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Flash Drives in Future Apple Laptops?
danscript writes "Samsung hopes that falling prices for flash-memory chips will mean solid-state memory can eventually replace hard-disk drives in Apple PowerBooks and iBooks as well as other devices, Macworld UK is reporting. The benefits? - silent; less power; reliable and faster."
Tech advances will over time become more available.
More after a few words from Samsung, our proud sponsor.
"I'm sorry sir. You can only install OSX 10 times. Then you ran out of read/write operations"
Now that the idea has been leaked Apple won't do it even if they were planning to.
Although they will certainly be more quiet, cooler and less power hungry, they will also be slower unless someone makes a massively parallel flash drive (think 64 chips in a huge internal raid 1 array). For now, that would drive up the price too far, even for Apple.
I remember talking to a guy at Radio Shack about flash-based drives and how this was going to be the new option back in 1992. I think they were calling it a "hard card." Looking back, it was probably the same thing as PCMCIA Flash drive. That's the precursor to Compact Flash cards for you young'uns.
It wasn't new then and it isn't new now. Is it time? Sure. It's long overdue and I'd love to see solid state drives suddenly become financially feasable.
I doubt it's going to happen though because it seems like the cost of the magnetic materials used in disc platters will always be low and a solid state memory cell (flash, ram, eeprom, whatever) takes a couple transistors. The price of both drops, but hard drive price per GB (or MB, TB, whatever) always drops faster because of the lower transistor count.
more of the same on Twitter.
More than likely they would opt for flash media like whats in the iPod minis since solid state media is verry finite with it's writes.
They must be talking about some other kind of flash than anything I've used... I routinely rewrite 128MB-512MB CF cards for an embedded product and it's nowhere near the speed of a laptop disk. Maybe they're thinking some sort of RAM cache.
Show me a flash drive that survives a couple of million write cycles, and I might consider using a flash drive instead of a normal hard drive.
I dont know much about flash... Can anybody clarify on how data can be recovered from a corrupt Flash based HDD?
The extra bonus: Apple gets to sell you a new one after 1,000 or so boots... : p
I'll turn into a supernova and burn up everything. Well I'll turn into a black little hole and you'll turn into string.
The drives are also typically lighter and can read and write data faster than conventional drives.
AFAIK, flash memory reads data faster than a hard drive, but writing is slow as hell because of the long block erase cycles,
does samsung have a new technology for flash chips? :-D
or do they eventually use MRAMs?
It certainly wouldn't hurt to have a 1 gb flash buffer to lessen wear and tear on the HD.
> These conditions include higher levels of oxygen,
> and the like commonly found on airplanes
Huh?
On your average pressurized commercial aircraft, the ratio of oxygen to nitrogen should be unchanged (just available to your lungs at a lower pressure). In fact, the only place you're likely to find *more* oxygen is on an unpressurized aircraft that requires you to wear an oxygen mask at higher altitudes. In which case, even "mustache wax" can be a fire starter.
And under certain other conditions, people have been known to burst in to flames. Oh wait, no they haven't. Come on, seriously, do you have ANY idea how many flash drives are currently brought on Airplanes? I've brought my digital camera, MP3 Player, and thumbdrive, all which have flash memory/drives. No fires.
For the science impaired with mod points: the above is, at best, a joke. Certainly not "2, Interesting" :-)
We know that the black turtle-necked one hates noisy machines and I agree with him. I configured an old Powerbook 190cs to boot from a CF card in the PCMCIA slot -- wonderfully silent and much faster than booting from the HD. Of course on that old machine, the OS, a couple of applications, and some files fit nicely in only a 4 MB flash memory. In contrast, OSX, modern apps, and files will need 1024 times that space (4 GB) at a minimum and tens of GB if the person has even a modest collection of media files.
I can only hope that Samsung's technology roadmap (16 GB by 2006, 100 GB by 2008) is correct although I wonder how HD technology will have evolved over those same years.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
http://www.physorg.com/news4220.html
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
The recent Samsung announcements were for 16 gig drives for this year. Considering that most laptops are being pushed with 100+ gig HDs, Flash still have some ways to go.
If you are willing to run Windows 3.1, you could have all the solid state memory you need very cheaply. 100 MB was a decent hard drive for Win 3.1. If we cared enough to think seriously about the software we use, we could have cheap efficient laptops with very long battery life.
As it is, software bloat will keep semiconductor 'hard drives' just out of reach.
flashers will be. As I am sure that you are aware of. Now go away, you bug me.
http://news.designtechnica.com/article7516.html
It might help to read the original article. Note, for example, that the drive uses the "industry's highest density 8 GB" flash to create 16 GB drives, meaning the drive probably uses striping. Also, the drive's performance seems to be pretty good:
"The SSD's performance rate exceeds that of a comparably sized HDD by more than 150 percent. The storage disk reads data at 57 MegaBytes per second (MBps) and writes it at 32MBps."
