[geeks] industrial USB flash drives, and other solid state Solaris storage

[Shannon Hendrix]

On Apr 20, 2008, at 17:02 , Joshua Boyd wrote:

> On Apr 19, 2008, at 11:42 PM, Shannon Hendrix wrote:
>
>> Solid State Solaris Storage... heh...
>>
>> Anyway:
>>
>> I found some industrial USB flash drives.
>>
>> They are ruggedized, have better algorithms supposedly focused on  
>> reliability, and higher quality flash memory.
>>
>> Unfortunately, they are also 8GB or smaller right now, and quite  
>> expensive.
>>
>> None of them said anything about if their USB interface was more  
>> reliable than normal.  Hopefully they are at least very careful to  
>> meet specs and not do stupid things.
>
> Have you found any that will directly connect to USB headers?

Yes.  In fact, that is all that I found.

None of the industrial stuff I found has USB port connectors.

> When I'm looking at solid state storage for theoretical personal  
> projects (as in, none have gotten that far) it is to save physical  
> space in the case and to not use of a SATA port

It would be nice to have a pair of 500GB drives in a mirror in the  
T105, and boot from something else.

I don't really mind using a SATA port, since the machine has an extra  
one.  It's mainly the expense of those solutions.

> I wonder why that is.  I would have expected them to more or less be  
> using the same flash as anyone else.

Not sure why you though that, since most flash can only do 1-3 million  
writes, which a busy filesystem will do in less than a year.

SSD drives are designed to run for years, and I imagine that's a large  
part of the extra cost.

> Unless they maybe use a few megs of SDRAM as a cache and find that  
> it reduces the number of actual flash erases.  Then they would have  
> to include a batter to power it during a final flush of cache to  
> flash.

...or just better quality flash.

Most flash RAM sucks and is pretty error prone.

What I've always hear is that it took years to get flash drives, not  
because of the RAM itself, but the time it took to shrink the support  
chips needed for wear leveling and error correction.

Early flash was pretty much only used for ROM applications, so you  
only wrote a few dozen times at the most.

-- 
Shannon Hendrix
shannon at widomaker.com