What is Digg?77 Comments
- radu79, on 10/12/2007, -2/+44Faster, quiter, more reliable, and lower power consumption devices are very hard to detect, ah?
Sure, you can get 3 car lead acid batteries and carry them in your backpack, but some people would like a HDDless system. - merle2, on 10/12/2007, -2/+27How about the 2.5 or 1.6 lb weight or the fact it will be silent?
- ATLBeer, on 10/12/2007, -2/+23It wouldn't be hard to detect at all
Blazingly fast access times and improved battery life. - CamZak, on 10/12/2007, -4/+23How to detect it: Turn it on, drop it from waist level a couple times. Computer should still work.
- Kujila, on 10/12/2007, -1/+15Jump to conclusions mat
- Boondoggle, on 10/12/2007, -6/+20It will be easy to detect: Look at the laptop: Celeron M, 32 Gb of storage. Then look in your empty wallet. $3000 down the drain.
- radu79, on 10/12/2007, -2/+14Most of the people don't need more than 32GB to do their stuff. The rest is usually taken by porn, movies, mp3s and games, which are not so crucial and can be stored on an USB HDD.
- lnxaddct, on 10/12/2007, -0/+11Flash read/write cycles have been as good as standard harddrive's for about 2 years now. And in fact, not only can you get as many writes, but if the stuff does start failing, it does it much more intelligently in flash. If you haven't worried about your harddrive wearing away, then you shouldn't worry about these wearing away. In addition to the ridiculous increase in battery life as well as decrease in weight and sound, it seems enticing.
- smkelly, on 10/12/2007, -1/+12Look at it this way. If they start a demand for that amount of flash, the prices on it will drop and the technology behind it will develop faster. In other words, this will just be the first step in the pool. Hopefully, we can learn to swim next.
- Malakin, on 10/12/2007, -0/+10It probably uses a standard SATA interface (or maybe even ATA). They'd be stupid not to use a standard hard drive interface. The system probably sees it just like it would any other hard drive so patitioning, formatting etc would all be the same.
- ,,|,_, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9"The Macintosh uses an experimental pointing device called a 'mouse'. There is no evidence that people want to use these things." John C Dvorak San Francisco Examiner 1984.
- Kujila, on 10/12/2007, -1/+9This way you can strap your trusty laptop to your leg and job while listening to your music - no more skipping in you audio tracks!
But seriously, I can see the advantages of such a system... Flash memory seems to be getting cheaper and cheaper nowadays, and I generally feel safer with a storage component without moving parts (whether or not that feeling of safety is unfounded or not, I don't know! heh ) - pigonthewing, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8no guys he's totally right.
and cars are a fad.
because horses get us to and from places just fine. - merreborn, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7Get an external 1/2 TB for all your porn and MP3s. Use it while you're home. When you're on the road, you'll appreciate all the battery life you save since you don't have to keep 2.5 inches of metal spinning at 100 rotations per second.
32 gig's enough to travel with. It'll hold your favorite games, and the stuff you need for work.
I don't get why people are so defensive every time flash drives come up. Faster, lower power consumption, doesn't break if you accidentally drop you laptop, weighs less, lasts at least as long as a harddrive.... What's not to like?
"Also, what about the Windows swap file? I see these things failing comparatively quickly as the flashdrives reach their write limitations ..."
Write limitations are on the order of 1,000,000 per sector. On top of that, you get a technology called "write leveling" that moves files like the swap file around before they get a chance to kill a section of your drive. Google it. - brilliantshadow, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7I agree. And computers will never need more than 640k of ram.
- merreborn, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5A flash chip can withstand a million write cycles these days. On top of that, there's this technology called "write leveling" that moves files out of areas that have been written to many times to areas that haven't seen as much action.
Your drive will probably not fail colossally like a platter-based drive can -- a platter-based drive can lose a head, etc. etc. The only way for a flash drive to fail all at once would probably involve faulty power supplies, and the like. 99% of the time, you'll just slowly lose space as cells die, long after your platter-base drive would have bit it. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -3/+8For many 32GB is fine. Most people don't travel with all their files. 32GB is actually pretty hard to fill if you don't put all your media on there. This is a great thing, I don't think some people understand exactly what this will do for the laptop.
- radu79, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6A laptop HDD uses about 2.5W/hour (it's 5V at 0.5A).
So depending on the battery size, and how much you use the HDD, it can save maybe 10% of the battery, which can be the difference between getting the job done or not. - velo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5I did this only once with my laptop, it fell - powered on - almost 1,5m onto solid ground a year and a half or so ago. One corner of the case is actually completely broken off, but it works perfectly. Plus: The Duct tape has something to it.