Conservatively, that's right on par with the fastest non-SCSI drive in the world, and by the time it's released, it will probably be able to directly compete with 10,000 RPM SCSI drives. When you consider that this drive weighs half of what a regular hard drive does, uses 5% of the power, gives off minimal heat, and won't break if you don't treat it perfectly (I've had to bring my iBook into the shop twice, both because the hard drive broke), is there anything to complain about?
Samsung has also teamed with Microsoft to create a hybrid Flash/Platter device that uses less power, is quieter, and more shock resistant. You'll have to wait for Shorthorn, though.
Samsung teams with Microsoft
So of course "Hwang Chang-Gyu, president and CEO of Samsung's semiconductor business" wants his company's technology to take over from hard drives. That's very different to Apple saying it will happen.
Drag n' Drop DVD Recommendations
Wouldn't a hybrid solution be the best of all possible worlds? There's got to be tons of stuff on your hard drive that (a) you update very infrequently and (b) have to have there all the time. The obvious candidates would be the OS itself, and applications. How about you put that stuff in Flash, and keep the hard drive around stuff that's changing all the time?
How cool would it be to boot a system and load a basic suite of apps - without spinning up the spindles until it was time to save your current project?
A nonvolatile buffer would reduce the frequency with which the drive spins up, which would probably significantly improve battery life for common laptop use patterns.
:) It would be safer if the nvram were integrated into the system.
(I don't think the long flash write time should
be a particular concern in this case, since for large operations the drive will probably be told to spin up & take over anyway.)
I've been tempted to write to write a Linux kernel module to allow USB 2.0 solid-state ram to be used this way, but I don't think it's so wise: I'd hate to see the result if someone yanked the stick.
I've been thinking about this for a long time. What about using a flash drive for the important stuff (OS+user docs) and a hard drive for the unimportant stuff (divxes, CD backups, you name it)? Basically, the hard drive would be powered down most of the time, bringing down noise and heat, therefore driving up the reliability of the whole system. That's certainly possible with every kind of computer out there, but it would be better with specific OS support. For example, the OS could transparently copy your data back and forth between both drives, like the iPod does (with RAM instead of Flash).
Regards
Nobox: Only simple products.
Solid state hard drives have been a part of the mainframe computing environment for a long time now. Good to see they may trickle down to people who don't need a data center for their computer.
If the price is right then we will have flash memory in our machines.
it's obvious.
I don't doubt flash may make some headway in the ultraportable market, but the advances in microdrive technology promise escalating capacity with reduced power consumption. Toshiba's already announced an 80GB drive in a 1.8" form factor, drawing around 1.4W and Hitachi has been talking up plans for a 20GB drive in a 1" form factor.
In the future, everything will have flash drives. The question is, of course, how far in the future. These will show up on the apple when the flash drives become a commodity item.
I do think that if an 18 GB solid state memeory card can be had for the price of a hard disk, that might lead some nice products. For instance, a 10" solid state iBook might be an in demand product. A power book with a hard disk and flash drive might resolve the issue with the powerbook having below average mass storage capacity.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
http://www.m-systems.com/content/Products/product. asp?pid=34
M-Systems has been providing fast FLASH based 2.5" laptop drives in the 1 GB to 128 GB range for a while - while they are god awful expensive, they do work very well and I have used them in several mission critical applications. My hope is that Samsung can get the price point down by an order of magnitude (or two)
I seem to recall an ABB Robotics person telling me that their S4PC products (PC controller for industrial robots) were all memory based drives. This'd've been in 1997 or so, Win95 (yeah, yeah), and "only" 256MB drive would have been adequate for the purpose (hey, my 100MB ZIP was a dream come true at the time).
--Jim (me)
I googled. No such thing. Sorry.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
... and what makes Apple notebooks (!) so special that flash drives only fit into that brand?
So flash drives are falling in price, are they? Well, who's making 40, 60, 80 or even 100gb flash drives?
And even if someone WERE making drives that big (and the largest drive NewEgg sells is 8gb) they'd cost several times what the computer itself would cost. The only 8gb flash drive NewEgg sells costs $650! My iBook cost just $150 more than that and it's got a 30gb drive in it! At that rate it would cost around $2500 or so to provide an equivalent amount of disk space. I'll grant you it would cost Apple a lot less because of the quantities they'd buy, but even then they won't get that down below $100.
