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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."
This solution makes a lot more sense than those hybrid drives with both flash and platters. Keep it simple. I won't mourn the demise of the spinning discs. Speaking of KISS, going swapless when using this as your only drive makes a lot of sense too.
I'd be quite interested in this for a desktop. Would pair nicely with a passively cooled system.
Transcend Humanity. Please.
What happens to the frequently accessed parts of the drives? The standard flash drives/cards stop working after a few thousand writes per sector ... in an MP3 player, this isn't such a big deal. In a laptop, that failure could get ugly.
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This should be nice for HD based mp3 players since I'm sure most of the battery life goes to spinning the platter.
The hard drive is 1/3rd of a notebook's power budget, so thanks to Amdahl's law, this can increase your runtime by no more than ~50%. And probably a bit less.
The BIG use is for ruggidized laptops: You can, combined with a passively-cooled CPU, make a laptop with no moving parts and which could stand being dropped, kicked, and shaken to a great degree without damage.
Test your net with Netalyzr
... 8 sticks of 2GB USB FLASH stick with an USB hub?
You can, of course, do this today by getting a CompactFlash and a CompactFlash to IDE adapter. You can get at least 8GB.
I ran WinXP off of this for a while. It was interesting to note the different behaviour in terms of performance; sustained transfers are considerably slower, seeks are considerably faster. Over all CF is slower than a 5400 RPM notebook drive, but the overal feel seems smoother somehow.
The unfortunate thing with CF is that they don't support UltraDMA modes, so you end up with more overhead on the CPU side, as well as a slower datapath.
Sometimes people bring up the limited write cycles of Flash. Well, yes, I did turn off the swap file. But most modern CompactFlash perform a sort of 'load balancing' of writes, which means that if you write to the same sector twice, the write may physically happen to two different sectors.
Well flash media doesn't have seeking like harddrives. so the disadvantage of being fragmented is that you can't do burst i/o. Although there are file systems that actively avoid fragmentation. Or that fragmentation is less of an issue because of small file sizes (unix) and a good block cache.
FAT stinks, but NTFS is okay when it comes to fragmentation. Ext2/3, Reiser, XFS, FFS, UFS, etc are all quite good at dealing with fragmentation. I don't know about HFS+, but I suspect it's simular to UFS, but with resource forks.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
what kind of implication might this have for servers? a big performance boost to servers is caching data in ram (to reduce read access time from the hard drive). what if that read access time was minimal? would this have an impact on the need to stock servers with LOTS of ram?
[shamelessplug]
s hDisk.html
This is not news. My employer, Adtron, has been doing flash based "disk" and "tape" drives for years. And we were the first (and only?) with SATA: http://www.adtron.com/products/A25fb-SerialATAFla
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Samsung announces and everyone goes gaga. Little guys do it for years and no one seems to know about it. [shrug]
The transfer times for your product look reasonable on paper:
Sustained Read/Write Rates:
512 MBytes to 8 GBytes - 20 MBytes/sec
12 to 16 GBytes - 30 to 40 MBytes/sec
20 to 24 GBytes - 50 to 60 MBytes/sec
28 to 56 GBytes - 70 to 80 MBytes/sec
But I didn't find anywhere to buy them, I am guessing you can't even buy these drives from your company unless you're willing to commit three or four digit quantities?
Correct me if I'm wrong.
And if so, what is the unit price, based on a 1 piece order of the 16GB and 56GB SATA flash disks? (Adtron(TM) A25FB Flashpak(TM))
This is where Samsung producing the drives will make a difference, you'll see them on store shelves and you'll most likely see them at an accessible/attractive price point.
How reliable or the quality of their manufacture remains to be seen, but they'll be readily available and most likely fairly inexpensive..
>"Flash-based drives based on the new technology are expected on the market by August of this year."
Many, many things "are expected on the market by [insert future time here]. This is not the same as saying that these puppies will be on the shelf in Fry's on August 12, 2005 at a cost of one gonad three pence. Any number of "expected on the market" items have become cliches here on slashdot. All of which is to say that people should be given some leeway for skepticism before being flamed.That said, I can see some excellent uses not only in laptops as mentined, but PDAs and other small form factor devices. I'd love one in a Rio Carbon case.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
Moore's law comes into play... It's 16gb now, it'll probably be 32gb next quarter, then 64gb, etc.
Also, competition breeds advancements. Once they hit the 32 or the 64gb mark, the race will be on to build really huge solid state disks.
Personally, I think the spining platter has outlived it's welcome and it's time for it to go...
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
The article claims 57MB/s read, 32MB/s write. That is significantly faster than a 7200RPM notebook drive in both read and write. And the flash memory fits into 1.8" formfactor, not the 2.5" 7200RPM notebook drive I'm referring to. Impressive.
Your 100ma figure is from 14 years ago, I hardly think it is valid today. Besides, 100ma is still better than current HDDs.
I have only two concerns about these news drives. First, cost, since even 4GB is prohibitively expensive today (Only affordable way to get some is to buy an MP3 player and crack it open). 16GB would cost more than the laptop you put it in, unless Samsung drops the price to something reasonable.
My second concern is reliability. Traditionally, as you mentioned, flash memory dies after a certain number of operations. Hopefully Samsung is using a newer type of flash memory that has a high enough limit that it doesn't matter.
That said, if it's not too expensive and the reliability is there, I don't see why I wouldn't switch to it. Faster than my notebook's 60GB 7200RPM drive, probably way lower seek times, lower power, and zero noise. Can't go wrong.
So in, say, 5 or so years when these things come in reasonable capacity, I would consider it.