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47 Comments
- ramsinks.com, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2They WILL replace platters. They last much longer than platters. They use less power than platters. They generate less heat than platters. You can wash your laptop on the washer and dryer and still have your data intact (many of us know this due to our thumb drives taking the tumble)
No more "DeathStar" ticking!!!!
nuff said. - Octopie, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Hard drives are cheaper because they make a lot more of them than flash drives, once production goes up the price will drop dramatically. Even if they don't, they will take over completely in less then 10 years. I mean, which would you prefer, I would pay a bit more for faster data and less power consumption.
- Tobey, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2"Doesn't Flash memory haved a limited number of read/write cycles?"
Flash memory has an infinite number of read cycles. And about a billion write cycles. A traditional hard drive would have failed LONG before you used up all of those write cycles. - acevoncash, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2no. not for another 10 years. at least.
- smash, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Yeah this isn't going to happen anytime soon. Too expensive.
- xeeton, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1"In fact, tape drives are still in use today in many places, though most people have forgotten they still exist. They are like that crazy uncle everyone has, but no one ever talks about. He is still out there even if you don’t invite him to Thanksgiving."
The author obviously doesn't know that tape is the only data backup medium that is admissible in court. - Tobey, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Flash memory is getting cheaper by the week. This might sound crazy, but I predict this will happen within the next 1-2 years.
- distrbnce, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Sounds pretty expensive to me.
Wouldn't that mean instant-on though? Finally? (didn't have time to read, 'bout to go eat)
And they would be super small notebooks... - fleabag, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1steamynachos: that they do.. you couldnt run something like linux on a flash based drive due to swap constantly doing read/write or youll be replacing the drive every month :( of course ram is so cheap you could always do without swap..
again flash based technology is improving so hopefully this will be something ironed out - ntufar, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Yes, steamynachos is right, flash memory does have writing cycles. Flash memory used to have 10.000 cycles, recently it got to 100.000. Most of products sold today are equiped with 100.000-cycle flash.
If your flash device is fromated as FAT, it updates the first sector every time it writes something, therefore if you write something to your mp3 player once a day it will fail after 100.000/365=273 years. But if you run today's operating systems that write everything and their dog to hard disk, mean time to failure will be much shorter.
Flash manufacturers promise to brin flash cycle times to 1 millon. If it happens it said that flash memory will have similar life to hard drives.
For Linux, there is JFFS2 file system develeoped especially for flash drives that tries to spread writes evenly over the blocks and not update specific blocks on every write like FAT does. - dimplemonkey, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1So any chance this may still happen? Perhaps on a smaller scale with the MacBook?
- il0vemymac, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Maybe for a PDA or tablet. Think about how much it would cost for 80 gigs in Flash memory...
- lollerskates, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Yeah, steamynachos, I seem to remember something like that...
- mojofrojo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0He paints a pretty picture of the future. But as been said before my post, I dont think it will be so soon that they announce something as radical as jumping to flash memory. Though it is a nice thing to look forward to. Ultra thin notebooks, with a battery life over 20 hours. Hell, make the drive hot swappable so you could just dock it into your home comp to sync files.
- bigbird, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0umm harddrives arnt big consumers of power in the laptop, I mean how does this equate to like 20 hours? Even if there was no harddrive i your battery woulndnt double. Theres a cpu, a screen(which apparently take up alot of power, especially the light) and speakers all draining your battery, plus everything else in there. Even with low power devices i believe the hardrive isnt the biggest problem for battery life.
- anagami, on 07/02/2008, -0/+0What about a portable Applec computer? What about a dvorak corded keyboard?
The flash technology may work for a portable computer, but it should have a smaller (and functional) keyboard. - mojofrojo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0When I was thinking of the future of laptops I was also taking into account of the quality of batteries improving onver the next 10 years. Since this article was on speculation I was doing a bit of my own. I apologize if my post was not well detailed and the wrong meaning was construed by it. The change to flash would at the very least bring power usage down by a good bit since it doesn't have to power Motors to spin the platters.
- mojofrojo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0LarsG,
Would we not need a swap file at that point? With ram being so inexpensive, could not the operating system just get by on holding files there? I know when I had a xp box up and running I would just load any game i was playing in the ram to make it run faster by ignoring the hard-drive totally. The same could be done for the whole os (if xp wasent so large) - CaptSnuffy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I think it's an obvious point, in the future everthing will be solid state.
- Matrixsjd, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I saw some solid state Hard drives less then a year ago but they were something like $500 a gig, sooooooo this isn't coming to laptops anytime soon lol unless you spend on spending a lot on a laptop.
- sneakerelph, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0@mojofrojo
where can i get the software/tutorial for running the game entirely in RAM? that would be pretty sweet! - steamynachos, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Doesn't Flash memory haved a limited number of read/write cycles?
- LarsG, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0tripm: The nano har 4 or 8 flash ships inside.
As for flash replacing HD. Not with flash being a lot more expensive per MB, and not without some operating system and file system changes due to the limited number of write cycles - no swap on flash! - headzoo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Like lynn said, it's 16Gb, not 16GB. His miscalculation makes the whole article pointless.
- FRAGaLOT, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0reminds me of "atomchip" laptops that have 2tbs of flash "hard drive"
- MicroT13, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0If Apple released an unlta-portable iBook/Powerbook, I'd buy it in a second. Something like a 10.6" LCD that weighs around the 3 lbs. mark; and now we just wait.
- tripm, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I like the idea alot. Doesnt the nano have 2 seperate flash drives inside it? I thought I had heard that. In a few years computer manufactureres can add 16 or 32 flash cards inside a laptop and it could ba as thin as an optical drive allows for.