The idea of flash-based notebooks is nice, but at the moment it seems a trifle premature. Maybe once flash prices fall to the levels of DRAM (and capacities rise to match those of hard drives) we can talk. Right now it's just pie-in-the-sky.
Problem is HD's are going to be cheaper per GB for some time and the capacity is what wins most people. Mini HD's are becoming better in all the categories (power, reliability, speed) but of course the idea of a spinning disk (in portable devices) is going to be replaced eventually because its just not the right way to go, so these improvements are to milk the last bit out of the technology while it still has the edge on capacity/cost. One day moving parts will be a thing of the past in computing...
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Maybe this isn't write cycles, but when I was at ApacheCon 2001, I met the guy who setup the webserver for the Showgirls (movie) website. He had the server right there and it used a 32MB flash drive for storage. That's a lot of read cycles.
Is this something the RAF found out to the detriment of several pilots?
Gigabyte is preparing an interesting solution. AnandTech give us a brief overview as seen in the last Computex:i =2431&p=5
:)
http://www.anandtech.com/tradeshows/showdoc.aspx?
Basically they just use ordinary DDR and use a pack of batteries to keep the data when the computer is powered down. The batteries have a maximum life of 16 hours. So this is for enthusiasm that leave their computer always on. I wouldn't install an OS on this since in case of long power failre you would loose eveything, but I really wish I could have one so that I could install Battlefield 2 on this. It certainly would lower the very long load time.
Consider that this has a LOT better random access time than a solidate disk.
Put most of the filesystem except home, tmp and var to this disk, and using a normal HD for them and t. Should reduce reboot times, and application launch times by a sizable margin. This thing could be usefull for server enviroments too if reliable enough. Its main advantage would be reduction of downtime by being able to get up quicker.
(No V!46R4 jokes plz)
Emacs is good operating system, but it has one flaw: Its text editor could be better.
Could this open some eyes and increase interest in alternative (Linux, Mac) offerings?
You are joking, right? Somebody will find a way of using all that space up, and more.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
I can't even say how I just LOVE the sleep function on my 15" PowerBook. I just close the thing and go home. When I get home, I just open up and continue my work. No need to reboot anything. Everything local and on-line just continues working smoothly, consistently, quietly, and flawlessly like nothing happened. Truly impressive.
I've used every major OS out there. Windows is junk. Linux is sweet. But OS-X is just too sweet.
Only bothersome thing is this shift to the dark side of Intel/DRM. The G4 PowerPC was truly one of the greats.
I can't believe nobody has seen this yet. One of the constant user annoyances is that your machine won't boot/shut down fast enough. Well with Suspend to Flash Ram, you are able to close your laptop, take out your battery, and leave it in the closet for two months, come back, put the battery back (assuming it's charged), open it up and be **exactly** where you were before you shut down.
It's been something I've wanted for years. Flash is now cheap enough to use as a secondary storage/boot drive. So why not?
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
It used to be higher, (up to 100,000), but new MLC flash has lower numbers. Note that the 1,000,000 numbers you read is low-density NOR flash, not the NAND flash a hard drive would be made of.
You must wear level, so the real life of the drive is basically 10,000*num sectors writes. A sector is 128KB or so, depending on the flash type.
This seems like a lot until you realize that often you write sectors over and over. Also, due to the large sector/page size of flash, you end up doing multiple writes when you think you are doing a single one. For example, if you write to a file in 4 chunks, 32K at a time, it uses up 4 of your writes. It might be possible to remove this with intelligent caching, but you're gonna need a lot of RAM for the caching.
Honestly, this is just an idea that isn't ready yet. Flash is too slow to write right now. The life is decent. Reads work well.
The limitations of optical media are ever-present. Heat generation, great potential for mechanical failure.... solutions have been sought for decades for these problems and others. Remember the DIMM-based hard drives? One solution, however an expensive, cumbersome, and unmaintainable one.
Flash technology gives us a chance to gain most of the advantages in that old unmarketable drive. The reusability used to be an issue, but manufacturing processes, as previously stated under this discussion, are refined to the point of feasability. Let's see where this takes us, as the cost of aggravation for the status quo is worth lowering at almost any cost.
The Crimson Dragon
All these moving arms and gears and spinning disks. Gah! Might as well have steam powered computers.
Can't wait for solid state!
I drank what? -- Socrates
As wifi becomes more prevalent, you could easily link back to your home ( or some other place ) for mass storage.
As long as you have something to boot off of, and basic apps, you are set.. This can be done in just a few hundred meg easily.
Or even better, just RDP/NX back home and require almost mo local resources.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
'book shuffle?
42
You are joking, right? Somebody will find a way of using all that space up, and more.
I'm not sure that's true. I disabled virtual memory on my Windows-based laptop with 1 GB of RAM, because the virtual memory implementation on Windows is just terrible.
