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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.
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
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.
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.
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.
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
Here's a great 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.
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
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...
Yes, the life of the flash is a factor here, but you're missing a couple of points.
First, the life of modern parts if much higher than you stated. I think it's in the hundreds of thousands if not millions of writes.
Second, they can apply the same techniques as spinning drives to remap bad blocks so that when a block stops working, it gets replaced by a spare one that was never seen by the user. A similar remapping can be done to swap heavily-used and lightly-used blocks to even out the wear and extend the life.
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.
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
> 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
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.
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?
"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.