- mojofrojo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Killasta43 I don't know if your still reading this but I thought i should still answer your question. You mount the game in ram. Play it for as long as you want. And when your done you let it get erased from ram when you turn off the comp. I was up looking all night trying to find the program to mount a virtual disk in ram to do this but its been so Long since I ran an windows box and I forgot the name. If anyone knows a program please post here for a nostalgic old man.
- LarsG, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0speel,
More likely that Apple would be pwn'ed by the class-action lawsuit that would hit them when the flashdrives started failing in droves less than 6 months after purchase. :-) - mojofrojo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I see your point LarsG, but if we are talking abought what is to dome in the near furture it's not too far feched to assume that the chips will be 64bit as a standard. While I am not an electrical engineer I can see a few ways that the random writes could be lowered to a more manageable size. Though those ideas might also be wrong. : ) Since we are talking abought apple, lets just say we are thinking abought a new workstation for them 2 64bit G6 processors running... oh I dont know OS XV. We put 8 gigs of memory in the thing ( 3gigs should be enough for the os dont you think?) use 2gigs for virtual swap and the rest for floating calculations. Doesn't seem too far feched to me. If some one could tell me different please do. I'm too broke to go out to the club tonight and none of my friends have gas money to come over. It's this and Diablo II for the rest of the night
- positron, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0"In fact, tape drives are still in use today in many places, though most people have forgotten they still exist."
i've actually got an 8 year old tape drive backup sitting, unused, in the backroom. sits right next to my old Timex Sinclair and its cassette tape drive. oh how times have changed... - mojofrojo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0sneakerelph
I'm looking for the program I used but I cant find the link. It might be OOB by now. Maybe I can find one that does the same thing for you. - Charlotte_Web, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0The flash memory is 16 Gb (little "b"), but when combined in 16 x 16 configurations, this will allow for 32 GB (big "B") flash memory cards. A Mac Powerbook laptop with two 32 GB flash cards in it for storage would absolutely rule.
- TVarmy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Put the OS and main booting stuff on the flash, put everything else on the hard drive. Then, you only need, like, 4GB of space on the flash, and you get a fast bootup.
- Killasta43, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0"With ram being so inexpensive, could not the operating system just get by on holding files there? I know when I had a xp box up and running I would just load any game i was playing in the ram to make it run faster by ignoring the hard-drive totally. The same could be done for the whole os (if xp wasent so large)"
I am curious to know how you do this mojofrojo. You'd need constant power in order for files to STAY on system RAM. RAM is volatile once the power is taken from it, anything that was on it is gone forever(not recoverable). I know Gigabyte came out with something that you stick your RAM into and it has a battery on it that keeps the info on it. - LarsG, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0mojofrojo,
RAM is cheap, but 4GB is the upper limit with 32bit. So if you need more you need to go 64bit before you can ditch swap.
Even so, unless the number of write cycles supported can be increased quite a bit the OS and FS has to be redesigned to try to minimize the numbers of writes to flash. With current 100'000-writes flash, that is 70 days until failure if we do one write per minute. Devices using flash today (like say, MP3 players, embedded Linux systems) generally try to avoid random access writes as much as possible and use hardware or file system wear leveling techniques to even the number of writes across the chip. - Killasta43, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Yes, I am still reading this :P. Thank you for the response. I am planning on switching to a a Linux platform soon anyway because Vista is going to be so expensive and "followed by microsoft". I don't want them watching my every move.
Thanx again. - Killasta43, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0volatile, once the power is taken from it, ^
- dbr_onix, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I thought of this ages ago (Solid state harddrives).. It's completely possible, look how much a 32mb flash drive was a year ago.. Now you can buy a 1GB flash drive for £70.
As for it having a limited nmber of read/writes.. I'm sure, that given some work, it could easily outlive a normal HD. Solid state = no moving parts, normal HD's have lots of spining parts that could fail fair more easily
It's just getting the techology initaly used, as they'll be expesnive at first..
Buut, it'll be a hell of a lot faster (no harddrive spinning up)
- Ben - Killasta43, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0And yea, please post here. I will look myself and see if I can find anything.
- clubgus, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I wouldn't trust flash based hard drive media even you gave me a lecture on the positives. it might be small and portable but it is susceptible to being erased as quick as you could say 'hello'. I have had 100's of digital camera photos erased because the flash disk went through a current field such as the xray machines at the airport and loose all my photos in one hit. some other technology must come out soon that cannot be destroyed by so quickly maybe a storage device made out of liquid or some sort of organic material , i just don't think flash disks are reliable enough to be used as hard drives
- prodigy311, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I agree with TVarmy, I think that would be really cool, put a few gigs of flash memory inaccessible to you that contains the boot up data. Quick start up on a laptop, droolll...
- Jammerdelray, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0this post is just lame....it's fine for a tablet but not for powerbooks...people who use apple love the mac software running on it and not some half brained idea of using flash
- fixit2new, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0I am still confused. These sites can't decide whether it's 16GB or 16 Gb.
We all know that 1 byte == 8 bits!?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/09/12/samsung_16gb_nand_flash/
http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,121589,00.asp
http://www.kashar.net/complete.asp?id=2273
http://www.applematters.com/index.php/section/comments/543/
Could someone write a CORRECT, informative article after finding the facts FIRST. Some people need to be fired....... - speel, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0if apple did this they would pwn every computer out there right now
- Lynn, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0Samsung announced 16 gigabit flash drives, not 16 gigabyte. So divide by 8.
- frem001, on 10/12/2007, -2/+0"Yet ANOTHER digg story dedicated to SPECUALTION about a product that 97% of the country won't give a ***** about? This is REALLY sad."
Oh really so, other companies won't copy them? It's when they do copy them that "97%" give a damn, that's what's REALLY sad.
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