin Memory boxes is automatic, requires very little tuning and the results are just flat out astounding. The ‘Larry’ quoted above is the Larry Ellison of Oracle, the giant database maker. So with that kind of praise I’m going to say the tipping point is near, but please read the article. Chris Mellor lays out a pretty detailed future of evolution in SSD sales and new product development. 3-bit Multi-Level memory cells in NAND flash is what Mellor thinks will be the tipping point as price is still the biggest sticking point for anyone responsible for bidding on new storage system installs. However while that price sticking point is a bigger issue for batch oriented off-line data warehouse analysis, for online streaming analysis SSD is cheaper per byte per second throughput. So depending on the typical style of database work you do or performance you need SSD is putting the big iron spinning hard disk vendors to shame. The inertia of these big capital outlays and cozy relationships with these vendors will make some shops harder to adopt the new technology (But IBM is giving us such a big discount!…WE are an EMC shop,etc.). However the competitors of the folks owning those datacenters will soon eat all that low hanging fruit a simple cutover to SSDs will afford and the competitive advantage will swing to the early adopters.

    *Late Note: Chris Mellor just followed up Monday night (June 27th) with an editorial further laying out the challenge to disk storage presented by the data center Flash Array vendors. Check it out:

    What should the disk drive array vendors do, if this scenario plays out?They should buy in or develop their own all-flash array technology. Having a tier of SSD storage in a disk drive array is a good start but customers will want the simpler choice of an all-flash array and, anyway, they are here now. Guys like Violin and Whiptail and TMS are knocking on the storage array vendors customer doors right now.

    via All aboard the flash array train? • The Register.

    Related articles

  • New OCZ Z-Drive R4 PCIe SSD Achieves Record

    Flag of Taipei City
    Image via Wikipedia

    Tuesday at Computex, OCZ claimed that it set a new benchmark of 1 million 4K write IOPS and 1.5 million read IOPS with a single Z-Drive R4 88-equipped 3U Colfax International Server.

    via New OCZ Z-Drive R4 PCIe SSD Achieves Record.

    Between the RevoDrive and the Z-Drive OCZ is tearing up the charts with product releases announced in Taipei, Taiwan‘s Computex 2011 trade show. This particular one off demonstration was using a number of OCZ’s announced but as yet unreleased Z-Drive R4 88 packed into a 3U Colfax International enclosure. In other words, it’s an idealized demonstration of what kind of performance you might achieve in a best case scenario.  The speeds are in excess of 3Gbytes/sec.  for writing and reading which for Webserving or Database hosting is going to make a big difference for people that need the I/O. Previously you would have had to use a very expensive large scale Fibre Channel hard drive array that split and RAID’d the data across so many spinning hard drive spindles that you might come partially close to matching these speeds. But the SIZE! Ohmigosh. You would not be able to fit that amount of hardware into a 3U enclosure, never. So space constrained data centers will benefit enormously from dumping some of their drive array infrastructure for these more compact I/O monsters (some are from other manufacturers too, like Violin, RamSan and Fusion-io). Again, as I have said before when Anandtech and Tom’s Hardware can get sample hardware to benchmark the performance I will be happy to see what else these PCIe SSDs can do.

    Related articles

  • AnandTech – Computex 2011: OCZs RevoDrive 3

    OCZ Technology
    Image via Wikipedia

    Theres a new PCIe SSD in town: the RevoDrive 3. Armed with two SF-2281 controllers and anywhere from 128 – 256GB of NAND 120/240GB capacities, the RevoDrive 3 is similar to its predecessors in that the two controllers are RAIDed on card. Heres where things start to change though.

    via AnandTech – Computex 2011: OCZs RevoDrive 3 & RevoDrive 3 X2, Now With TRIM.

    OCZ is back with a revision of its consumer grade PCIe SSD, the RevoDrive. This time out the SandForce SF-2281 makes an appearance and to great I/O effect. The bus interface is a true PCIe bridge chip as opposed to the last versions PCI-X to PCIe bridge. Also this device can be controlled completely through the OSes own drive utilities and TRIM support. All combined this is the most natively and well support PCIe SSD to hit the market. No benchmarks yet from a commercially shipping product. But my fingers are crossed that this thing is going to be faster than OCZ’s Vertex 3 and Vertex 3 Pro (I hope) while possibly holding more flash memory chips than those SATA 6 based SSDs.

    One other upshot of this revised product is full OS booting support. So not only will TRIM work but your motherboard and the PCIe’s card electronics will allow you to boot directly off of the card. So this is by far the most evolved and versatile PCIe based SSD drive to date. Pricing is the next big question on my mind after reading the specifications. Hopefully will not be Enterprise grade (greater than $1200). I’ve found most off the  prosumer and gamer market upgrade manufacturers are comfortable setting prices at the $1200 price point for these PCIe SSDs. And that trend has been pretty reliable going back to the original RevoDrive.

    Related articles

  • AnandTech – OCZ Agility 3 240GB Review

    OCZ Technology
    Image via Wikipedia

    Theres another issue holding users back from the Vertex 3: capacity. The Vertex 3 is available in 120, 240 and 480GB versions, there is no 60GB model. If you’re on a budget or like to plan frequent but rational upgrades, the Vertex 3 can be a tough sell.

    via AnandTech – OCZ Agility 3 240GB Review.

    OCZ apart from having the fastest SSD on the market now is attempting to branch out and down market simultaneously. And by down market I don’t mean anything other than the almighty PRICE. It’s all about the upgrade market for the PC Fan boys that want to trade up to get the next higher performing part for their gaming computer (If people still do that, play games on their PeeCees). Performance-wise it is designed to be less expensive and this SSD shows that it is not the highest speed part. So if you demand to own an OCZ branded SSD and won’t settle for anything less, but you don’t want to pay $499 to get it, the Agility 3 is just for you. Also if you read the full review the charts will show how all the current generation SATA 6 drives are shaping up (Intel included) versus the previous generation SATA 2.0 drives (3Gbytes/sec). OCZ Vertex 3 is still the king of the mountain at the 240GB size, but is still very much at a price premium.

    Related articles