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: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.