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Solid State Drives in Notebooks?
spenney asks: "It seems like the most problematic part of any notebook is the speed of the hard drive (and they also get noisy). I noticed this site selling 2.5" solid state disks (SSDs). Anybody currently using one of these in a notebook? I can't find pricing anywhere, but they've gotta cost a fortune." How long do you think it will be before the major laptop manufacturers start adopting this technology?
... see this page:s .html
http://www.bitmicro.com/products_edfeature
When I was young we had a saying :
... all within 5 minutes.
... when you are ready to bail turn the laptop completely off and when it is off -then- close the lid, flip it all around and put it in your bag.
Don't move a machine while it is running.
The theory behind this was the gyroscopic forces of a four pound (2kg), five platter hard drive spinning at 3600 rpm were incredibly strong and the drive heads were very large (quarter inch by quarter inch, or thereabouts) and were quite a bit more massive than today's itty-bitty drive heads. It was believed that yawing the drive (moving it so the spindle changed the direction it was pointing) would cause insane pressure on the bearings, and that the inertia of even a short quick movement could set the drive heads to enter a harmonic weave or bounce.
Enter laptop drives spinning at 5400rpm - granted lighter and only a single platter, but still moving a LOT faster and now envision how much movement the laptop gets while it is turned on : you keep it in your lap, you turn it on its side, you flip it around to show your friend, you take it off your lap to put it on the desk so you can get up to get a drink, you pick it up off the desk to put it back on your lap
I would imagine that you could destroy a laptop hard drive in a weekend by vigorously flipping the laptop around while the drive is running - aye? So if you are slowly flopping your laptop around while the drive is spinning, you are merely destroying it slower.
I would wager that you can't damage a laptop drive with the heads parked (all current drives park the heads when they power down) without cracking the laptop case and screen.
Granted current generation IDE drives are failing in record numbers, but if you want your drive to live to its potential quit moving it while it is on. Get an external keyboard / mouse (I use the Logitech iTouch keyboard / mouse and love them), this won't affect your hard drive but will let you put the keyboard in your lap and toss it around if you like, while the laptop remains stationary. Put the laptop on a table, turn it on
I would LOVE a solid state drive, but at a dollar a meg I'm not getting one any time soon. Treat your laptop like it was a delicate, fragile piece of precision hardware and your hard drives are going to last a LOT longer.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
Flash disks have a layer between what the computer sees as it's "blocks" and what are really it's blocks. It uses a system that evenly distributes writes around the memory and marks off bad blocks. Unless you frequently write data onto your entire disk (like a video recorder), it isn't much of a problem.
Also, many flash parts have a 1e6 writes rated life span. That is, they will survive a *minimum* of 1e6 writes or you can have your money back.
Looking for pricing? Here you go. Of course, you will probably want to look at exactly which drive is which first.
Sure thing, there are a few links in this thread already. About a dollar a meg, so figure $2,000 for a two gig solid state drive. Of course if your data was pretty static I would suggest a 2G RAM drive from http://www.superspeed.com - they have a free 30 day trial to check it out. If you want to play with Solid State Drives to see the kinds of performance gains you are going to get from going that direction, put an extra gig or two of memory in your favorite machine and turn it into a RAM drive - if you want to keep on using it, great, if not split up the memory and share it between your other machines because it will make them run better regardless.
... it covers nicely :)
This doesn't cover all your uses, but for the ones it does cover
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
Actually, they say that typical endurance is 27 years for a drive that gets written 100GB a day and 28000 years if the drive gets written only 100MB a day. And those are just for 1GB model. 4.6GB model can take 100GB a day and still survice 123 years. I'd call that damn reliable. No details how they do that but I guess there's some hardware layer that remaps new data to least used areas.
The only thing I don't like is the read and write speeds. And the price, probably.
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Spelling and grammar mistakes left as an exercise for the reader.
Asside from the maximum number of writes (erases), how about this:
o g.html
From the linked page the 30GB drive is listed at using
write 3.3W, read 3.1W,idle 2.4W.
From a fijitsu web page http://hdd.fujitsu.com/global/drive/mhs2xxx/catal
wead/write 2.30W, idle 0.65W, standby 0.25W, sleep 0.10W.
When I first saw the post, I was hoping for quite the opposite. The last thing I need is my laptop to run dry faster, I don't need the fast read/write in a laptop.
Bah!
I have a PCMCIA adapter for CompactFlash cards and use this as a RAM disk on my laptop and can offer up the following observations :
... say for use on a small boat (so the constant lurching of the boat didn't destroy the hard drive) it would be great (if a little slow.)
It works nicely, but it is a little slow. If you use it like a massive floppy drive for moving massive files between laptops, it is great. Totally reliable. Just a little slow, about on par with IDE drives of a couple of years ago - 1.0MB/s or a little slower is what I remember my rig running. I had visions of running a database app on it (no moving parts! zero latency!) but the read/write speeds and throughput throttled the system pretty bad.
I just re-benchmarked it, read speed peaked at 875KB/s over the course of 24Megs of data, averaging around 500KB/s - 700KB/s, write speed peaked at 435KB/s averaging maybe 400KB/s over the course of 40Megs total in three large files.
They come in sizes up to 1G, and the prices on those are dropping FAST (under $150 now for a Gig, maybe $200.) For a removable media they are great. For moving massive files around between computers they are great, esp. if the machines are not networked. For storing a bunch of data while you reinstall your OS and apps - great.
Hope to replace your hard drive? Sorry but not really fast enough. I guess if you had LOTS of RAM (enough that your machine doesn't swap) and just wanted to boot your computer (OS, apps) from the CompactFlash you could put four 1G cards on adapters and fill the two IDE channels on a computer - one for the OS and the other three to store your programs and data on
Would be really quiet though, and if you coupled it with a CPU that was a few generations old (say a mid range Celeron, perhaps) that could use one of those heat-pipe coolers with no cooling fan - totally silent computer.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
This is a dollar a Meg - expensive by today's standard but there was a day that $1/M was cheap for hard drives so everything is relative.
For most applications today yes, I would agree with you this is way more expensive than we have become accustomed to paying, but it is also way more performance than we are accustomed to getting - if adding a $2,000 solid state drive to a web server doubled the number of simultaneous connections it could handle that would be very cheap : $2,000 is about two days of custom development and there is no way you could get a programmer to double the performance of a system in two days.
For commercial apps, I see these things possibly making a difference IF they can keep the performance substantially faster than regular hard drives.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
1. Windows98 is inherently unstable. I have had a clean install of Win98 crash after a few days of use, doing nothing more than surfing the web with multiple instances of IE running. Got to the point that it blew up several times a day with little more than Office installed.
2. If footprint and performance is your concern, consider a minimal install of Win95. Get it patched up nice and it is tight, stable. Doesn't run DirectX8.1 or higher - just FYI - but for normal use it is way better than 98
3. The reason for not putting a swapfile in flash has to do with the incessant writes/reads/rewrites to that file. Flash has a notably short lifespan (not terribly short, but if you hammer on the same blocks over and over and over it takes its toll.)
4. With enough RAM (256M is not unreasonable to fill a laptop with) you can run Win95 with no swapfile (YMMV)
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
I wanted to use one of these drives on a laptop for a project I was working on. I found a company that sold them, then paid $250 for a 128 Meg one. But then I checked on ebay, and paid $100 for a 1 gig one on ebay, this would have normally cost around $3000.