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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."
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.
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
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.
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?