It's a Samsung, as well. I love it. ;) - lnxaddct, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5bash,
The read/write cycles hasn't been a problem for a bit now. You'll get as many read/writes as you will out of any modern harddrive. Well, I don't know if it is as many as a harddrive, but most flash memory chips come with a guaranteed *minimum* of 1 million erase cycles now, which for all intents and purposes is more than most will ever use (yes... swap files/partitions might kill this quickly, there are ways around this). Flash memory also degrades much more gracefully. There really are no disadvantages other than cost. - nbx909, on 10/12/2007, -5/+932 gb ain't enough for me to buy it... they need to have them cheap and at competitive sizes.
- demerol, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3radu79: This is very true. Tests I have read (sorry, I cannot find the link to the nicely graphed one at the moment), show that something like 80% of the battery usage is a result of the LCD screen under regular use. Changing the HD would be about as minimal a gain as speedstepping (which is nice for cutting down on heat more than anything).
- JK1150, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4It is a shame that we still have moving part hard drives, and I know flash memory will catch on quickly. It will use much less battery power, have much improved access times, and won't be nearly as prone to drive crashes. If we keep working to improve flash memory, drive access can become instant, and being that hard drives are the number one bottleneck in computers today, that would increase performance significantly. I have a ThinkPad T43, and I am going to wait for flash memory HDDs to become standard before replacing this one.
- strangerzero, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Yeah, but most of my hard drives need to be replaced after about four years use.
- radu79, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Yes, 10% is not that much, but it's a start. They are already developing OLED displays that consume half the power of the LCDs, the new CPUs consume less (or offer more for the same power), so all those small changes added up can boost the battery life by 50% if not more.
- pigonthewing, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3it'd be a bitch if you had to reinstall the OS every time you restarted the computer, huh.
the flash is nonvolatile, but there is the issue of finite read/writes before the chemical composition of the media is exhausted.
it's just like your digital camera. SD cards will fail after you write to them enough times. the reason we don't care is burning out a flash chip in a digital cam would take a very very long time. think hundreds of years. but inside a personal computer, bits are being written CONSTANTLY. more read/writes = faster burn out - raremage, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Good points, Radu - I wonder what the battery life will be given the significant reduction in power requirements for the flash drives.
- lnxaddct, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I think you're confused. Access rates will increase quite a bit going with this type of flash memory (there are different kinds in case you didn't know). Flash can be picky in certain situations because of its block structure, but nothing that will be noticed by most home users, corporations, or probably even most servers.
- shimavak, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3All of the concerns about the write cycle life of the Flash memory may be moot if Samsung tosses a few cute tricks in the BIOS of the computer.
Most good modern operating systems let you run without a disk swap space (for Windows a paging file or virtual memory) at all, but for those that don't (read: some versions of Windows) you can trick it by creating a good ol' fashioned RAM drive. If you stuff the laptop with enough memory, as they would have to, you could have the BIOS earmark a small section of the memory for a fake IDE drive. It could even have special bootup programs to format this drive during the boot procedure, and present any operating system that demands a swap space with a memory based one with minimal performance loss.
Of course battery life would suffer by having to keep those pages of memory in a higher sleep state, but hopefully by the time it is adopted in the main stream all of the vital OSs will provide the option of completely disabling swap space.
I say go for it Samsung, make us proud! - kylewp, on 10/12/2007, -3/+6Could you still partition your "hard" drive and install other operating systems? What if you wanted to dual boot linux and windows?
- jaijai, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Speaking as a thinkpad laptop owner who's gone disconnected from the wall many a time, remaining battery life tanks when the disk starts thrashing like mad.
It's similar in concept to why micro-drive based CF cards use up your batteries faster than their flash-based CF equivalents in devices such as digital cameras. - pabster, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Gentlemen, NAND flash can be written/rewritten WELL over 10,000 cycles. Try 500,000+.
I believe the swap file problem can be solved with additional RAM to begin with. RAM is cheap at the moment.
This might really catch on... - Zorkon, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Pabster: sure... just as long as you aren't dumb enough to put a swap file on the flash device. Cuz guess what? Swap gets written to at *least* that often inside of a week.
I'm sure Samsung will know better... but I'm not sure that the "average user" will. - baalthazar, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2why flash memory hasnt been used before as a HD?
- MikeSD34, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3I've got a PowerBook with an 80 gig hard drive ( 74.41 gigs ) and it has 53 of those free.
With standard usage that only flexes a few gigs up or down. I would be very, very happy
with 34 gigs if it increased my battery life by as much as the data sheets say it does. - drbroccoli, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2It does around a million writes per sector before it burns out. Or rather, its guaranteed to do that. On the other hand, a hard drive is guaranteed to last 90 days...
