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

Too Bad pn Junctions cost more than magnets

[Metaphorically]

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.

Re:Too Bad pn Junctions cost more than magnets

[FidelCatsro]

Sometimes good tech just takes years to catch on and neigh on useless legacy crap takes forever to die off. Just look at the fact that FDDs are still clinging on tooth and nail in the PC world.
LPT ports are still used for printers , serial ports still come as standard on most motherboards .

I think the principle advantage is in the power consumption for laptops, Batteries are really expensive , if you use your Laptop on the road a lot then it has two principle advantages , lower power consumption and its far far more robust to damage due to things like dropping .
In this field of the ultra compact laptops i would say that the Power consumption and durability will outweigh the per GB cost .
If the write/erase cycles are now within the realms that samsung is considering offering these drives for commercial sale then i would defiantly want one in my laptop , i could easily cope with 15GB on a portable device for work.

Re:Flash

[FidelCatsro]

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 .

Two drives: one flash, one magnetic

[AdamInParadise]

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

Re:Flash

[MaynardJanKeymeulen]

Thumb drives are slower, let's do a test:

[root@pentie4 /]# hdparm -t /dev/sde2

/dev/sde1:
Timing buffered disk reads: 78 MB in 3.04 seconds = 25.69 MB/sec
[root@pentie4 /]# hdparm -t /dev/sde1

/dev/sdc1:
Timing buffered disk reads: 36 MB in 7.43 seconds = 4.84 MB/sec

with sde my USB2 harddisk and sdc a USB2 thumbdrive.

Re:the number of writes is 10,000...

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

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.