It was like getting a new PC. All of a sudden, minimized applications restored instantly, instead of grinding the hard drive for 20 seconds first. And even though I do some reasonably heavy duty Java development with the machine, I've yet to exhaust physical RAM.
And if I do, so what? I'll just pop another 1 GB of RAM in. There will always be people who need virtual memory for certain applications, but more and more, virtual memory is becoming unnecessary for many applications due to generous amounts of physical RAM.
must have spontaneously combusted...
Maybe I have become a bit of a curmudgeon but I wasn't intending to be a troll.
I remember being willing to kill to get an extra 4 kB of core memory. What I now have on my desk totally blows the doors off machines that we used to consider to be super-computers. I have also done a fair bit of embedded work over the years.
When I complain about software bloat, I'm being deadly serious. If computer hardware hadn't progressed so fast, I guarantee that our software would be a lot more efficient. As it is, it probably isn't worth the effort to try to reduce the waste. On the other hand, if you do need an efficient device, there is a lot of old (Win 3.1, Commodore 64, Trash 80, etc.) software out there that uses a lot less resources.
Perhaps, but what? Even Microsoft can't think of any more features to add to Office these days. At some point, 99.99% of people's everyday needs will be addressable by the amount of RAM in their machines, without using swap. The question is, have we reached that point yet?
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
HP's original Obook 300 (c. 1993) had an option for a 10MB PCMCIA flash card. The OS (W3.1), Word, Excel, telcom, PDA & some utilities were in ROM. It weighed less than 3 lbs, had a 10 hour battery life, and the only Windows sleep mode I've seen that actually worked. All the wired hipsters had to have one. So instead of ROM, Apple (why? because who else introduces new technology in the PC space?) would use the flash for the OS and Apps folders, & use a 1" drive for user land. They will have an external optical drive (that's why they changed iDVD to support disk images) and a really lightweight box. You'll be able to update the OS and apps without coming anywhere near flash's write limits - all the swap space and docs will still be on a hard drive. The Obook spoiled me for life: anything over 3 lbs is just too heavy. Much as I love my 12"PB, it is just too heavy to be comfortable when traveling. Please Apple, hurry up and ship it. A G4 is fine! Flash is coming - again! I can't wait.
actually, flash based drivers are more suitable for use in micro gravity situations than spinning hard drives. the problems associated with cosmic radiation can be reduced by sheilding the drive and using multiple drives in parallel for detecting single bit errors. placing a flash drive in a low power laptop that doesn't require convection based cooling such as a fan would make it much more suitable for use in the space based market.
I think they mean the technology they've co-developed with Microsoft. There was an article on slashdot a while ago. A regular hard drive with 128M of high-speed flash cache. This will address some of the power dissipation problems (you don't need to move the heads all the time, just when there are cache misses), make things much faster (lightspeed if it's in the cache, no 10ms seek delay) and won't make the cost go through the roof.
Back when Plus Hard Card was new thing there were no such thing as IRQ 14 or 15 on typical PC. IBM PC was still running on 4,77MHz and using 8-bit slots with IRQ's 2-7. It was not even possible to install it to 16-bit slot of IBM AT because 16-bit part of ISA slot was blocked by frame of card. Of course most AT systems had also 8-bit slots for this particular reason so installation was still possible.
They didn't use IDE-like drives either. Controller part of board was fairly complex with multiple large chips.
There were lot of clones that were'nt as plug-and-play as original Plus Hard Card was. Clones were just 8-bit MFM/RLL (and later 16-bit MFM/RLL/IDE/ESDI/SCSI) controllers mounted to metal plate with normal 3,5" HDD.
Quantum bought Hard Card manufacturer eventually as someone already wrote.
Hard Cards from various manufacturers lasted quite long. I'd say around 10 years eg. from 1985 to mid 90's. I considered 10 years pretty long time in computer industry.
There's link to photo of original card. Text talks about smallest being 20 MB, but first model was actually 10 MB.
http://incolor.inebraska.com/bill_r/hardcard.htm
Whoa-oh! Saviour of the Universe.
Perhaps with the lower powerconsumption of flash we can finally get mirrored drives for laptops. This has been my biggest gripe against laptops no one (That I know of) makes one that can take 2 harddrives So you can have a mirrored system. I for one would rather take a lack in battery life by 1/2 to get a mirrored drives in my laptop. But with lower power from flash based memory we can have some protection from our data in real time except for backing them up to a server once a day.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
The major advantage of CFs is that they don't have seek time, so in practice a 10M/s harddrive is going to be slower than a 10M/s CF.
