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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.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Wake me up when they're introduced.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
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.
I'm so glad to hear they aren't announcing flesh-based disk drives. There may still be time to stop the robots from consuming us all!
air and light and time and space
The have fast seek times but the slow rotational speed makes for low throughput.
This is nothing new. Memory based drives have been proposed before, but the FA did not specify the price per meg. If I could compare if this is worth it (COST per Meg) vs. (Speed or BatteryLife) THEN I might buy it.
Of course with Moore's law in Economics, if you can wait 6 months, it will cost half as much.
Would these drive come with a CACHE for writing large blocks? What is the speed difference between FLASH drive, vs. other memory disk drives? Again - not enought info in the article.
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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16GB? How much is that in Libraries of Congress? Dammnit I can't understand these fancy units like these GBs!
Lunacy.
Who gives a shit?
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this won't nearly fit all my porn.
..but what about write limits? If I'm not mistaken, don't these types of drives usually have a limited number of times they can be written to? Samsung doesn't say anything about this.
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1) Not enough space to store my pr0n
2) Not enough space to store my bittorrent downloads
3) Not enough space to store my iPod MP3 collection
4) Not enough space to store the web browser cache of various goatse.cx websites
5) Not enough space for my MythTV
6) Not enough space to store my archive of slashdot.org
Nothing to see. Move along.
IIRC, flash has a limited number of writes before it fails. I didn't see in the blurb that Samsung had fixed this so I fail to see how this will replace an HDD on a portable
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Any word on the MTBF of these things? And would they ever need to be defragmented?
If the g'vt kept the data on you that google does you'd better believe you'd be calling it "doing evil"
So, you like to watch porn, eh?
Talk about subliminal marketing..."This is Bob. Bob is springing large and laughing easy"... I've gotto mute the TV during those back to back Enzyte commercials during Southpark.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
If your're gonna jettison old crap, do away with PATA as well.
Transcend Humanity. Please.
This should be nice for HD based mp3 players since I'm sure most of the battery life goes to spinning the platter.
Flash memory can only be written to a finite number of times.
Is my disk-drive just going to stop working at some point?
See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_memory
Have they come up with longer lasting Flash?
You can't take the sky from me
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?
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."
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
Is with an animated sing and dance number.
;-)
That's where the bar has been raised, and I won't stand for sub standard hard drive technology announcements!
You can't take the sky from me...
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 want pictures!!!
All these new-fan-dangled devices are poping up on the radar, but how can I get excited over them if they dont LOOK cooler then what I already have.
Geesh people, put some money into those PR machines and photo-gimp me something cool!!!
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 ?
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.
I want a couple of handfuls of these to use in my home system. These aren't all that big so making a one or more RAIDsets would be nice, especially come backup time. Added plus: No spinning drives or the auxiliary fans to keep them cooled == nice quiet system.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Why is it called a disc drive if it's based on flash memory? :)
"I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar."
-Hoban Washburn
if its flash memory what's the need of a disk?
sarchasm
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?
I would like to see a SLASHDOT cluster of these!
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!
~Someday, I hope to be an aspiring author.
This is interesting, but I won't hold my breath. There have been many things including bubble memory that were supposted to kill off the rotating storage medium..............
Madre de Dios! Es El Pollo Diablo! -- Captain Blondebeard
Depending on the chip and manufacturer
Uhh - the chip and manufacturer are Samsung, no?
Flash read/write performance is terrrible compared to DRAM, and has a very limited number of possible rewrites, too. Depending on the flash technology:(NAND=100,000 NOR=10,000).
/temp and the swap partition, you'd get good performance gains and it wouldn't even need to be backed-up/restored. It would save wear on your conventional HD's too.
Other than for laptop use, I'd rather have a DRAM-based drive that optionally gets backed-up/restored to conventional HD at power-off/on. It would give much better performance than flash, last much longer and probably cost much less per Gb.
If you just used it for
Unfortunately the only such drives I've found are ludicrously expensive.
. . . but not stirred.
fueling inte4rnal
Because the chips are cut from a round flat disk of doped silicon, NowSitDownKidAndPleaseShutUp. Next question....
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
Because people are already familiar with associating the hardware with an application. This is the same reason why we call them "floppy disks" when they have long since lost their floppy-ness (for those who never saw 5.25" floppies, must less 12" floppies..)
Bel, the mostly sane.. "Of course I can't see anything! I'm standing on the shoulders of idiots." -- Me
What about swap? Seems that would still take it down relatively quickly.
Cache and virtual memory will eat them up in no time.
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
Look like it's also available for BeOS, so it isn't Mac Only.
This technology looks like it could be used in palmtop devices.
The Sharp Zaurus series of handhelds had one device with a 4 GB drive in it.
The palmOne LifeDrive may also have uses for this technology.
But, above all, it would be best in the laptops, both for smaller size and for extended battery life.
Google on "flash wear leveling algorithm", and you are bound to turn up some info.
