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."

Comments

No SATA?

[Eunuch]

If your're gonna jettison old crap, do away with PATA as well.

Fragmentation

[ari_j]

The MTBF question has been asked a dozen other times, and I don't see any answers or know of any to contribute. But as to fragmentation, I would think it will not be an issue. Since there are no moving parts, there should be no waiting time to get from sector 0 to sector 8 billion. Of course, I may be wrong, particularly if there is complex circuitry to route requests to the drive, seeing as there are probably quite a few individual flash memory chips involved in this and addressing that many different chips could require a memory processor (replacing the drive controller circuitry that traditional hard drives have) which would take some time to access a given piece of the drive.

Naming?

[Winterblink]

Why is it called a disc drive if it's based on flash memory? :)

Re:This question is already in the original articl

[Humorously_Inept]

One might additionally be concerned about long term data durability. Granted, most people are unlikely to have data that is untouched for the ten-odd years that current flash technology can maintain it, but it's still something to think about.

There is also the matter of medium damage and data recovery. HDDs may not be as mechanically reliable but if there's something on stored on an HDD that you really need then it can be recovered by a recovery service. What happens to your data if your rig gets zapped in some kind of freak accident and the flash memory is affected? It is, after all, an EEPROM. Everything on it would be erased. Great for spies, but not so great for everyone else!

Re:Old News

[rainman_bc]

Excuse me, but doesn't flash storage have a limited number of writes?

Re:Old News

[LordStraun]

Yes, and depending on how the writes are being spread across the media, the device could last a day or years. From the comments in TA, someone posted the following specs:

MTBF specs vary based on the manufacturer and the calculation used; the following are some sample specs I have found:

Pretec --> MTBF 500,000 hours (powered on)
Simpletech --> MTBF 1M+ hours
SanDisk --> MTBF 3M+ hours
BitMicro --> MTBF 2M+ hours


But the most reliable and experienced guys around are BitMicro, and this is what they pubish for one of their flash drives:

http://www.bitmicro.com/...urces_flash_ssd_db2.php

Example #2: Write Frequency in MB/sec

E-Disk® PB Size = 16 KB

I/O Block Size = 64 KB

Write Frequency = 6,016,204,800 KB per day (68 MB/sec)

E-Disk® capacity = 155,648 MB
Number of Flash chips = 608
Size of Flash chips = 2048 Mbit or 256 MB or 262,144 KB


Number of writes to Flash chip = 64 KB / 16 KB = 4
Total E-Disk® physical blocks = (262,114 / 16) x 608 = 9,961,472
Total max writes to E-Disk® drive = 9,961,472 x 1,000,000 = 9,961,472,000,000

Endurance (in days) = 9,961,472,000,000 / (4 X (6,016,204,800/64)) = 26,492 days
Endurance (in years) = 199,229 days / 365 = 72.59 years

Samsung could also use a form of wear leveling to increase device longevity.