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Samsung Announces Flash-Based Disk Drive
doc6502 writes "Samsung has announced flash-based disk drives with a 16 GB capacity, with an aim to get the drives to market by the end of the year. The (short) article suggests that this could be a big boost to laptop owners, as battery life could be seriously extended if there isn't a big high-speed motor to power constantly. The drives should be fast, too."
Memtech has been doing this sort of thing for a while now.
Still, this is great news...the more companies that switch to flash technology, the more the technology itself will become mainstream. It's about time we did away with platter-based HDDs.
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
it's non-volatile flash memory.
Here's a great paper about flash technology in HDD applications. The document is a bit lengthy, but the conclusion is that today's flash technology allows for enough erase/write cycles to make them more than viable for HDD use.
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Depending on the chip and manufacturer, you can get Flash that can be written up to a million times.
What this means for you is that the manufacturers will get the cheap stuff. That means you'll get 100k writes if you're lucky, and most likely you'll get stuck with 10k.
Since that will probably take you past the 1 year warranty, the drive manufacturers will say, "Ha, ha. Thank you for your money. Please buy another drive."
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ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
Yes, the life of the flash is a factor here, but you're missing a couple of points.
First, the life of modern parts if much higher than you stated. I think it's in the hundreds of thousands if not millions of writes.
Second, they can apply the same techniques as spinning drives to remap bad blocks so that when a block stops working, it gets replaced by a spare one that was never seen by the user. A similar remapping can be done to swap heavily-used and lightly-used blocks to even out the wear and extend the life.
check m-systems http://www.m-sys.com/ they have a 176G flash scsi disk there, also a 'low cost' 8G ide flash drive in 1.8 and 2.5" so how is this news exactly ?
Again, please refer to this paper about flash technology in HDD applications. The document is a bit lengthy, but the conclusion is that today's flash technology allows for enough erase/write cycles to make them more than viable for HDD use.
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
> Wake me up when they're introduced.
From TFA:
"Flash-based drives based on the new technology are expected on the market by August of this year."
A couple of months and they will be.
Yes. Flash memory can only be written to a finite number of times, and your flash disk-drive will stop working at some point.
Exactly like platter-based disk drives.
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
The CF+ and Compact Flash specification 3.0 includes UDMA 33 and UDMA 66 support. I've seen references to certain cards and CF->IDE adapters that support DMA, so that problem is partially solved, and will get better.
As for the problem of sustained speeds, there's always RAID 0...
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
LOC is usually measured as 20 Terabytes (although estimates range from 17-20, 20 is almost always taken). 20 TB = 20,480 GB so 16GB would be .08% of one LOC (78/100,000).
Regards,
Steve