(S(SKK)(SKK))(S(SKK)(SKK))
from physorg:
"16 Gb [notice the lowercase 'b'] Samsung's Flash Solid State Disk to Replace Hard Drives"
when the motor dies (which it will). They can use load balancing at the hardware level to keep the limit from being reached in practice though, and on a 16GB harddrive it'd expect them too.
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While these "drives" may be cool and use less power, 16GB ain't that much space and it'll be a lot more expensive then a normal drive in any decent capacity.
But even still, until they fix some of the inherent problems with flash memory (limited number of writes, etc) I won't feel too comfortable with one of these. But, then again, it'll be a lot less likely to crash if you drop it, and these will be silent.
Decent idea for low profile notebooks, but not a platter-based HDD replacement by far.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
>"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.
RTFA
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make install -not war
Your user number says enough.
I feel a marketing blitz comming on...
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Flash a-ah
Savior of the Universe
Flash
He save everyone of us
Flash
He's a miracle
Flash
King of the impossible
He's for everyone of us
Stand for everyone of us
He save with a mighty hand
Every man every woman
Every chill-he's a mighty
Flash
Just a man
With a man's courage
Nothing but a man
But he can never fail
No-one but the pure at heart
May find the Golden Grail
With Freddy dead I never would have believed this possible. We truly do live in amazing times. Next I want a "Fat Bottomed Girls" based hard drive. Sweet!
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
"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"
so if it's 26,492 days (1st calc), where does the 199,229 days come from in 2nd calc??? surely should be 26,492 there also???
And the people shall be oppressed, every one by another, and every one by his neighbour Isaiah 3:5
I'm asking because I want to use a CF drive myself, and CF->IDE adapters are dirt cheap (after all, the interface is almost identical from an electrical point of view)
The Raven
If you read the ratings on the existing flash drives, you'll see that they are designed to last 8 years, 8million read/write cycles. I imagine that is longer than most anyone geeky enough to buy one will need it due to upgrade cycles and etc.
a sp?supplierid=77&suppliercode=HM2550-4096
... yeah, my $300 solid state computer isn't going to see one of these babies anytime soon.
H -4096-901&mscssid=97L2ES4HAQPR8NF7WTHGT5XFWJHX0LC4
However, the real issue here is price:
http://www.instantit.com.au/browse/ProductDetail.
That link there is to a memtech 4gb drive, and I believe the currency is Australian dollars. That's just for comparison to this 4gb announcement. If you go to their list of memtech devices you'll see the 28gb UDMA66 IDE drives priced at around $16,808.04
This:
http://www.esend.com/sandisk/product.asp?sku=SDCF
is much cheaper anyway. Although I doubt it guaranteeds 8Mil. read/write cycles (more likely in the range of 200-300k or less).
Makes me wonder how much samsung wants future laptops to cost.
I read the script, and I think it would help my character's motivation if he was on fire. -Bender
jim frost
jimf@frostbytes.com
I want IDE ir SATA RAM disks or a battery backed SRAM disk.
Imagine if you could populate 3 of the cards with a DDR266 and connect it to the PC in a raid 5 arrangement. SQL database faster than ever seen with redundancy so that in the event of power failure it can be written to a regular drive.
Or SRAM for the speed that makes FLASH look downright slow but can live through power cycling.
I remember SRAM "disks" that were ISA formfactor bac in the 80's that acted like the A drive during boot up. insane speed booting on a 286
There's an interesting debate on going swapless in both Windows and Linux worlds. No swap means neither drive. Swapping will be to memory like it should be.
Transcend Humanity. Please.
Give the other drive a miss. I mean for my desktop I need more storage, but I could deal with 16GB on a laptop. That'll hold the OS, office and internet apps, plus enough space left over for a small MP3 collection. That'll do it for the road most of the time.
Give this another couple years to mature, I bet the drives will be big enough for gaming and so on as well. Then you could just keep a fullsized firewire drive around if you need to do something large or intensive like audio production.
...oh, wait.
nevermind.
I think Anita's point was that we see far to many paper launches these days. This obviously isn't ATI/nVidia or AMD/Intel levels of paper-launchdom, but the product isn't in the supply chain yet, so it's not actually launched.
"Expected" = wake me up when they're here
I print out all the ones and zeros, then put all the pieces of paper side by side in a giant grid and then measure the area. It's about 2 Texas's+3 Rhode Island's in area.
Hope that helps.
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
16gb, that has got to be expensive.
Sure its cool, but aside from the cost over a HD, isnt the R/W life still far below the average HD?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
This is good news for Samsung, who has the market lead in innovative portable music players like the YH-925. A solid state version of the sampod will really help solidify their lead.
Samsung's products support open standards like Vorbis, instead of closed, locked down systems from other companies.
IIRC the backlight on the screen is the single largest power consumer; there have been announcements of recent minor breakthroughs on this front.
Reducing CPU power consumption is near the top of Intel and AMD's priorities lists, according to what I've (been allowed to) read.
If the first two can be reduced by, say, fifty-to-seventy-five per cent each, then the power savings of a flash drive over a mechanical one will become almost mandatory. Batteries are not only expensive, hard on the environment, but heavy. A good percentage of a laptop's mass and bulk is because of batteries.
