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Solid State Memory on the Rise
skaet writes "CNet is reporting that manufacturers of NAND flash memory are expanding the market for their chips - over the next few years - to eventually replace current methods of storage in media capture devices, mobile phones and even some notebooks as well as car navigation systems and large data storage at corporations and government agencies. From the article: 'The average notebook has 30GB (of hard drive storage). How long is it before the notebook has solid state memory? Five or six years,' according to Steve Appleton, CEO of Micron Technology, one of the world's largest memory makers. 'I'm not saying drives will go away. There will always be a need for storage, but when was the last time you tapped out a drive?'"
This guy clearly hasn't ever installed Bittorrent.
Most solid-state memory is pretty darn slow, and the stuff that's fast costs major $$$ ...
I'll buy it when it gets faster & cheaper - but then, flash *is* much faster than the ol' floppy - I was glad to see that go ...
--I gots 99 problems but a new machine ain't one!
AMD! Asus! Whoot! 6 years!
With solid state memory, won't you never have to reboot the OS? Will I still have to reboot Windows every so often even though the machine is capable of instant on/off? This feature of the hardware will put serious reliability requirements on all OSes. MS will have to finally fix the damn blue screen or its lack of reliability will be a serious henderence.
"Those that start by burning books, will end by burning men."
i dunno...i would rather use hard disks personally. in my ecxperience, they fail in a less catastrophic way. have a few errors....back it up and get a new HDD. with flash memory, when it fails, it FAILS. the end
The average notebook has 30GB (of hard drive storage). How long is it before the notebook has solid state memory?
I havent seen a laptop with less than 40GB in I dont know how long. A long time anyway. Maybe this is out of date.
"There will always be a need for storage, but when was the last time you tapped out a drive"
Last week at the parents' place. Two days ago at work. Probably tonight as well at home. You were saying?
No matter how much storage you put in a given system, it will eventually be not enough. I've seen it a million times.
Also, flash memory is way too slow to be used as primary storage. Putting 512MB of MP3s on my SD card takes almost a three minutes. Drive to drive, that's under 10 seconds.
And let's not even mention how quickly a cache partition would die with the 100,000 writes before failure standard of current flash drives...
Gigabyte has something out they call i-RAM. It's a PCI add-in card that allows you to plug regular ram sticks into and then access them as a piece of solid storage space. They say its good for "multimedia applications" and I'm sure it is...if not a little overkill.
Here's a link to a review from Anandtech http://anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2480
I think that they're moving in the wrong direction. Yes, solid state is cool (despite its price). Yes, it uses less power (but is noticeably slower). What I want to see as the future of portables is a thin client. Companies try to roll out thin client desktops every few years, but they never seem to think about thin client portables. Imagine a very small portable that is nothing but a thin client with wireless. It wouldn't take much power, could run resource hungry apps via an ssh tunnel to a real box and be and be relatively cheap to produce. Something like what I saw on one of the blogs at Sun a few days ago represents the future. Don't try to take the whole computer with you, just take a small phone to call your computer.
What are you eating? isItVeg?.
What is the expected lifespan (in cycles) for flash memory? I thought it was only good for a few thousand writes.
Has it improved recently?
-- Braden's law of data: All data spends some of its lifetime in an excel spreadsheet.
Most of my hard drives are already full. Let's review.
ShuttlePC Red Hat box: ~120G on a 200G hard drive. (old IDE controller) Full.
G4 Apple Mac, 3 hard drives totalling ~ 620G. Aproximately 60% full, and that's only because I recently added a hard drive.
PC Laptop, 80G hard drive. 25% full. And that's only because the hard drive was recently formatted and reimaged.
120G external hard drive. 75% full
27G external hard drive. Full
60G iPod. Full
So I'm a little shy of a terrabyte of active hard drive space. It would all be full if I didn't have multiple binders full of CD-Rs and DVDs.
But I guess not everyone regularly edits and encodes video on their computers, or routes their entire entertainment system through their computers.
