macnn/electronista
12/17/2008, 8:20pm, EST
Wednesday, December 17thToshiba rolls out first 512GB notebook SSD
Toshiba late Wednesday said it has set a record for flash storage with the first-ever 2.5-inch 512GB solid-state drive. It makes use of the company's newest 43 nanometer assembly process and particularly dense multi-level cell storage to double the 256GB record only just set earlier this year. The capacity boost also comes alongside faster performance; Toshiba sees peak read speeds of 240MB per second and write speeds of 200MB per second. Longevity is also a focus with a mean time between failures of one million hours (114 years), though the cells themselves will typically wear out sooner.
AES encryption is also an option to lock down the drive, which plugs into a typical SATA notebook drive bay.
The range-topping drive also comes alongside physically smaller 1.8-inch drives that take advantage of the new memory inside ultraportable notebooks and include 64GB, 128GB and 256GB versions. All of the drives will be ready to test for PC makers sometime during winter 2009 and should be mass-produced for shipping systems during the spring.
Filed under: computers, upgrades/storage
Other story tags: Toshiba
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Damn!
Damn!!
Day-um
Yea, verily. 114 Years? How much????
Mac Pro RAID...
...never looked so good...
;-)
get real
MTBF is NOT an indicator of how long a device will last. Hard drives have a MTBF of 1.5 million hours, and they don't last anywhere near 200 years. It's an engineering statistical reference, NOT a prediction of life. Look it up on Wikipedia. And shame on the authro for not knowing that!
Well... ?
TWO huge questions MUST be answered before I get excited and reach for the plastic...
1.) What are the read and write speeds vs. a 2 1/2" 7200 rpm hard drive?
2.) How much?
Sounds like $1300
Sounds like $1300 to me.
Great news
Now that capacities are approaching what traditional hard drives offer, these are going to start taking off. Yes, the price is still high, but it's dropping pretty quickly. Within a year or 2, traditional hard drives will become a thing of the past.
MTBF-explained simply
Why your hard drive doesn't last 150 years.
(There are about 8700 hours in a year, but to make this example simple, let's call it 10,000.)
Here's how MTBF works: it's an aggregate of many units based on expected life of a single unit.
Let's say you have a hard drive that is warranted to last 3 years, or 30,000 hours.
You put it in a server, and behold, it lasts 3 years. You take it out and put in a new one, and that also lasts 3 years. So you replace it with a new one, and that too.... well, you get it.
Let's say you keep doing that and finally, on the 50th unit, only two years into it's life, it breaks.
You now have 3 years or 30,000 hours per unit, times 50 units = 1,500,000.
And that's your MTBF.
So anyone who says "Wow! MTBF of 1.5 million hours! that mean this thing will last (1.5M / 10000) 150 years!" -clearly- doesn't know what they're talking about.
(MTBF is more complex than my example, including "infant mortality" and "wear out" phases; "theoretical" vs "operational" MTBF and so on, but the gist of what's here is correct.)
The "real" story re HDD
There have been a number of studies that have thoroughly debunked the ridiculous (for what are basically mechanical devices) MTBF claim for hard drives. The most widely reported ones were done on a large universe of servers, running 24/7. Actual unit failures occurred at a rate of 1.5 to 5% PER MONTH. That's not a real issue in the server world, where redundant RAID arrays are commonly used; there's no loss of data when a drive fails, and the sysop is notified of the failure and has to install a replacement drive. It's a MAJOR problem in most other applications, especially embedded ones!