Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
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.
Video Phone Blogs send video messages straight to the web.
16GB? How much is that in Libraries of Congress? Dammnit I can't understand these fancy units like these GBs!
Wake me up when they're introduced.
Anita, this is Flash Drive; Flash, this is Anita.
There, better now?
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
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.
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"
If your're gonna jettison old crap, do away with PATA as well.
Transcend Humanity. Please.
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
it's non-volatile flash memory.
... 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.
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 ?
Again, please refer to this paper about flash technology in HDD applications. The document is a bit lengthy, but the conclusion is that today's flash technology allows for enough erase/write cycles to make them more than viable for HDD use.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
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
> Wake me up when they're introduced.
From TFA:
"Flash-based drives based on the new technology are expected on the market by August of this year."
A couple of months and they will be.
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
Can I hit the snooze now?
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Yes. Flash memory can only be written to a finite number of times, and your flash disk-drive will stop working at some point.
Exactly like platter-based disk drives.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
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?
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.
As someone else mentioned, all hard drives eventually fail. Even SCSI drives. It's a mechanical device and all mechanical devices eventually fail. You realize that the slowest device in your system is the hard drive, right? You realize that your hard drive and your optical drive are the only moving parts in your computer and thus, are more prone to failure? If you want to keep using a mechanical device in this day and age, be my guest. But to me, this seems to be a step towards solid state drives for the masses and I applaud the move.
Something Witty Goes Here
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.
The Inq has a picture of the flash drive at http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=23425.
>"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.
Why start now?
Oh yeah like we've had great luck with standard disks in the last 5 years..
IBM DeathsStar drives come to mind along with the Travelstar line..(We've replaced hundreds of those)
mosts of those were total failure with little to no warning.
More recently I had a 2 year old Maxtor puke on me..
Maybe it's me but todays drives just don't last like they used to.
If these new drives can run for 3-4 years before fraging themselves it'll be an improvement.
If you think it's expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur. --Red Adair
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.
"16GB ain't that much space"
I suddenly feel very old.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
They are probably using 10^x days instead of the technically correct 2^X day format. Drive manufacturers do that to gain the extra time.
:P
kurzweil_freak
5th Kyu Genbukan Ninpo/KJJR student
Be the darkness that allows the light to shine.
Moderation 0
50% Overrated
50% Underrated
Now that's Slashdot!
--
make install -not war