- seibed, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2pigonthewing - technically, hard drive density isn't dictated by Moore's law, but rather it's "Kryder's Law" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kryder's_law (note that Digg can't handle the apostrophe, so you may have to cut and paste...) which, depending on your source, is much slower (or faster!) than moore's law. In reality, there is no steady state of advancement, but rather a slow steady uphill with the occasional leap (at one of the respective leaps in technology, like MR, GMR, and most recently Parallel recording technologies.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Alright a whole 32GB wow, what to do with all that space, lets see, with xp running, and some decent default apps, (nero, office etc,) then i could rip a dvd, and oh wait "disk space low" damn it
- sweez, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1So Windows + Nero + Office fill up 30 gigs? A normal XP installation is around 2.5 gigs, Office is 140 megs on my system (Word, Excel, Access and Powerpoint), and Nero... well I don't have it installer because version 7 made me vomit, and yes it was a bit heavy, but take an earlier version... and there's no chance those apps will take more than 3 gigs of space... For example, my whole Program Files (I consider myself to be a normal user) folder is 2.3 gigs... so XP + program files = 4.8 gigs, let's say 5. So you've still got 25 gigs left. Not enough for burning a DVD, eh?
- deadbaby, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1From what I've read about laptop power usage the hard drive is actually one of the lower power parts so I wouldn't expect any miracles of improved battery life. Maybe 20-30m at absolute most. It's the display, wireless and CPU that eat most of the power.
- pigonthewing, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1"Perhaps the most significant, according to the company, is that the Q30-SSD will operate in complete silence, lacking the quiet chatter of the hard drive or even a processor fan. The Q30 will include a 1.2-GHz Intel Celeron M 753, which will likely be passively cooled."
No processor fan, but it will only **likely** be passively cooled? Not sure which other option you have on that one. - cyssero, on 04/18/2009, -0/+1Looks pretty cool to me. If you check the picture it's also running Windows Vista.
- Kujila, on 10/12/2007, -3/+4Or at least ship it with a Galaxasuperultra 80 GB thumbdrive, right? ;D
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1i think that you can get like 24000 read/ wrights out of a peice flash storage. correct me if im wrong, 32 gigs is a little weak but i know that useing flash instead of a hdd has got to be a little bit more pricy
- SilentPurity, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1If only you could get Samsung notebooks easily in America. Samsung would PWN Dell, Alienware, and any other company if they sold them in the USA.
- nerditup, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1it was much to expensive to incorporate into laptops as their primary storage device, i believe is the main reason. But as technology progresses the prices decrease, woo
- dapperdrake, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1gosh, and if you would have told me a few years ago that there would be notebooks with flash before the next windows was even RELEASED, i would have thought you were crazy
- pigonthewing, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2In about 5 (max) years, the average traditional hard drive will be in the range of a couple terabytes, at today's HD prices.
it's all about moore's law. technological advances double every 18 months.
If you have a 300gb HD today for $100, 18 months from now the same drive will be $50, and a 600gb drive will be $100.
You can only catch up with it all if you lower your standards. If today's technology is alright with you, and you keep thinking it's great for another year and a half, you're set. But that doesn't happen. We want the newest, the best, the fastest. - Woknblues, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1"The NT-Q30-SSD will include the Celeron 753, a 12.1-inch WXGA (1280x768) display, 512 Mbytes of RAM, an Intel GMA 900 integrated chipset, an ultraslim optical drive, 56K modem, IEEE 802.11g Wi-Fi, internal sound, a DMB digital TV tuner, and either a 3-cell or a 6-cell battery, all in a 1.14-kg (2.51 pounds) chassis. The notebook will measure 287.7 x 197.5 x 18.0 to 23.8 mm.
The NT-Q1-SSD, meanwhile, will weigh just 751 grams. Inside the case the ultraportable will house a 900-MHz Celeron M 353 microprocessor, a a 7-inch 800 x 480 TFT-LCD, 512 Mbytes of RAM, a GMA 900 integrated chipset, a 10/100 Fast Ethernet connection as well as IEEE 802.11b/g wireless LAN, internal sound, a DMB TV tuner, and either the 3-cell or 6-cell battery. The NT-Q1-SSD will measure 227.5 x 139.5 x 24.5 to 26.5 mm, Samsung said."
With an enormous price tag and weak ass specs like that? Stick with your Palm Treo. Wowee, no HDD... - Klarth, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1...How many times has this story been on Digg now? Seriously.
-
Show 51 - 77 of 77 discussions
Browsing Digg on your phone just got easier with our enhancements to the 
© Digg Inc. 2009
— Content created and posted by Digg users is