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

My experience with laptops...

[HaloZero]

...as a student, has been that the hard drive is usually the first piece of equipment to fail, with the LCD/TFT or optical drive (if it's a tray) following in a close second. Other concerns are batteries and power supplies, but I digress.

The constant moving, up and down, left and right, jostling, dropping, the occasional beating-by-classmates (consider laptop being hauled around in a backpack - yes, the Targus ones are damned, good, I have one [If you need a laptop bag, GET ONE!], but the padding doesn't stop the heads from skittering across the platters when the laptop is subjected to smacking, pounding, and even spinning around.) Data is lost, the discs spin down, and it's all just one big bloody mess. Solid state drives, if affordable, could definately revolutionize the way I look at laptops, the way my school looks at laptops as a student solution, and the way the laptop community works.

But... will it catch on? Please? I hope so. This is one thing that would suck to see it go the way of vaporware.

they say the price is $1-2/mb

[pavel_pod]

... see this page:
http://www.bitmicro.com/products_edfeatures .html

What about the limit on number of rewrite?

[linuxghoul]

Doesnt Flash memory have a really low number of rewrites, like 10,000 after which the chip goes bad? To me, this means tht one just cant use a flash chip as primary storage with regular consumer operating systems...think /tmp and /var/log and their equivalents under win32. Or look at yesterdays story about the sector which holds the FAT, which is written/rewritten every time a file on the filesystem is modified. 10,000 total modifications, and ur FAT sector (and probably the physical chip its located on? i am not sure...) craps out. Heck...that means, a new device might not even last through the installation of a linux distro.

or is this a different kind of flash from an alternate universe that i dont know about. I noticed on the webpage, they mention a very high MTBF, which is logical, but dont say anything about the number of rewrite cycles...

Ghoul2

Re:What about the limit on number of rewrite?

[ikeleib]

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.

Re:What about the limit on number of rewrite?

[mr3038]

Doesnt Flash memory have a really low number of rewrites, like 10,000 after which the chip goes bad?

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.

Laptops? They dont think so...

[GeekWithGuns]

From their own Applications page you can see that their not even looking for the laptop market:

Portable Computer Applications

Notebook and laptop computers will use Solid State Disks as the main external memory storage because of their low power consumption and resilience to mechanical stress. There is no need for the external memory storage to withstand environmental conditions that are better than those required by the LCD screens. LCD environmental requirements are generally more restrictive than those for mechanical disk drives.

The majority of portable computers will continue to be equipped with magnetic and optical mechanical drives. The competition in this market will be challenging because the customers in this market will be price sensitive. We still believe that some customers who need the higher performance and reliability of our E-Disks® will be willing to pay more.

Not that it isn't a good idea, but they are just not going to price them to compete with the standard Magnetic disks. But looking at the performace these would kick butt in any server application!

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 :-)

Old school suggestion

[Glonoinha]

When I was young we had a saying :

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 ... all within 5 minutes.

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 ... 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.

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.

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.

Here's some pricing

[EatHam]

Looking for pricing? Here you go. Of course, you will probably want to look at exactly which drive is which first.

Exist?

[Glonoinha]

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.

This doesn't cover all your uses, but for the ones it does cover ... it covers nicely :)

Power consumption.

[nsrbrake]

Asside from the maximum number of writes (erases), how about this:

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/catalo g.html
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.

I have done this

[Glonoinha]

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 :

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 ... 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.)

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.

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

Re:Extremely expensive

[Glonoinha]

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.

Answers

[Glonoinha]

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)

Re:Answers

[oakwood]

Thanks!

The system has 160Mb, which is the max for it. For my next system, I will look for one that takes more RAM.

The Win98 never crashes (except for the rare shutdown hang.) It does crash if I fiddle with the swapfile size or turn it off. Like you say, instability. I do run Norton WinDoctor regularly to clean up the registry.

I don't think I want to go back to 95 in order to gain more space, but it is an interesting idea.

I will look into a minimal XP installation with no swapfile.

Best thing is to stop keeping so many unused apps and unused files on the system! I have IE set to keep only 0 days worth of history. And use Norton Clean Sweep once in a while. Mijenix SizeManager is very helpful on this. Amazing the redundant, old, and usused junk that collects in a Win system.

By the way, I back up the key files online to a small TypeII PCCard Sandisk and, of course, offline.

Thanks again for the insight.