From the BBC:
A Durban IT company pitted an 11-month-old bird armed with a 4GB memory stick against the ADSL service from the country’s biggest web firm, Telkom.
Winston the pigeon took two hours to carry the data 60 miles – in the same time the ADSL had sent 4% of the data.
I calculated that transfering 4% of 4 gigabyte in 2 hours came out to 184kbps, the same as the very slowest DSL (my connection is over 100 times faster). The pigeon actually delivered the stick in 1 hour, and it took another hour to load the data. That’s less than 1 megabyte per second from a USB stick, are they using abacusus over there? If anyone wants to check my math please a comment.
Yesterday Intel announced their first solid state drive, the X-25. Intel gave several presentations about SSD at their recent Intel Developer Conference. At the conference Intel addressed the weaknesses of SSD (sustained reads) and how they have developed controller technology to negate the weaknesses. The new X-25 they announced is ridiculously fast, it blew away 2 traditional magnetic drives in RAID. It boasts read speeds of a whopping 170 mB/s and read speeds of 70 mB/s. Most computing depends on your ability to read from the drive so that is going to be the bottleneck, but it’s still faster than magnetic drives. SSD technology seems to be advancing at a rapid pace. It seems like every week I’m posting about a SSD.
While the RAIDed 500 GB, 7200 RPM Seagate Barracuda drives were getting a little under 550 IOPS (that’s input’s/output’s per second), the single 80GB X-25M Mainstream SSD was posting an almost unbelievable 44,000-plus IOPS. If these numbers hold true when the new drives hit shelves in several months, it will be interesting, to see what a pair of RAIDed Extreme drives can do. When an X-25M laptop was put up against a 5400 RPM-based in a PCMark Vantage showdown, the Mainstream-based system saw a 1.5x better overall score and an almost tenfold improvement in the Hard Drive category. Saleski then went over the game load times and demos he showed yesterday (see our SSD article from yesterday for some numbers).
See my other SSD posts.
The read speeds for solid state drives continue to climb. By combining the near-zero latency speeds of solid state with SATA-III and new drive controllers, we will continue to see a surge in performance. Imagine putting these in RAID.
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