The Raven
Battery backed DRAM? As in, the kind that has to be refreshed 8000 times a second to prevent memory corruption? It's no damn wonder they can only get 16 hours of battery life.
What happened to good old SRAM? A real crosscoupled latch. The kind that has almost zero power consumption in steady state?
My old NES cartridges have lasted over 10 years on a single hearing aid battery. Granted, it was probably only 32 kbit of SRAM, but still.
i know for digital cameras there is enough difference with some brands of flash memory that it will effect how long you wait between shots (at least for cameras without internal memory to buffer it). if you figure the transfer of one JPEG is that noticeable, then transferring real data would matter too.
i guess if you have the buffer of internal memory in your camera, you will not notice. so the cheaper, slower flash cards are effectively the same.
If you don't care about redundancy, RAID 0 is probably the way to go here. Just strip the data across all the elements.
Where in the article (other than the title), does it say anything about Apple using, or consider using flash drives?
Or is this assumption made because Samsung provides drives for Apple's iPods (or is it the mini's or the shuffles?)?
While this certainly sounds interesting, I can't see Apple committing entirely to flash drives until they hit the 80-100GB point.
However, one thing I can see Apple doing is giving the user 8-10GB of high speed flash memory to use in tandem with a standard hard drive, in which the user can install the OS and their primary applications. The benefit to this, is that it could make the system faster, while allowing it to conserve power at the same time. (The only time the hard drive is accessed is to either write data, or read user-selected data / secondary applications.)
8==8 Bones 8==8
I think this fits in with the grandparent's assertion that IDE, in some ways, was the natural successor to the hard card and was probably inspired by it. You essentially had the originals, then someone at Seagate (? - I can't remember who pioneered the format) realising that you could put all the circuitry that was on the hardcard onto the drive itself, where the drive's side of the controller would normally be, and reduce the role of an adapter card to being just something to convert ISA (XT, AT, whatever) to a form that can run over a ribbon cable.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
You're confusing windows brain dead vm system with the rest of the planet's. Windows just does not work well with a large amount of ram.
Huh? It's not like tons of people aren't already use flash media on airplanes. I doubt this is an issue. I mean, go figure...any non-harddrive MP3 player, plus all those USB sticks and digital cameras. Sounds like FUD to me.
What I'm worried about? Flash tends to go bad after a few thousand writes. Have they gotten around this in the new tech? I read an article about it a couple days ago, but no mention was made about it.
The point is that most people don't need 200GB drives and are willing to give up storage space for battery life concerns. While you're right the prices are dropping, the one area we haven't seen much improvement in wireless devices is battery life. They've become better at conserving power on the computer/device side, but not at making longer-lasting batteries.
I would gladly give up many GB's on my laptop and pay a little extra for extended battery life if solid state drives can deliver. That's much preferrable to dimming the screen to painful levels or getting a sub-notebook with a tiny screen.
They're out there in the embedded market, where your option is paying more for a flash disk or having your spinning mag plates fly apart because of shock/vibe.
. asp
. asp?pid=41
http://www.m-systems.com/Content/Markets/Embedded
As others may have noted, there are different kinds of flash, some that have good write performance, some that have good read performance, and some that have both.
And if you want to pay, you can get an Ultra320 flash disk:
http://www.m-systems.com/Content/Products/product
Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside a dog, its too dark to read.
And under certain other conditions, people have been known to burst in to flames. Oh wait, no they haven't.
Well...
Using it as a pagefile? (IMO that's a pretty bad idea)
Running a database? (IMO another pretty bad idea)
The big question right now is how laptops are going to deal with the pagefile, since that's going to be the flashdrive killer. Personally I beleive the pagefile really needs to go the way of the dinosaur. VM was just a temporary solution for people without enough ram. It's either that or come up with another piece of hardware that'll act as an intermediary between the ram and the storage. You know, like a ram cache. A harddisk could come to use here, but then again it's more $$$. I say just toss it all and plop in tons of ram, or at the very least, use cheap, massproduced slow ram as a pagefile substitute. On a laptop, 2 Gigs should be enough for everybody :-)
I think for most uses, the laptop will be for making documents on the fly, surfing the web, checking your email, things like that. Lightweight work on the go. If you are doing video/audio editing, or heavy photoshop work that requires you to start using a scratch disk, what the heck are you doing on a laptop??
One thing I would love to see is some hibernation/sleep done right. You know - close the laptop, computer recognizes it being in sleep state, and dumps the ram to hd. Depending on the side of the ram, should take like 5-6 seconds (hopefully). Then open the laptop, HD is read for 5-6 seconds (hopefully) and computer is right where you were at. When can we finally see THAT?