Using less power would let us carry smaller batteries and smaller, lighter and less expensive devices.
And it could still leave the option of carrying a modern laptop load (about 9 pounds for fully-configured ones) that would allow uptimes on battery measured in days....
This, indeed, looks like a viable breakthrough once the early-adopters have brought down the price by voting with their dollars.
You restore it from the backup. You have heard of backups? They're sort of the 20th-century version of the 'recovery service' you mentioned.
Have you read my blog lately?
I flew from London to South Turkish coast to climb a mountain and take panoramics on Christmas day last year. THAT is when the 1 Gig flash card failed. After lengthy post-mortem it was established that wear balancing is designed in. Further data can be often recovered from a trashed drive... but not if the controller part is broken, as does and did happen.
Given that the Flash card uses an IDE interface I fail to understand why all laptops do not come with several slots and a RAID 5 configuration. That would be perfect. Sales to Artillery alone would pay for R & D.
Microcomputer builder for 27 years
Uh, yeah. A dutch magazine studying the reliability of flash drives (the USB kind) actually put a few in a washing machine. Most of them survived. What kind of freak accident are you talking about? WW3? I mean, the chance of me dropping a harddrive and experiencing a head crash (try to recover *that*) is much much (much) more probable. Even if you experience problems, you would just loose a sector, not the complete drive. Oh, and flash != EEPROM afaik.
I really dont think that 8 sticks of 2GB USB Flash with a USB hub would fit in a laptop drive bay.
Replace the USB controller chips and USB connectors with an ATA controller and a laptop ATA connector and it might, just as many laptop batteries seem to be made of AA cells.
Thanks. I appreciated that, even if it's not noticed by anyone else.
Cable modems do modulate and demodulate the signal in some way. All modern layer-1 interfaces do this; few use baseband anymore because modulation is more resistant to noise.
Can you imagine it?
But seiously now... The storage isn't that small that your average slashdotter couldn't make a decent RAID 0 array.
Panasonic makes ToughBooks.
except for the fact that flash memory tends to run hot.
How big is the handwriting?
A company called c-guys already has flash based harddisk storage. The flash is SD card. This is a replacement to ATA Harddrives. Only limitation is the currently available size of sd cards(2GB). http://www.c-guysusa.com/CGSDMD.html Looks like speed is 20MBps and it supports 2 sd cards(master and slave).
These drives would be good if you could take your favourite OS and a few applications and throw them on the drive with the directive that any files whose data frequently changes would be written to a traditional mechanical drive. Imagine boot time similar to resuming from standby, or the speed of level loads of your favourite games.
How long will a drive like that last? Last time i know, Flash storage had a limit on the ammounts of reads and writes. It also slows down as it ages too.
I see flash as a short term solution in a notepad. If you run windows, or any operating system for that matter. The OS will hit the drive when reading data, hit the drive when writing data and then ofcourse we have swap space as well.
Somehow i feel like this nothing but a gimmick so menufactors con tell you about how fast it runs and how little power it uses...for about a year from purchase.
Why not create a hybrid drive --
the use of flash-based hard disks with another (platter-based) disc for stuff like a swap partition (or lord forbid, a windows registry)?
only spinning up the platters when needed...
I've put my thumb drive through a washing machine (not on purpose). It survived.
sigfault. core dumped.
Can someone knowledgeable please comment on this?
Why not use FRAM instead of Flash for these things?
Is it enormously more expensive or something? Because FRAM incurs *no* delay when writing and supports practically unlimited write cycles...
Good maybe this will help the fact that a hard drive is possibly the least reliable technology in computers. Flash based drives definatly way more reliable. I think companies should put more money into flash based drives instead of working on the next terrabyte piece of crap!
More pedantically, the consequence of fragmentation is inversely proportionate to the latency and bandwidth of the device.
low latency, high bandwidth means little consequence to fragmentation.
I would think fragmentation would still be a bit of a bummer for even flash drives. You are wasting cycles searching through fragmented memory, even if it is fewer than with platter-based disks.
Could someone try this with a bunch of USB thumb drives and see if you can get a raid(x) to work.
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A washing machine is not very similar to a power spike, last I knew. A flash device will be much more suceptible to electricla damage than a mechanical hard drive, or at least if *part* of it goes the whole thing goes - unlike an old-fashioned spinning-ceramic hard drive.
± 29 dB
The Flash is probably better off with your usual hard drive, at his speed, he'd wear out those flash ones too fast?
Not Free SF Reader
It would be nice to have a drive, which uses DRAM for R/W cycles and flash only for backup.
That would resolve speed and write-cycle issues.
On powerup, the drive could copy the flash contents to DRAM and back, when Power fails, or you really want it to. I have no idea, what capacity the battery needs to have to copy 16GB of Data from DRAM to flash, though...
Crivens! I kicked meself in me own heid!
Commodity flash is about $50 a GB.
Commodity disk is $0.50 a GB.
(Both these are ridiculously cheap compared to a few years ago.)