Will be so much fun to hack ssd's in the future

[HaQue]

Would have loved to go to the Flash Memory Summit.

Hacking SSD drives with a ARM Cortex A9 1Ghz processor and running Linux? awesome fun.
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1323445

The biggest takeaway was on the breadth and depth of work to turn solid-state drives into processing nodes for big data centers. Specifically, there are efforts afoot to tap into under-used flash controllers to handle distributed computing tasks that include processing core search algorithms such as Hadoop and Map Reduce.

Startup NxGenData emerged from stealth mode to show its new concepts on the show floor. It flash controller will use an ARM Cortex A9 running at up to a GHz rather than the more typical Cortex-M or -R cores.

The extra umph will help chips manage up to 8 TBytes of data on an M.2 form factor PCI Express card, that's about the size of a long stick of gum with the extra error correction coding that requires. More importantly, the company outlined a strategy to make the controller a distributed computing node.

Each controller will run a lightweight Linux kernel and a virtual memory container. It will communicate with a host system via a TCP/IP-over-PCIe tunnel. The company claims engineers at Google are expressing interest in the concept which essentially creates a second layer of distributed processing in the data center

[HaQue]

http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?_mc=RSS%5FEET%5FEDT&doc_id=1323445&page_number=8

Over at the Toshiba, attendees saw a variety of the usual flash appliances, SSDs and chips. One anomaly was its FlashAir (below), a hybrid Wi-Fi and flash memory SD card, selling for about $30 in a version supporting 802.11n and 8 Gbytes memory.

Toshiba-FlashAir.jpg (15.64 KiB) Viewed 5170 times