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Samsung Announces Flash-Based Disk Drive

Posted by Zonk on from the whirrless-laptops dept.

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."

9 of 378 comments (clear)

  1. It's good news but ... by ProfaneBaby · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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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    1. Re:It's good news but ... by frazzlenz · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I've done some work with Flash in an embedded database application.

      Flash is specced for 100,000 erase cycles -- in a 'disk' application this probably equates to 100,000 writes. However, after about 10,000 erases, the write speed decreases significantly.

      In my application, I remapped blocks of data on a cyclical basis, so that all the blocks would get used the same number of times.

      At 100,000 cycles, if you erased and rewrote the entire disk every hour, it would last for 11 years. How many people are still using an 11 year old HDD? (That'd be, what, 1GB or so?)

      The key question is how much this will cost. The fact that its aimed at laptops suggests that it will be significantly more expensive than a HDD.

      Another question: how long do we keep calling Flash memory devices 'Flash drives'? Or will the name hang on, like 'dialling' telephone numbers?

  2. Re:Great news. by TrippTDF · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Install your OS and Applications to the Flash Drive (in my world, that's more than enough space for the installed apps) and then store your larger files (music, movies) on the Platter-based drive. It will save a ton of power on a notebook, and i bet it speed up load times.

  3. And its no HUGE breakthrough on battery life. by nweaver · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

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    1. Re:And its no HUGE breakthrough on battery life. by mrchaotica · · Score: 3, Interesting

      50% increase on my iBook is another two hours -- I'd say being able to watch a whole extra movie is a huge breakthrough, wouldn't you?

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  4. Looks like... by grumpyman · · Score: 3, Interesting

    ... 8 sticks of 2GB USB FLASH stick with an USB hub?

  5. CompactFlash by slashdot.org · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  6. Re:No SATA? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    [shamelessplug]

    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-SerialATAFlas hDisk.html

    [/shamelessplug]

    Samsung announces and everyone goes gaga. Little guys do it for years and no one seems to know about it. [shrug]

  7. Re:Great news. by rainman_bc · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Great in theory, but with a limit on the number of writes, you might be hooped.

    The registry is too important to a Windows OS. The OS is constantly writing to and reading from that damn thing.

    I thought about the same thing too. A Linux OS might be more efficient though... You still have the problem of where to put the swap. On the drive with limited read/writes and isn't spinning, or on the one that's spinning and consuming power. Either way. I'd be concerned.

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