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?

Comments

Re:Laptops? They dont think so...

[zeugma-amp]

Your comments about the uses of such a device in servers is perceptive. I see stories about Solid-State Hard Disks(SSHD) a few times a year. Like many other technology topics, it's either cyclic, or brought out in slow news days.

Just about everywhere I've seen them discussed in any real depth though, server applications are the ones most commonly brought up. There are 2 main reasons for this. The first is that businesses are much less sensitive to price overall than your average Joe looking for a nice system to do email with. For the forseeable future (or until a fundamental change of technology), these SSHDs are going to be really expensive, especially when you compare them to magnetic media like hard disks. ($1/meg as opposed to $1/gig).

That's where the performance comes in. For sheer performance, you can't beat memory speeds. Even the 10k RPM drives are pokey by comparison to the access and transfer you can achieve in properly engineered SS hardware. Historically, we've seen, in general, a 1000x difference between disks and memory. (I'll probably get slammed on my numbers)

So, if you have an application that really needs a bunch of speed in randomly accessing a great deal of data, you might be willing to pay for it if you need it badly enough. You get 1000 times the speed at about 1000 times the price.

Personally, I'd think there are better solutions for this though. Rather than having a SSHD, you could just use more main memory and cache the hell out of your data. I used to work at a place where we had a multi-GB database, that was read into memory on boot, and then accessed from there. This was necessary due to the extreme time-sensitive nature of responses to queries necessary on the device. Disk reads of any kind would have pushed us beyond the required response times, so we just didn't have them. Sure made the system slow to boot up though :-)

Server Market

[Hungus]

I know in the application I am currently developing these would be of a signifigant help. Right now I am looking at sustained wriiting in the order of 14MBs-1 then another 20MBs-1 in reads. As this is a medical application and every transaction has to be recorded potentially forever ( or 120 years whichever comes first :) ) ( also means we cant use ram to cache the database)
One issue wil be total cost though. Currently we estimate the need for 4 clusters of drives.

1 X 42TB cluster and

3 X 28TB clusters.

At $1 per MB those are some signifigant numbers.
126 million dollars in arrays. vs something like an X Raid at $6038 TB-1 or a total of 761 thousand. There is a cost factor difference of 165.

Have 1GB Sandisk FlashDrive. Silence is wonderful!

[oakwood]

I have a 1GB Sandisk FlashDrive in this notebook. It a type3 PCCard in a metal frame that has a 3.5" IDE form factor, so it fits instead of the hard drive. It is wonderful.

I do have to be careful about space and it is a little slow. Very important to defrag regularly, speed drops greatly with fragmentation. I'm using Win98 to save space. Unfortunately, it will not run with Win's Virtual Memory set low or to zero. It can be tricky to format the drive.

Love the silence.

http://www.sandisk.com/oem/flashdrive.asp