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- bram, on 10/12/2007, -2/+35Cool! We are closer to super-fast storage which I feel is more important than todays news of the 1TB drives.
- paulmdx, on 10/12/2007, -11/+41"The hard drive is a critical component of every modern computer system. It loads and stores practically everything about the computer"
Who is this article aimed at, my grandmother? - jambarama, on 10/12/2007, -1/+24These sorts of flash drives would be beautiful in portable devices yes. Pocket PCs that can actually hold the bloat in windows XP (I kid I kid), iPod nanos that hold 32 gb, and any of a dozen other applications.
But more importantly I can see a terrific value using them in laptops. Imagine putting 5 x 16gb flash drives in a laptop in a RAID 5 array, giving 64GB usable space (more than enough for most laptops). You'd have a few huge advantages.
1. You'd save a terrific amount of power (spinning CDs and HDs kills batteries faster than about anything).
2. In a RAID 5 array (so long as only 1 drive fails at a time), if you have a drive failure, you could have a little program popup and say "look part of your HD has died. You haven't lost any data, so don't worry, but get this serviced immediately."
3. With the RAID 5 controlled by the computer, the read/write times would be unreal. Fastest loading ever. 10 second boots and instant program loading!
4. With solid state memory, no more hard drive heads scratching the hard drive platters if you drop your laptop.
5. Flash memory is small. Even 5 chips would be much smaller than a 2.5 inch hard drive. More importantly, it is flat. So you could get laptops half inch thick (assuming a slot loading CD drive).
6. No problems with fragmentation. Because read on flash speeds aren't tied to sectors being consecutive, it doesn't matter if files are spread all over.
Traditional hard drives have some advantages over flash. Traditionaly hard drives have faster consistent write speeds, flash is faster for smaller files but slower for large ones. This is assuming the regular hard drive isn't fragmented, but it is a concern nonetheless. To beat this hardware manufacturers have developed hybrid drives.
While this was taken from my blog sometime ago, it is relevant: http://jambarama.blogspot.com/2006/01/flash-and-future.html (sorry for the blogspam) - alantocheri, on 10/12/2007, -0/+193 to 5 years for the price to come down is too long.. :(
60 seconds? Awww but I want it noooow. - rlg420, on 10/12/2007, -0/+17Hey griz, try in the '80 numnuts. It wasn't that long ago when a 1 mb hdd was huge.
- trghpy, on 10/12/2007, -2/+16600$?
Thats what I paid for my first 1 MB hard drive!
Does this mean we'll start seeing 10+ gig solid state MP3 players soon? - dimsum05, on 10/12/2007, -0/+11So for $600 I can go jogging with my notebook???
...
W00t!?
No, but seriously, notebooks really do need this.
I mean no moving parts, longer battery life and faster performance?
What more can you ask for? - Andy.D, on 10/12/2007, -5/+14That's not the whole quote, it continues:
"Yet the hard drive is based on a mechanical spinning disk system that is ultimately prone to failure, usually due to the stress of heat and motion"
Point being, that despite the fact that it's so important, it's a moving-parts piece of hardware that's prone to problems. - sacherjj, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9While they mention the idea of flash memory wearing out, I would be really curious about how the drive looses space over time. This happens currently with hard drive technology, where you have an excess of sectors that are called into service as other sectors go bad. I would guess that by allocating a little more excess unused sectors, the longevity of flash could seem longer for the user. I would be interesting to see some real world usage life in the next couple years.
- simpleSoft, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7Where do I get one? The power savings alone is sick. 50 to 87 percent. That is a dramatic difference. It seems that for the most part now a days you only ever hear of 10 to 20 percent increases in whatever your comparing.
- RonaldLewis, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7jam,
i think you've made digg history -- you weren't buried for linking your blog. congrats. - PabloMac, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8I would jump all over a 12" MacBook Pro with a 32G flash HD.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7Yeah the read speed will be fast, but what about the write speed?
I want one now!! - brundlefly76, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7@Yorn
63 MBps is about 20% faster then the maximum throughput rate of the fastest current notebook laptop drive.
Don't confuse theoretical bus throughput with achievable drive throughput.