Over the last 4 years of powerbook ownership, I think I can remember about 15-24 boots. and most of those were when I was a bit careless with the reserve battery,
right aound 2170 then?
there are plenty of reasons to worry about flash drive life span, and apple's commercial tendencies, but reboot count isn't really one of them...
(yes I get the ipod battery reference joke...)
-- it's ridiculous how many people misspell ridiculous... (damn, damn, damn...)
They want to remind customers how much they loved their Powerbook 5300s.
Hello, moderators. Wake up, parent is a Troll!
The google search yields NOTHING.
This has to be the best troll ever.
I googled for "Flash omium potential" and no hits. Google being google, I'm sure your post and this discussion will be in the index soon, so no worries - soon googling for "Flash omium potential fire hazard" will turn up enough hits for people to believe its a real problem.
Even better you said
"These conditions include higher levels of oxygen, and the like commonly found on airplanes."
Firstly, flash memory, like all IC's is sealed. Levels of oxygen around it can't affect it. Secondly, airplanes don't have "higher levels of oxygen" as far as I know. Thirdly, I work with flash memory a lot, and I've never heard of this scare story.
And then the killer
"Does this mean that the use of iBooks and PowerBooks will be banned on airplanes?"
There's no reason for them to be, but you're working hard on it. I must say, I like idea of me taking out my cheap plastic Fujitsu laptop, and yuppie next to me taking out his ultra hip (and ultra expensive) Powerbook only to be told he can't use it because of some bullshit firehazard while I work away.
Powerbooks are a firehazard BTW - their cases are made out of a material which is fire hazard. Even worse, terrorists may ignite them with a blow torch deliberately. The Department of Homeland Security must protect the homeland and band them now.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
but but but... flash memory is full of flash powder right?? :)
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneous_human_com bustion
I'm just surprised that terrorists haven't held passenger flights to ransom with bombs fashioned from their in-flight beverage and an iPod.
Software Freedom Day!.
Don't know. There is bound to be some wasteful pointless features like embedded high definition movie clips or 64k colour fonts that are fully rendered and shaded so they appear to be carved from various materials (granite for fixed text, teak for dropdown menus.....) that will appeal to the brainless suits to make presentations to each other with.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
Flasher Drives Future Apple Laptops?
Odd advertising campaign.. seems related to the Browncoats story.
Boo!
http://www.andashdesigns.com/
Just make a Redundant Array of Expensive Flash Drives -- RAEFD? -- to solve your speed issues.
-- Marcio
Sooo just because someone has a powerbook they are a yuppie? I want a powerbook because of OS X, not because they are 'hip.' Who is being the troll here? ;)
I suggest apple sort out their ipods first, im on my 4th, 3 have broke!!
shouldn't use light speed (you mean C?) since it's not true on two counts. One, lightspeed is different for different media, and these are electrons anyway, not a photon (the name for an "emitted" electron. But principally, Flash has definite (and quite limited, usually) read latency. That-is, even if seeking the location of the information incurs no cost, "serializing" it does, that's why we speak of 32/64/128 bit computer to begin with, it's how Much the Computer can move per clock of the CPU's speed. okay, there are lots of mitigating factors there too... Anyway. hard dries hare had read/write RAM cache in them for a long time, and all it seems that your mentioning here is the possibility of making that cache appreciatively bigger. and that can often Bea *losing* option in the world of algorithms, as page swap algorithms themselves demonstrate. You can Research "Page Swaping Algorithms" for proof of that.
Just look at the fact that FDDs are still clinging on tooth and nail in the PC world.
The internal floppy continues because it's easily rewritable and bootable. Windows doesn't include any CD-RW packet-writing software (which is necessary if you just want to copy files onto the CD as if it were a floppy), nor does it include software to make El Torito (PC bootable) CDs.
LPT ports are still used for printers , serial ports still come as standard on most motherboards.
That's because they're proven and not patented. It's a lot easier for a hobbyist to solder together a device that connects to LPT or serial than to build his own device incorporating a USB controller.
In the context of PCs, when most people say "serial" without further qualification, they mean "RS232 on a DB9 connector". The most widely deployed versions of SCSI and ATA are parallel, but you don't hear anybody calling anything but the LPT port a "parallel port", right?
A little bit of trivia. The air you breathe on a passenger jet comes from the engines (one of the stages in the high-pressure compressor). In a pressurized piston engined aircraft, the air you breathe comes from the turbocharger.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
I don't know if they even would be removable or interchangeable, so really this is a question. Could they be desinged that way? If so, would anyone want it and why?