I don't think hard drives will ever be big enough because data files will continue to grow as well. Solid State memory is and will always been a niche technology for areas that suite it best such as high reliability, small packages and extreme environments.
IMHO the market is already awash in solid-state storage microcomputers. They're called PDAs.
That's not what I meant.
My crappy old 900 hmz ibook has 40 gigs and I have to hook up a 120 gig firewire drive to it just to hold my mp3s and various digital video caputures, thousands of pictures and graphics, etc. So the answer is I would "tap out" 30 gigs instantly and you can add another 30 gig on top of that. Anything short of 80 gigs is really pretty laughable by todays standards, talk about years from now when we'll see hd (or blu ray) dvds, 5 channel 24 bit music, etc, etc.
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
Let's set aside price. Does anyone know what the power consumption for say 100GB of this vs a 100GB hard drive is? If price weren't a consideration, I might be willing to consider a slight drop in speed, if it meant that my batter would last say 5x as long.
2 cents,
Queen B
HDGary secures my bank
Yes, in a few years I'm hoping that both FSB, peripheral interconnects, and hard drives based bottlenecks go the way of the dodo bird. As it stands now though, solid state memory is very expensive and not altogether fast. Both of these would never work for me because of the sheer amount of storage I use for files. For example:
Server: roughly 800gigs of storage
Portable hard drives: 1.6 terabytes of storage
Laptops account for about 400 gigs of storage
And desktop account for about another terabyte.
Now how much would it cost to replace all this? Boat loads that I'd rather spend on other hardware.
I remember reading that flash memory can only be rewritten only about 10K-1M times. It works Ok for USB memory sticks, but having a page file on a solid state disk would destroy it in no time.
Please...
YOU KNOW!!!!
I'm curious: Why is Flash/NAND memory "noticeably slower" than a hard drive? I remember back when RAM drives were the rage at the ultra-high end because of blazing fast access times. It wouldn't surprise me that Flash is slower, but it would surprise me that it was so much slower as to be slower than a HD, which has seek and access overheads.
Are you sure it just wasn't the way it was accessed (i.e., a USB drive)? I would think that a NAND drive on an equivalent bus (say FireWire or SCSI) would beat an HD hands-down. What am I missing?
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
I tapped out a vein once...
It already exists in the form of all the hand helds out there, only difference is the scale, few hundred MHz instead of 2+GHz and storage in a few hundred MB instead of GB. My Zaurus(206MHz, 32MB ram, ~1GB storage(SD card) is running faster than my old laptop 366MHz, 320MB ram 12GB HDD. It suspends/restores in 2s and reboots in 1-2min while the laptop only takes a few minutes more. It's not going to replace the power of the desktop used for gaming or A/V editing, but it will improve the small, light and portable laptop/notebook.
F7 doesn't work, ignore spelling and grammar
What's new about this?
Back about 1985 or 86 I bought a NVRam card for my AT.
I *think* it was called a "BatRam" or "BatDisk" or something like that.
I also had one before that for my 8bit XT machine.
I no longer have the 8bit card but I dug up the 16bit AT card out
of my garage just now, it took me about 30 seconds to find it.
Here's what it looks like, (please be gentle on my bandwidth!)
http://www.systemrecycler.com/misc/dscn0773.jpg
and
http://www.systemrecycler.com/misc/dscn0774.jpg
At the time, this was revolutionary stuff. You could power down and
all your stuff was right where it was before. I think these things were
only about 2 or 4 megabytes (which was HUGE back then).
IIRC, I was using mine as a ram disk. I could put LOTS of programs
on 4 megs. This being in the day when most programs were still being written
to run on 64k IBM PC's.
While 30 GB is a thimble for the Slashdot crowd. I've worked with a lot of lowend users (grandma's , email only) who only use 5-10 GB. A solid state drive would be perfect for them...smaller,less power,more durable (at least mechanically). Those who don't store any multimedia (MP3s, Movies,Photos) wont ever use more than about 5GB (3 for OS,1 for apps and a gig left for a whole ton of recipes and emails). I on the otherhand have two full 200GB drives and need to add more.