Oh and don't ignore ACCESS time, which is arguably more important - about 100x faster. - jambarama, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7The limited write cycles (the reads are unlimited) is essentially a non-issue. The number of writes is really large, the limit on commercial grade flash is 1,000,000 from what I've read. Even if 100,000 is right, with load balancing (where no particular sector will wear out faster than any other, which all flash drives do now) you'd have to write 100,000 times the size of the drive to wear it out. On a 32GB drive that means you'd have to write roughly 3,200,000 gigabytes or roughly 3.2 petabytes. That is really a lot.
Plus if you hit this limit, the worst a drive can become is read-only. - GawtMilk, on 10/12/2007, -2/+9What more can I ask for?
A 32 GB flash card and Vista's ReadyBoost. - UltimaNut, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6$600 is not prohibitive. I want one.
- griz, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Is the sustained read/write speed of flash equal to current hard drives? I didn't think it was.
- brundlefly76, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4@Yorn
Plenty of us have used USB keys to boot and run Linux and BartPE Windows, and Vista is specifically designed to use flash and hybrid drives.
Yes they have write lifetimes but that problem is approaching the lifetime of a HDD MTBF, and the warranties of recent flash reflect this.
I think this is one reason why they are starting with laptops, which overall will see less writing then a desktop or server. - griz, on 10/12/2007, -5/+9"Does this mean we'll start seeing 10+ gig solid state MP3 players soon?"
My money is on January 9th - hiPpymIck, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4its not the point you were makingbut.....
what about the Digg audience-the full range from expert to total noob...
as you might be guessing i tend towards the latter
im always grateful when someone explains
tho youre right factual accuracy is primo
- Digital2k6, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Once those drives cross the magic 60GB mark and go below a $200 price point, you'll see them in all mid-to high end laptops.
Flash prices were plummeting for a year or two but now with EVERYTHING being made with flash ram prices have seemed to stabilize. Hopefully by '08 solid state hard drives will be options on many laptops. Unfortunately I think the spinning drive has 3 more years left in laptops. - gameguy43, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3This is incredibly exciting. The price WILL go down and the technology WILL be perfected and we WILL have laptops that require no fans (can be waterproofed), dont get hot, and have much better battery life. I for one am excited.
- TehDoctor, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3If you do the math on the "2 million hours" bit in the article, the longevity is a *lot* more than just a few years.
- dAbReAkA, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3100 times faster access time - wow, that would be the most performance-increasing upgrade u might have nowadays ;)
- petrograd, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3"...but the DMV will still take like 9 ***** seconds! 9 seconds!!! come on! "
- Merrick015, on 10/12/2007, -0/+264GB versions are available for military applications. low MTBF and high resistance to harsh environments. They are still very pricey tho.
- danielwsmithee, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2While a raid5 would be neat on a solid state device it is not really necessary, since many solid state devices contain EDAC which can give you essentially the same protection at the individual chip level. This hasn't really made its way into consumer storage devices but it will.
Also for performance striping is likely already performed at the chip level behind the controller which performs the wear leveling and SATA interface. It wouldn't give you any added benefit to stripe at the SATA interface level (RAID 0) unless the performance bottleneck was the chip controller or the SATA interface which it currently is not. Because theoretically you could stripe on the disk on chip up until the SATA limits which we are long way off. - adminfoo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Yorn: go read the product announcement ( http://www.sandisk.com/Oem/Default.aspx?CatID=1478 ). They're claiming 2 million hour MTBF. That's >200 years!
- brundlefly76, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2@purque
Compared to a desktop OS (or even a digital camera), an iPod will do hardly any *writes*. - bdbr, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2If they integrate the OS into the process they could do things smarter. They could keep all the system stuff (that is read often but rarely written) and often-written user files in flash (so you're not constantly hitting the hard drive). Files that haven't been written recently could be archived to cheaper hard drive when no movement is being sensed (with some priority if the laptop is docked). There is no reason this sort of thing couldn't be completely transparent to the user.
- GT35R, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2"common! Ive got to be at work in 2 seconds!"
- zachws, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I say two years. Who am I?
