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."

Comments

Reliable? Don't think so.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Reliable? Don't think so.

[laffer1]

So you must not use swap space?

Seriously, its possible for a hard drive to have a lot of writes. Log files, swap space, patches, virus patch updates, etc. A lot of writes happen on modern computers. I've even read articles about people booting computers with flash memory as routers but they had to make sure /var and /tmp were memory disks because it would kill the flash memory in 3 months. (logs alone!)

Re:Too Bad pn Junctions cost more than magnets

[yttrstein]

SCSI, SATA and ATA controllers found on each and every hard drive made take quite a bit more than a couple transistors.

Re:Too Bad pn Junctions cost more than magnets

[shine-shine]

The price of both drops, but hard drive price per GB (or MB, TB, whatever) always drops faster

This isn't to say that solid state drives won't become popular. If I can get a 80GB solid state drive for the price of a standard 400GB HD, I'd go for it. I think this is exactly what'll happen. As capacity grows, it becomes less and less important for people to have the largest HD on the market. Sure, many people have the need for large drives (video editing, pr0n, etc.), but most can do just fine with tenth the size of a modern HD. Especially when it comes to laptops.

Re:Flash still has lots of room to grow

[Anita Coney]

Not every one is concerned about massive drive sizes. There are plenty of people who would choose the battery saving advantages of flash drives in their laptops.

I'm of the opinion that laptops should be as small and energy efficent as possible. I just don't get the point of using them desktop replacements. If you want something as huge and powerful as desktop, buy a friggin' desktop. If you want something portable, buy something portable.

I mean, what's the point of a "portable" computer if you have to plug it in all the time?!

Well, of course he wants it to happen

[intmainvoid]

The most recent IDC data ranks Samsung as the world's number one producer of flash chips

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.

Re:Too Bad pn Junctions cost more than magnets

[epiphani]

You missed the boat.

Samsung to release 16GB IDE flash drive in august.

I want them in my servers.

Re:Flash still has lots of room to grow

[BenjyD]

what's the point of a "portable" computer if you have to plug it in all the time?!

I agree that there is always a place for small laptops, but a desktop replacement laptop has many advantages:

• If you need to move office, just pick it up and go. I need to go to the US occasionally for work - when I do, I can just find an empty desk and plug in my complete development environment without sacrificing processor speed.
• One desktop replacement laptop is much cheaper than one decent desktop and one small laptop, and avoids the hassle of keeping two systems in sync.
• They are generally quieter
• They use less power

I use a 15.4" widescreen Pentium-M Sonoma laptop for all my work and it's great: 3hrs battery time, easily fast enough and I can work pretty much anywhere there's internet access.

Re:Flash still has lots of room to grow

[Ancil]

Considering that most laptops are being pushed with 100+ gig HDs, Flash still have some ways to go.

Unless you consider that most 100 GB hard drives are about 15% full...

Re:Flash

[Just Some Guy]

Thumb drives are slower

...at sequential reading. Wanna run the same test with bonnie++ or another benchmark that slams the drive with random accesses? I'll bet the near-zero seek penalty on solid state media makes up for quite a bit of its currently mediocre sequential access.

Imagine a database where you're writing millions of tiny blocks of data all over the place. Within reason, fast seeks are about as important as fast IO.