I don't know what decade he's in, but it's hard to find even a budget laptop that has only 30gb of hdd space. By the time the price of flash has shrunk, the files people will be using will be that much bigger, as will the harddrives. Without some major advance in the manufacture of flash, it will always be significantly more expensive per-gigabyte than hdd.
And the argument that 30gb ought to be enough for anyways (sound familiar?) is a fallacy. As disk space grows, so does the size of content and programs.
In the beginning the universe was created. This made a lot of people very angry and is widely considered as a bad move.
"Most solid state memory is pretty darn slow"? May I respectfully ask, What are you smoking? What do you think is in your system (main RAM) and on your processor (cache)? There is no comparison between the worst case access time on a 10ns CAS2 DDR memory bus and an 8 ms seek time hard drive. The memory is *orders of magnitude* faster than the hdd. That's why modern operating systems do read and write cacheing of disk information.
Thinking outside my Head
Meanwhile, I'll keep charging $10 per floppy disk in need of recovery. It is amazing to me that people will save their only copy of a critical file on cheap disposable media.
I work with digital video and audio. I filled up 3 160 GB drives this year with stuff I can't delete for years, and I'll have my new 200 GB FireWire drive filled up by April. Yeah, I keep too much, but I have a lot of really, really large files.
Come tell me when they finally come out with FW3200 10 PetaByte thumb drives -- I'm going to need a few of those.
if they can build lots of storage (50G+), lifetime you'd expect from DRAM (get rid of the wear problems of flash) and make it fast enough to saturate typical disk busses and fit it into 2.5" and 3.5" HDD form factor with appropriate bus to use as a HDD. Who needs TCQ when you have no head movement. Then these super fast disk busses would actually be worthwhile.
I've seen flash "disks" in HDD form factors for IDE and SCSI before, but they're hyper expensive, typically intended for military use and still suffer from the wear problems of flash memory.
I would love to see the end of mechanical disk storage. Somehow I imagine I would be wondering how I coped before it, like I do with the optical mouse. I wait in great anticipation! The power savings and added battery life should be great too.
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
Im sure we've all mused on the potential for memory or other implants in human beings to boost abilitys in ways that mere flesh can not hope to dream of.
Well, I would say a solid state memory chip powered from bioelectricity could be just the ticket we are all waiting for.
After all, implanting a non-tissue object into a human is traumatic enough, but if its one that also has moving parts like a regular hard drive, well.. no thanks.
Solid state would definitly be the way to go.
Here's the Coralized links;d scn0773.jpg d scn0774.jpg
http://www.systemrecycler.com.nyud.net:8090/misc/
http://www.systemrecycler.com.nyud.net:8090/misc/
30G is a bit thin, but think of this: having a 10Gig solid state partition for the OS, pagefile, applications and etc., then a 100G(or whatever) for all the data (mp3's, video, photos, if you have a lot). this way, unless you're really crunching data, watching a video or something, the OS would run off the RAM disk, which would save battery life, and, with possibly faster access times.
i might try this once usb sticks get up to 6G or more -- i only need 3G for OS X.
mr c
"Physics is like sex. Sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it." - R. Feynman
He was quoting Mooreon's Law...
1. Every eighteen months, the technology that you support will double in capacity.
2. Every eighteen months, the technology that you are supporting it over will do nothing.
Ergo, given that average notebook hard drives are currently around 60gb, rather than 30gb, Moore's Law (as opposed to Mooreon's Law) allows us to deduce he began applying Mooreon's Law 18 months ago - the doubling of average disk space since then has been ignored by him as it's a competing technology (and covered under part II of Mooreon's Law) - it has just taken him this long to get anyone to take him seriously.
Applying Mooreon's law from that point we can deduce:
1. 1GB flash 18 months ago translates to 2GB today, translates to 4GB in 18 months, 8GB in 3 years, 16GB in 4.5 years, 32GB in 6 years.