- rudy23, on 10/12/2007, -3/+5You know that when SanDisk is in the business its gonna become MainStream in no time.
- PurgueFlantar, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Regarding flash devices wearing out: I haven't heard anyone worry about their iPods dying on them. Granted they don't pagefile, but I'm not concerned about it, the failure rate on disk based hard drives is high enough that it's to me roughly the same. Plus, a failed flash based drive *should* continue to be readable, just not writeable, so valuable data is safer.
- grumpyrain, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2"I would say to that value, I'll believe it when I see it. If this drive was used to edit video or constantly defragged"
Q1: Why would you defrag it? That is only beneficial for spinning storage (ie hard disks)
Q2: Why must each section of the video being edited be physically moved to consecutive blocks? That is important for hard disks because of seek time. A fast SCSII RAID of 15000 rpm drives are still going to have a seek time be a few milli seconds. Solid state has seek time is a tens of nano seconds. In other words, video editing software will be designed to change pointers rather than physically moving data.
Remember, these devices use wear leveling too. - htwnrver, on 10/12/2007, -3/+4For a system partition I would take a super fast flash drive that only has a life of a few years.
Trade off of longevity for speed. Unfortunately not ready to trade off 600 bucks for that much speed. - ez12a, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1The hertz race was debunked by the Core Duo processors, where efficiency was key.
- CedEx, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1@ dimsum05
What more can you ask for? Hmm... how about a flash drive that comes bigger than 32 GB... like say... 300GB.
I wouldn't mind asking for that... guess I'll just have to wait. - Specul8, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Lowering cost is only one part of bringing this technology to the masses, the problem associated with limited read/write cycles of flash memory must be dealt with as well. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_memory
- mabhatter, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1don't know, another article was talking about Apple adding LCD backlights .. another huge power and space saver...
Another possibility is that they use some form of battery backed up cheaper RAM for the page file right on the flash drive. Most notebooks don't get run all the way down, so as long as the battery was in it would not loose pagefile between charges. They could use something less than PC100 for a flash drive because DRAM versus Flash is still a huge leap in speed...PC100 is up to 1 or 2 Gb on a single chip now... better if manufacturing becomes profitable. - OBDriftwood, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Very exciting indeed. While this product is geared towards mobile users as prices drop and capacity rises this becomes a possibility for the data center in a few years. I'd love to have terabytes of storage with 0.1 ms seek times in our SAN.
- dognose, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1It's not the flash prices completely. 4GB SD cards run about $50. Just glue 8 of those together for $400. So, like $200 of the price is just markup to make up for the new form factor?
I myself would be happy to have a 16GB flash drive for only $200. I really don't know why they don't make some notebooks with that option! - s1oan, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2I wouldn't get too excited about the first generation of anything, specially this kind of hard drives. They have a much faster access time but last time I checked they had a much lower bandwidth compared to regular hard drives.
- Keach, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2So tell me people in the know on this ... Can you just have your whole OS on one of these things? Can it just be your "C" Drive? Does it massively increase speed? Oops. Guess I should have read the comment above. My bad.
- mooninite, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2rudy23.... *software raid* is actually quite useful.
Price? Linux: $0 Windows: License fee
You could get there either way, but keeping at your $400 price point would require a Linux system. - greevar, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Yes, but two million hours MTBF... that's a long time. That's roughly 228 years.
- sacherjj, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I would say to that value, I'll believe it when I see it. If this drive was used to edit video or constantly defragged, I would bet it would start loosing sectors after a couple years, not 200.
- MScrip, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1How about this. Laptop manufacturers use the 32gb flash drive as the primary storage drive. AND, they also use another replaceable 4gb flash drive for the pagefile.
Then, if the smaller pagefile flash drive "wears out" because of excessive writing, you can replace it. How expensive are 4gb flash drives anyway? - dt40, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1The power savings is surely nice, but don't expect radical increases in laptop battery life as a result. The CPU and display eat more power than the HDD. If memory serves, HDD is something like 10-20% of the power use in a laptop, so even taking storage to zero power usage would result in 10-20% battery life extension.
The performance benefits here are the big story, IMO. Laptop performance is typically bottlenecked by HDD IO. -
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