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!

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