2. 30GB of traditional 2.5 inch HDD 18 months ago should still be 30GB today and will be 30GB in 6 years.
Therefore, 32GB > 30GB in six years - hence 5-6 years is an accurate figure for when flash should overtake 2.5inch HDDs.
If, you know, Mooreon's Law wasn't for Mooreons.
And one nice thing about laptops is that they come with widescreen pre-installed. All of sudden that 30gb drive doesn't look all that big.
It has always been the problem with solid state memory. The moment they increase the storage by 2 HD companies increase by ten and half the price.
Sure HD's are vulnerable, they may even suck your battery dry faster then an Itanium BUT they make up for it by being bloody big.
or to answer the question in the post. When did you last tap out a drive? Yesterday and I bought 2 sata drives each 320gb. Granted in part to retire an old Promise raid (yeah yeah I know, stupid) so I can finally upgrade my linux server to 2.6 but also because I maxed out all my disks.
Granted I wouldn't use a laptop as a fileserver BUT I am not going to accept a laptop with less storage then my bloody iPod. Not unless there are some very real advantages and multiple of them.
Far cheaper, far less power consumption, an awfull lot faster. I need at least 2 to make up for a huge loss in data storage. Oh and it better not be like flash wich craps out after using it to much. Geez learned that the hardway when I used my flash mp3 player as a backup solution.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Yea yea I know you can use Torrent and that donkey and of course you can easly fill that terabyte with dumping your divx pr0n collection.
And industry changin his way to solid state.
A 10 gig solid state very nice.
I see lots of people considers buying laptop ever before. Also that Mobile Phone sales was very high. That devices need large storage areas.
Solid State is absolute way.
And I wondering what about that IBM Holo Storage tech.
[My english is better than most other people's Turkish, so please point out mistakes politely. Thank you.]
Also, there are flash technologies that are starting to get rid of the limited numbers of write cycles that plagued earlier flash, as well as load-leveler drivers that even out the cycles on current flash.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
clearly the author hasnt gotten on any college networks recently....
I'm currently using about 1.5GB for the last year of work email, not counting the stuff I've deleted after saving the attachments or reading the contents. It'd be a lot bigger, except that Outlook apparently freaks out and dies if your
But yes, it's a lot less than the space I burn on the machine where I download music :-)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
and magnetic disk and removable media for the content ?
.. isnt this Apples plan for the Mac Mini ? hmmmmm
I must spend forever trying to configure windows to run the Documents and Settings folder on a seperate partition as well as finding ways of locking the current run state install for the Window folder. Programs like drive snapshot help in the build but I can see how it may now be possible to sell a alternative Pc.
Manufacturers can start builing a PC where you buy a seperate "option" of a external USB drive. Now they can manufacture a PC with all Solid State components from Motherboard, Graphic card, Memory and "disk" drive. Configure the operating system to boot and run and then allow it to locate other storage devices. Less power is then required for the overall build....
hey wait a minute
And thats why Firecrackers and kittens don't mix.
I think what we'll be seeing is hard-drive/flash hybrids. Flash to store the OS on for quick energy conserving access and the hard drive for everything else. Flash just isn't ready to handle large amounts of data and it has a limited ammount of writes before it goes bad.
I've read it is possible to the Unattended Answer File (WinNT.sif) to put the Profiles (D&S) folder on a separate partition in Windows XP (and likely 2000) but I've not been able to find a link.
your e-penis is way bigger than mine because you have so many hard drives. you must get all the e-chicas.
"3 for OS,1 for app..."
I use close to 5 GB for programs alone, and I do not have a single game installed on my drive!
That would only be true for people who use the bare minimum of software. Not just people without multimedia requirements.
>won't you never have to reboot the OS?
Unlikely with Flash memory as your storage medium.
Although flash is non-volatile (it maintains its data when the supply to it has been removed, ) flash has a very finite number of times that you can write to it. Although lifetimes of 1,000,000 write and more are common now, that is still not enough for flash to replace main volatile memory. And of course the write time, although good compared to a harddisk, is very poor compared to RAM.
