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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."
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.
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That's not really a worry any more , modern flash memory has a substantially greater number of read/ write cycles. .
IIRC the numbers are good enough that they would probably live as long if not longer than your average laptop HDDs
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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.
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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).
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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.
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That is interesting. I know modern CF cards employ wear levelling within the cards themselves, but I was previously leaning on BSD's soft-updates and noatime to prolong to life of the CF cards in a few servers and firewalls. Maybe some slices should also have FFS file systems with a 128kb block size to limit any block to no more than one file. I'm off to see if FFS in OpenBSD can use a block size of 128kb. Assuming this would actually cause 128kb block sized writes?
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.
Yes I must say that I find the high speed flash cards I use, which are directly plugged into my motherboards IDE controllers via passive IDE-CF converters (no electronics, just different connectors at either ends of the converters), are slow to write.
I have Lexar Pro series 80X CF's and San Disk Ultra II CF's. The Lexar's are WAY faster than the San Disk's BTW. But still they're pretty slow. I use them in Sun Ultra 10's and 5's, which have really slow IDE interfaces, but the CF's are slower than these and are also slow in various PC's I've tried them in.
Here I have written 64Mb to a San Disk Ultra II, first with 64kb chunks and then with 128kb. I did this because I usually use 64kb chunks and thought that 128kb would be faster for CF. Turned out to not be so, unless dd is writing 128kb chunks but the writes are being committed to the file system at no greater than the filesystems block size at a time.
The two last dd's are the same thing but being written to a 120GB Seagate 7200 RPM PATA drive. Both the CF and HDD are directly connected to the on board IDE controllers of a Sun Ultra 10, each seperately as masters without slaves.
The IDE controllers on Sun Ultra 5/10 motherboards are garbage BTW. They can get the best out of the CF cards I have, but certainly not the Seagate HDD, which does about 2-3 times better transfer rates in some of my PC's.
I feel compelled now to do these tests again but to raw devices instead of to files within a filesystem. If the results were that 128kb block size filesystem is likely to be many times faster than a filesystem with much smaller blocks, I might be inclined to build filesystems with 128kb blocks on my CF based machines. But I think I would be limited to 1024 files on a 128Mb slice. Which might not be workable.
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Your results are not indicative of flash performance - CF is simply not that fast. I frequently get 10MB/sec with my USB 2.0 SD card reader and generic PQI 1GB SD card.
Flash can be *very* fast. Remember, you can interleave many flash chips using RAID-like techniques without the cost of having multiple disk assemblies.