Depends on whether RAF means Royal Air Force or Red Army Faction.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
couldn't we use the flash memory as a giant sim card for laptops(have os and all personal information on card)
I don't know if they were IDE or not, but I remember always hearing the persistent rumor that Hard Cards were so reliable (and they were!), because they used only half the drive capacity, and remapped bad sectors. So maybe it wasn't IDE, but if the rumours were true, they were on the right track (bad pun, sorry)
Well, if it is on the internet, it must be true!... Oh and here is the first line of that link.. Many people believe that Spontaneous Human Combustion was first documented in such early texts as the Bible, but, scientifically speaking, these accounts are too old and secondhand to be seen as reliable evidence.
I'm posting this so that you (the moderator) have some context to consider twitter and not mod him up whenever he posts his filler preformatted rants about installing Knoppix or Mepis or whatever that unfortunately get him karma every single time and allow him to continue posting his trademark toxic crap (read on) day in and day out. You may consider this a troll - I consider it community service. And I ain't kidding.
If you're a /. subscriber, I invite you to look through some of his posting history. I guarantee that you'll be hard pressed to find someone that is more "out there" than twitter. You'll also probably notice he's got quite an AC following. Don't just read his posts, make sure you go through the replies.
To get an idea of what I'm talking about, check this post out. This is an article about email disclaimers. The parent of the post is complaining about the ads in the linked page and so on, and twitter actually goes off on a rant to blame it on Microsoft and recommend Lynx, because "is teh free".
Here's another. In this post twitter not only calls the OP a troll but attempts to "tell it like it is" while making some vague argument about "GNU". Yes, if you're confused, you're not alone. The reply (modded +4) proceeds to simply destroy his bogus argument. You will notice he did not reply. This is what some people call "drive-by advocacy". A sort of I'll just leave you with my thoughts here and move on to the next flamebait kind of deal. In fact, he almost never replies because he knows that his fanatical arguments simply do not hold up to any sort of discussion. It's not that he's chosen the wrong cause - he's just going at it in a completely wrong way.
Here's that drive-by advocacy and FUD in motion: twitter goes on about some topic and then drops the usual "oh and M$ is teh evil" because "WMP phones home" or some such. Called on his FUD, he then claims that WMP stores every song and movie you've ever played in a file, somewhere. Pressed further, he just sort of slithers out of sight, his FUD-spreading complete. This is not about some Microsoft technology that nobody likes anyway; it's about lying for the sake of lying. Way too many of his posts are exactly like this one.
More? Just read though this post and the subsequent replies. I guess this stands on its own. Or these two. Or this one. Or this one.
Still not convinced? This is what twitter considers "humour" while going about his daily "M$" routine.
Nevermind that HP did this in 1993
The Omnibook 300 also had built-in ROM to hold the operating system and so forth. It was a damn fine computer for its time. Hell, I still use one on occasion...it's lighter and more usable than most modern superthins. The 386 processor is kind of showing its age, though...
Physics is good
Original IDE (called ATID back then) 16-bit controllers were just couple simple IC's connecting IDE ribbon-cable to ISA bus. When VLB and PCI came there was need for separate controller chips (for example RZ1000 and CMD640) so original idea of having all controller logic on HDD was no longer true.
XTID was different thing. Controllers had several chips, on-board BIOS etc. They also required XTID versions of HDDs so you couldn't use ATID version. There was some rare disks that had jumper to choose between XTID and ATID modes. I think it was one specific 40MB Seagate model 3.5" LP aka Slim-Line.
Only manufacturer I know that made pure XTID drives was Western Digital. Installed couple of those with 8-bit XTID controller in mid 90's. They were antique even back then. I don't know where those WD XTID HDD's came to market here in Finland. Finding XTID controller (for x86 machine) was even harder. I think I had those two XTID disks in shelf for years until I found XTID controller in some surplus stores junk pile.
/www.linuxjournal.com/node/4551/print
There is an inexpensive board that you can buy; it makes flash memory behave like an ide drive. The cited article describes how to put up a linux web server on such a drive. This is the cheapest and easiest way I have seen.
The news of Apple putting flash mem in their compuers makes me ask this: With all the car radios out that play mp3s off cd roms and dvds, why not have the manufacturers put a slot on the front of the dashboard unit for compact flash, sd-ram, usb flash, etc? Anything that is ATA should work and It already can read the filesystem off cd and dvd roms, so the cost should be minimal to add the interface. Then we dont need to burn cds of mp3s anymore, we can just use the thumbdrives or sdram chips. You could carry a whole library, hundreds of hours of music in an old tape case.
Disregard that comment. I read the thread wrong.
And in any case, this would make for something like a flash-based iPod Mini before a flash-based laptop.
I only reboot my iMac every two months when an OS update gets released. The secondhand iBook I bought last month gets used daily, and I haven't rebooted it since installing Tiger the day I got it.