I totally agree with your sentiments though. Think of the power consumption we would save! SETI wouldn't like it though...
Open Source Drum Kit, LPLC deve board - mjhdesigns.com
Everyone keeps mentioning their personal/private computers. Solid state memory will be big in corporate desktops. I'm a system administrator and where I work most of the computers use less than 2 GB. That's because only Windows and Office goes onto the drive. Very few additional programs are installed and documents are stored on a network mapped drive. This is what it's like at most of the larger workplaces.
I and my users would love to swap those 40-80 GB harddrives for 2 GB solid state drives and enjoy the benefits of a computer using less physical space, making less noise, consuming less energy, being faster and cheaper.
While it's generally accepted that harddrive space is cheap there is a minimum cost to pay. The smallest drives of today are still as expensive as the smallest drives of five years ago. With solid state drives I expect the price of the smallest drive to go away because it will be integrated on the mainboard - something that wull never happen with 3.5" drives.
go-l.com have been selling desktops built on solid state ram disks for at least a couple of years from this site. That's the lowest model too.
Also their laptops included some of the same technology.
Oh, and checkout the monitors... woah.
AND.. no, I don't work for them.
i have seen something like this RAM Drive back in the ISA-Bus days... it hasnt been quite successful
ISA-Bus days..lmao! SCSI and PCI based RAM Drives were a key strategy for 68K developers on the Mac (22 years ago) and Amiga (21 years ago) platforms until the early 1990s. The huge number of header files needed to support the GUI frameworks and OS-kernel/Toolbox APIs with such slow (MFM/RLL) hard-drives and busses (60KB/s) of the era dictated this as an absolute necessity. Of course, the poor guys who were dealing with "ISA-Bus" just had to pull in stdio.h (to support DOS) and thought all all of us (3,000 or so) 68K developers were insain.
[begin slowly-i-turn-step-by-step-inch-by-inch] If Irving Gould hadn't messed with Jack Tramiel and John Sculley hadn't messed with Steve Jobs, I don't think it would have taken 18 years and a few Dead Geniuses to prove them all wrong, either.[end slowly-i-turn-step-by-step-inch-by-inch]
Back in the present, if you check the latest version of Apple's development tools (included FREE with every Mac, yo), you'll find that they are more than pretty syntax-aware editors with hyper-linking and documentation-lookup. Under the hood, these tools support Killer features that decrease the compile-link-debug turnaround using every trick in the book (except reaching into the page-table-entries --they'll realize that once they come up for air from Rosetta). These features, some 20 years in the making, afford developers more time to do trial-and-error tweaks and unit-testing (since changes in the source are "instantly" visible in the executable), so the quality of the code shipped to customers can be much better, even when using dog-slow CPU chips (thank you Motorola) or (4200-5400rpm) laptop drives. In fact, unless your (executable) App needs a lot of CPU or disk performance, it's really hard to justify buying a top-of-the-line Mac with 10,000 rpm RAID-1 drives just to support software engineering and certainly no need for PCI or SCSI based RAM drives --you can get by very nicely with a 17" laptop, an external monitor, firewire 7200rpm drive and an a couple of mini-macs to play "target practice" with.
[begin lets-not-waste-another-18-years]Now, if Apple can only overcome the windfall its competitors (HP, DELL and Gateway) are in for as customers realize they really do need a new PC to support Windows Vista, then world domination is assured. Can you say to Apple, "Give me a $200 competitive upgrade discount off any IntelMac in exchange for my activated-copy of WinXP (which Apple can then tell the Microsoft-overseers to have Microsoft de-authorize some 30 days after your upgrade to OSX86)?"... If not, then Windows will likely continue its long history of "borg-ing" every other company's cool ideas and leveraging them to make money through that big market share they gained with exclusionary contracts at the end of the 1980s (when our anti-trust people were pre-occupied with IBM mainframes and Selectron typerwriters). Gates is no idiot and he just doomed PalmOS on the mobile platform (so when the PC is dethroned by cell-phones, those phones are likely going to be running Windows. Jobs is no idiot either and nobody cares about Windows Media 11 for a reason... Let's just hope he can make Gates lose as many customers as possible in the transition from XP to Vista! [end lets-not-waste-another-18-years]
I got a 2.5" IDE<>flash adapter and installed a 1GB cf with miniBSD
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
I think these things were only about 2 or 4 megabytes (which was HUGE back then).
