Intel, Hitachi to develop solid-state drives
Intel will target solid-state drives for server computers in a tie up with Hitachi that was announced Monday night.
Intel solid state drive
(Credit: Intel)Intel and Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST) said they will "jointly develop and deliver" Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) and Fibre Channel (FC) solid-state drives (SSDs) for servers, workstations, and storage systems.
While Hitachi is a large supplier of hard disk drives, Intel manufactures and sells consumer and enterprise-class solid-state drives (and the flash memory chips inside the drives). The enterprise-class X25-E Extreme SSDs that Intel offers now are based on Serial ATA (SATA) technology. As are its consumer-class drives.
Solid-state drives are generally faster than hard-disk drives, particularly at reading data.
"The combination of a leading Enterprise drive supplier with a NAND technology and manufacturing leader will produce world-class solutions in terms of reliability, performance and system compatibility," the companies said in a statement.
The agreement is exclusive to the two companies with the first Serial Attached SCSI and Fibre Channel products expected to be available in early 2010. Both Serial Attached SCSI and Fibre Channel are interfaces typically used in servers.
The companies said the SSDs will not replace hard disk drives but complement them. "The new generation of solid-state drive technology complements existing enterprise-class hard disk drives and is intended for use in storage applications that require extremely high Input/Output Operations Per Second (IOPS) performance and power efficiency," according to the two companies.
Hitachi GST said it will continue to provide its customers with both "traditional" hard-disk drives in addition to the SSDs.
The new SSDs will be "branded and exclusively sold and supported by Hitachi GST" and use Intel NAND flash memory and SSD technology.
Hitachi said it will use its expertise in drive firmware, reliability, qualification and system integration in combination with Intel's technology and manufacturing capabilities.
Brooke Crothers has been an editor at large at CNET News, an analyst at IDC Japan, and an editor at The Asian Wall Street Journal Weekly, among other endeavors, including co-manager of an after-school math-and-reading center. He writes for the CNET Blog Network and is not a current employee of CNET. Disclosure. 
- by dwinks December 2, 2008 1:30 PM PST
- Fragmentation is purely a function of the OS and File-system. HDDs have moving parts which take time to seek (move), and when a file is fragmented, it requires more than 1 seek to read, which slows down speed, and on crappy filesystems that get fragmented badly (FAT32/NTFS mostly), it could mean hundreds or thousands of seeks per file. Since SSDs don't have moving parts, and their seeks (which they DO have, though non-mechanical) take around 0.001 milliseconds, rather than 10-25 ms like HDDs. Such fast seeks make defragmenting useless.
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- by quirK December 2, 2008 9:39 PM PST
- Not to pour cold water on your analysis, which is highly interesting, but DNA in its highest density state is packed tightly and unable to be accessed for information (wrapped into chromosomes for cell division). Nevertheless, for anything man-made to approach DNA's density, even uncoiled; that is a feat.
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(5 Comments)Not only that, but almost all SSDs implement "wear-leveling", which sends data to random parts of the disk, rather than contiguous areas, even if the OS/Filesystem tries to send a contiguous write, and consquently, even if you "defragment" a SSD, each file is stored in many many parts on the disk and the OS is unaware if this, which means that defragmenting a SSD does ONLY ONE thing, which is unnecessarily wear down the drive. However, that really isn't a concern, because contrary to what some people would try to tell you, MTBF (mean time between failure) on a SSD is measured in millions of hours, which under fairly heavy use, 24/7/365 works out to something like 30 years, which is far beyond the actual useful life of a SSD.
As for the "bulk storage", magnetic media is getting VERY close to the physical limits of data density per platter, and I have read that a 3.5" HDD will top out at around 5-6TB. The physical limits of density were already reached with parallel recording, for the most part, and only by switching to perpendicular recording have they managed to squeeze more onto a disk, but that is rapidly hitting it's limit too, with no new way to improve it. SSDs on the other hand are estimated to be able to eventually hold thousands of TB in a 3.5" form factor.
DNA is most likely the close to, if not the highest data per gram/volume, and it's said to be something like 2.25 ZETTABYTES per gram. There isn't anything physically preventing SSDs from getting at least 10% that data density, which would likely be around 100-200 zettabytes per disk. HDDs can't pack too much more data per platter before random bit-flipping starts to occur. It should only be at most 5-10 years before HDDs are completely replaced.
Also, due to the nature of how SSDs are made, it's possible to put each memory chip in parallel in what amounts to a raid-0 array, and there are disks already in the lab being tested that exceed 1gbps transfer rate with effectively 0 seek time and 100x the reliability of HDDs. It's expected that SATA's 3.0gbps transfer speed will bottleneck SSDs in only a couple of years!