He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
I am being the troll, enjoy your day.
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Even if this particular rumor isn't true, it still looks as if solid-state memory will become competitive with hard disk drives in the near future (perhaps five to ten years).
Now imagine if this continues and non-volatile solid-state memory becomes price- and performance-competitive with ordinary RAM as well as with hard drive memory. Remember those old introduction-to-computers books back in the 1980s: the reason why we have disk drives is because main memory loses its contents after a power cycle. In other words, disk drives exist as a crutch for insufficiently-advanced technology (viz., RAM needs constant power).
It may take a while for non-volatile RAM to replace volatile RAM, but it will happen. Now, think about what that would mean for operating system design.
File systems exist because all of that disk drive storage needs to be organized. If RAM is non-volatile, then disk drives (whether platters or solid-state) will not be needed for anything except removable media (compact discs, ZIP disks, USB drives, et cetera). In this situation, using file systems for anything other than archival purposes would be anachronistic.
Now consider this tenet of the Unix catechism: Everything is a file. When (not if, when) file systems become obsolete, Unix will be ripe for replacement.
Of course, people will argue that Unix will survive, and it will, but that's not the point. The design of Unix presumes a state of affairs that will not obtain forever.
Also, for performance, disk drives have rotational latency, and flash doesn't, so even if reads aren't quite as fast (especially compressed reads that use yor CPU), the effective speed is generally a lot better.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Yes, writing to flash memory is generally slow. But reading is really fast, and you don't need to wait for rotating machinery to get to the right location to start, so it can really be *much* faster, and you get most of the power and performance savings by speeding up reads. If you're using USB-based flash sticks, obviously you're limited by the quality of the USB drivers, but USB2 itself is faster than most disk busses and isn't a bottleneck, though some people have argued that Firewire is lighter and faster.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
"This will be big once people enjoy how much faster and convenient it is to use solid-state disks rather than hard-disk drives."
...
Okay
That sounds like it should be true.
But my USB drive is slower then my HD access.
And less reliable.
Is the USB layer the bottle neck here?
Writing flash may be slow, but reading is fast, and there's no rotational latency to worry about. So put your OS and applications in the flash, the way you would with CD for Knoppix, and that stuff will be a LOT faster. Maybe you use flash for writes, or maybe use a hard drive to mount /usr, or maybe do some sort of translucent file system thing that initially writes to disk and then migrates stuff up to flash.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
So put your OS and commonly used read-mostly files on the flash, and mount a piece of rotating machinery for /home or whatever, and either don't swap or else swap to the disk drive. If you're paranoid, build a file system that writes to disk in parallel to the flash, so you won't lose anything.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Did the monkey just say flash drives were more "reliable"?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Perhaps, but what?
The top two would be HD Video and high quality audio. Even non-techies edit their home movies on their computers nowadays, and if I had TBs of space I'd rip my CDs to WAV instead of MP3.
If that kind of space was available it would certainly be used. We're so used to having to be "reasonable" with HD space requirements that we wouldn't even consider including, say, two or three hours of tutorial video clips with new OS installations, or including every single possible randomly generated game level on the disc to ease CPU load.
This one caught my eye because my first PC was a TRS-80 and it had OS in ROM :)
I don't think that either of those two functions require the use of swap space, though. In fact, programs that do video and audio typically go to great length to avoid using swap, since swapping destroys their ability to play back in real time. They do use up lots of disk space, but that's a separate issue.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
I googled for "Flash omium potential" and no hits.
Liar.
Results 1 - 9 of 9 for Flash omium potential. (0.33 seconds)
And if you search for the correct spelling of omnium:
Results 1 - 10 of about 13,500 for Flash omnium potential. (0.89 seconds)
And aluminum in solid form is not flammable--a blowtorch would melt it, not burn it. (Powdered aluminum, on the other hand, is explosive.) This Material Safety Data Sheet has the scoop.
The real hazard would be in reacting it with acid, releasing free hydrogen--but you can do that just as well with the Coke cans.
Twitter, you're a petulant cock-gobbling sycophant to Linux Torvaldyos! Quit taking DP from ESR and RMS's feculent cocks and why don't you try to stop sucking quite so much? Get out of your parents' basement and see the real world - maybe then you'll see how pathetic you sound, with your neverending stream of bullshit about how Microsoft is stalking you. Wasn't it you who said that Microsoft believes your insane ranting is actually a threat to them, so they PAY PEOPLE to reply to you on Slashdot? No sir, I don't get any money. I do it for the love. Someone has to go up against your paranoid whining. So get back in your cage and shut the fuck up already.
The article and /. responses is very interesting. Wish I could mod the whole thread up.