It was a 512 kB (16*32 kB), but still was huge, and must have costed you a fortune back then ! I remember having made an NVRAM of 2 kB myself which I used to store some alternate boot code, and I was dreaming about the 6264 SRAM chips which would have brought my card to 8 kB ! It was back when you could modify your PC with a soldering iron.
Willy
Based on Latin constare 'stand firm, stand at a price.'
cost (to the consumer)...same as price (paid)
cost
noun
the COST of the equipment PRICE, asking price, market price, selling price, unit price, fee, tariff, fare, toll, levy, charge, rental; value, valuation, quotation, rate, worth; informal humorous damage.
verb
the chair costs $186 be priced at, sell for, be valued at, fetch, come to, amount to; the proposal has not yet been costed put a price on, price, value, put a value on, put a figure on.
price
noun
the purchase price COST, charge, fee, fare, levy, amount, sum; outlay, expense, expenditure; valuation, quotation, estimate, asking price; informal humorous damage.
This is going to call for a change in the current architecture of systems. It's basically rendering RAM useless. It'd be cool if laptops with these RAM drives would basically scrap the RAM and increase the faster cache somewhat. Scrapping the main RAM should offset some of the price of these RAM drives, at the very least.
But, the main change is going to have to be with the software. Would there be any need for a swap file? Any need for memory scheduling? Wouldn't all programs be runnable from their location on the RAM disk, with no (or minimal) performance hit?
Your operating system wouldn't need to be "loaded", as such, as all the runtime information would be saved "in-place", as it were. We'd finally get "instant-on" systems, and hibernation would be a thing of the past.
Analysis of Flash memory, market, price point decline, flash capacity increase and companies are analyzed at: http://finnews.blogspot.com/2006/01/flash-memory-a nd-investing-in-flash.html
I think this is really interesting.
The role of the home desktop is changing. It used to be the powerhouse. The computer you used when you really wanted to get some work done... but that came at a price: working in an office. Laptops work for me, because when faced with a block the best way of solving it is a change of scenery. Sitting in the same place for hours on end for "fun" is less appealing now I have to do it at work as well.
My G5 is easily twice as powerful as my G4 Powerbook, but I use my laptop 80% of the time. So why have a the G5? It's a home server. I have over 40GB of music, 10GB of photos, 100GB of home movies and PVR, and its incredibly useful to have a single point of access for the whole household, and because its a desktop its always in the same place, always on and permanently connected to the internet meaning that not only does it server the house, it serves us whilst we're on the move as well.
Even if my laptop could match the desktop for storage, I wouldn't want it to be bogged down with running the services, and all the laptops in the house having independant media store is just plain bad management. Also, tasks like media recompression, code compilation and games are still done best on a machine with more RAM than sense and a processor thats designed for performance not low power consumption: you use a push bike to get to work and for fun, you use a car to do the shopping. Sometimes you need the heavy lifting.
In fact I now have a couple of home servers, but thats because I'm a nerd: I have a PIII running debian to provide the low power services like a front end for Azuereus, a few small web apps and LAN facing NFS server. Which is why I can't wait for a 20GB NAND drive that improves the battery life of my laptops. I just don't need that much storage on teh move providing I've got a decent wireless network connection.
As for, when was the last time I topped out a hardisk... yesterday. I hve 300GB of storage available to me and I use all of it. You can never have too much storage, you just don't need all of it, all of the time, providing you can access it from anywhere in the world network latency and speed is more of a barrier than local storage.
