is this the future?

[Anibal]

cool stuff

http://www.engadget.com/2008/12/11/f...age-confirmed/

[dbjp]

Once this becomes affordable, and Digidesign either updates their cards to something resembling modern day technology (1 card = HD10, or something like that) or takes a different approach to the current DSP system, I'd be all over it.
As it stands, it's not of much use to us HD users using macs.

[rdolmat]

Originally Posted by Anibal

cool stuff

http://www.engadget.com/2008/12/11/f...age-confirmed/

For some reason, I can never trust flash memory for multiple writes-reads-rewrites. I've had too many flash drives fail after a certain amount of writes/reads... maybe that's just me, but I still love my old skool hard drives!

[Craig F]

$ per gig?

[Table Syrup Records]

$37.44 Per Gig for the current 80GB model. (@ $2,995)

160 and 320 available, 640 in the works.

I read the benchmark write up and it appears to be pretty impressive.

In a general sense it would show us 3 times the speed of the fastest SATA II SSD's on the market, if I understand correctly. WOW!

It appears that the access time is the fastest feature, but we'd still be writing much faster than the fastest 15,000 RPM RAID 5 available running on the fastest controller available and SATA II SSD setups, again, if I understand correctly. SWEET!

I'd say that the biggest issue would be heat and the longevity of the product (Both closely related I imagine) And the NAND Chips are stacked so that can't help either! :)

I wouldn't be surprised to see these on the shelves for consumers in a year, two tops! Granted, you could buy one now.

One downfall, if you wanna see it that way, is it is 64-Bit only. I would imagine the consumer models would be available in 32 as well, or at least downward compatible.

I would also expect to see, or wouldn't be surprised to see, these come in a thin shell (Small enough not to conflict with adjacent units) with a slim fan on it in order to keep it cool in consumer cases. I however would simply place the center rail fans accordingly in my rackmount case.

I'm stoked! This could be really cool. I get excited about fast drives. Imagine a Disk Drive running at the maximum speed of your PCI or PCIe bus!

Also, the current units are not bootable, although it did say it's in the works. I personally would like it for System and Audio, but shoot, either way, even just Audio, it could be pretty slick, PT mighht be happy with zero (Virtually) latency drives :)

Of course there's still the obvious need to backup. But these are RAID compatible :)

And there's the question of 'will these live harmoniously with PT, HD, where's a 6-8 PCIe slot MOBO, etc'????

Though I imagine we're gonna see this happen before too long....

man this makes me hungry.... heh heh

[Eric Lambert]

Originally Posted by dbjp

As it stands, it's not of much use to us HD users using macs.

I'm not sure how the two issues are related. Storage vs. processing power.

I'm crazy about this idea. Certainly there will be virgin issues (damn virgins!), but once they're ironed out, this will be an incredibly useful technology. As someone who's STILL fighting with I/O bandwidth issues with streaming audio and direct-from-disk playback, the (theoretical) 10GB/sec spec sits quite nicely in my brain.

As far as the date we can expect this -- if it's out now, it's out now. Nothing "2 years" about it. The price will drop as soon as there's competition, and it will be on a shelf at Best Buy in much less time. If we've learned anything about technology it's that new products elevate to "common" like a virus. I bet I'll have one in my Mac in a year. Maybe wishful thinking.

Out of curiosity, how long would a defrag take? A minute? A couple? Boot times would (should) decrease, too.

[dbjp]

Originally Posted by Eric Lambert

I'm not sure how the two issues are related. Storage vs. processing power.

How many spare PCIe slots do you have on your Mac?

[Howardk]

As these become prevalent, there will be an external pipe that has the speed as well. . . it is all inevitable. . .

[Table Syrup Records]

Originally Posted by dbjp

How many spare PCIe slots do you have on your Mac?

At least with PC's there's MOBO's with tons! And they don't have to be x1 / x4 slots either, they can be x16, but it'll only utilize x4 from what I read of the review.


The other thhing is that once this is adopted, MOBO's will be changed accordingly, just as they are now, and have been, for as long as computers have existed, in order to adopt new technology.

The interesting thing here is that I think we'll see a very fast skip over the SSD's at least in some applications in the near future.

Being these are already available for purchase (Even though insanely expensive) that just show how fast this technology has been accepted and how effective it is. On the corporate level these puppies are being bought, so that's just gonna speed the process of it trickling down to our local shelves at a more affordable price.

They're get cheaper and cheaper as Samsung, Seagate, Hitachi, Western Digital, etc, start manufacturing. Competition will drive the cost down.

I'm stoked. I was getting all set to build this quad with standard drives, but also pick up a couple ssd's to test it out, now I might just wait for these :)

[dbjp]

Here's a question for some of you that might be knowledgeable enough on the issue.

Back in the PT Mix/OS9 days, we had a period of a couple of months in the studio where Pro Tools became ridiculously unstable, crashing all the time.
After a lot of frustration and some researching, we found out that the SCSI (or was it ultra scsi?) drive was too fast (yeah, FAST) for PT. I honestly can't remember how fast it was, it was the fastest of its kind at the time, and all problems were solved once one of the engineers did something to slow it down. I think he said there was a switch somewhere, can't remember.

So, is this kind of problem a thing of the past? It really shouldn't be a problem, obviously, but it did happen in the past. With modern day coding in 64 bit, is everything completely different now? I hope so.