Scared of flying, pointy things snce 1979!
I am after all, concerned with the trivial..
xp Pro 64 bit.. can indeed adress a little bit more than 4gb of ram..
(can't install jack shit for external hardware, but still)
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
I think I have heard this story ever January since 1970, and it was probably around before that.
A brief revue of the literature will reveal that, although its perefectly true that solid state memory follows More's law. HDs appear to as well.
At the time Bill Gates said "640k should be enough for anyone", a 40MB HD was the size of a Bendix washing machine, and cost about the same as a Ford Galaxie 500 with all the extras. 64k of RAM cost about ten times as much as a PC with no RAM.
In 1974, (check your library for old copies of Dr Dobbs) there was a serious debate as to whether the laws of physics made it impossible for memory to EVER cost less than 1c per bit!
And for those of you stupid enough to think solid sate means slow - ask someone what Google store their data on! People who know nothing about history are condemned to repeat it. The rest of us get shiney new USB thumb drives.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
sure honey, you can have my old laptop
DAAAAD it only has a terbyte of memory are you trying to embarass me
I hate you
OK, sugar pumpkin, what would you like
well the new laptops at CompUsa weigh 12 ounces, have a 3D screen, virtual keyboard, and a pB of ram (1 pB = 1^3 tB = 1^6 gB)but shirley jones has one
with an extra 20 pB so she can have evry movie ever made, and virtual language translation
Well, you know the jones have a lot more money then us, but how much is the pB machine...
And you cn just imagine what our great grandkids will say
.. hard disks have a capacity of at least 2 Tera bytes
30 GB looks cool in 5 years but everybody forgets that disks will grow as well.
So forget about solid state.
Flash memory has slooooooooooooooow write speeds. Far slower than the hard drives' read speeds.
Battery-backed DRAM or SRAM would be a whole other story... Even slow DRAM that is a few generations behind current technology would provide an insane performance boost if used as a drive cache.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
That disadvantage of FAT causes excessive seeking on mechanical HDs.
It's not a problem with flash. Flash seeks instantly and the amount of data that actually needs to be written to the FAT is miniscule. I'd estimate less than 5% overhead at worst, most likely much less for large files.
Simply put, the raw write speeds of flash memory are LOW. Flash is slow as hell when you want to write to it. They've made huge advances in read speeds, but not write speeds.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
When accessing large files (not much seeking involved), modern hard drives have around double the sustained read/write speeds as that drive has CACHED read/write speeds. That thing's sustained write is only 1 MB/sec and its sustained read is only 2.3 MB/sec - even under incredibly heavy seeking, a decent SATA drive won't drop anywhere nearly that low.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
It provides minimal advantages (mainly battery backup) over simply increasing system RAM. For 90% of people it makes more sense to increase system RAM.
Now if that drive used an older memory technology that was much cheaper per megabyte than modern system RAM, it would kick ass. Unfortunately, you need to load it with the same stuff you put into your system, and unless you need the battery backup, you'll get much more performance by simply sticking the memory into your system itself.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
... are the key. HDDs support practically unlimited overwrites. Today flash is somewhere between 10.000 and 100.000. Even with advanced defects management my guess would be they need at least 10 years and possibly much longer to be real competition to magnetic memory. Especially as long as computers use swap space.
This guy is just blowing smoke to make himself more important. Typical suit behaviour.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I have a broken iBook and it would cost 650 euros to fix it. What is broken about it is the ATA controller or the HD and the CD. I have been using it /tmp directory is a 16 MB memory filesystem. At boot a roughly 100 files get updated and written causing write/erase cycles but I'm hoping that this setup will last me at least 2 years, I'll find out when it breaks anyhow.
/pci@f2000000/usb@18/disk@1/bsd
by booting the OS over ethernet and running everything over NFS. This always made the iBook reliant on the NFS server that had to be on. So for XMAS 2005 I asked Santa for a USB Memory Stick and in the New Year when I had some time I put the OS on the USB stick. I'm very happy now because I can can boot the iBook independently now. The limited writes on the Flash device scared me somewhat and I'm going to have to see how long the USB drive will last me. Changes I've made to make to cause less writes are that I've made the filesystem not update the atime on every access of a program and the
I've already made plans to switch my other computer to memory storage and
when I have extra money I'll make the switch. My main goal is to squeeze
out less energy consumption. When I need to store lots of files I can always spin-up a harddrive for a limited time to write something to it and then put it to sleep again. And I'm considering tape backup more than ever in case the flash breaks. If some break-throughs come in the next 12 months in regards of getting rid of the limited write/erase cycles I'd be a lot happier and would worry a lot less about my decision.
So main purpose is "energy consumption", I'll feel a lot better to be more efficient than other people and maybe they'll follow suit some day.
Here is the last part of dmesg showing that I really did this:
umass0 at uhub0 port 1 configuration 1 interface 0
umass0: SMI Corporation USB DISK, rev 2.00/20.40, addr 2
umass0: using SCSI over Bulk-Only
scsibus0 at umass0: 2 targets
sd0 at scsibus0 targ 1 lun 0: SCSI0 0/direct removable
sd0: 481MB, 481 cyl, 64 head, 32 sec, 512 bytes/sec, 985088 sec total
bootpath: '/pci@f2000000/usb@18/disk@1/bsd'
string [/usb@18/disk@1/bsd] not found
Warning: bootpath unrecognized:
boot device: sd0.
rootdev=0x200 rrootdev=0x800 rawdev=0x802
wish me luck on a lengthy USB stick life!
Oh crap. It's bad enough that the average consumer can't differntiate between "memory" and permanent storage... Now the slashdot writers are going to start calling them both memory too? I'm so sick of my sister telling me she needs more memory, me explaining to her that she has 1GiB of memory, which is overkill for her system, then, after several minutes of trying to get a straight story from her finally realizing that "not enough memory" means her harddrive is out of free space.
That said, I honestly do believe that true solid state memory will someday take over. Not flash either. SDRAM grows bigger, cheaper and faster every day. Eventually it will become a viable solution to have a perhaps slightly slower version that's maybe a little more power efficient. I mean, heck, imagine even just plain old ancient PC-100 memory (which I bet they don't even make anymore) as a harddrive. Even SATA 150MB/s is nearly impossible to reach with very rare exceptions, but, PC-100 memory could get pretty close to 100MB/s efficiency. I would willingly trade my UDMA133 harddrive for an equal sized ram drive so long as it was power efficient enough that it could survive on battery for long enough to never loose my data. I might theoretically loose a tad bit of maximum speed, but, realistically speaking, I'd get far faster access times and more throughput by far. That's crappy old PC-100. Now image it's, say, three years from now and everyone laughs so hard they nearly suffocate if you admit aloud you have PC-2100 memory in your system. By then that stuff will be so cheap and crappy it will be dirt cheap (right now it costs more along the lines of water than dirt.) I don't know that it is hard to imagine a big enough drive made up of just ancient old PC-2100 memory technology given a few more years. Heck, right now current technology can't really produce drives that are all that much faster (remember how we hit a top speed limit on CD-ROMs? HDs are spinning faster and soon they'll hit that point where if you spin faster they fly apart if they haven't already, and in the end you can only improve things like seeking so much.) Bigger buffers, spinning as fast as we dare, and etc are starting to hit limits, just like they did with CDs (though thankfully no one had to learn the hard way like we did with those horrid 52x cd-roms and all the plastic shrapnel -- which is good because harddrives are a lot more solid than a cd.) d-:
The thing to remember is that harddrives aren't growing that much faster than memory. In the past, memory has always been terribly expensive, but, it looks to me like the manufacturers are making it slowly start to gain at a higher rate than the harddrives. Harddrives are getting bigger at a slower rate than they used to, or so it seems like.
Has anyone around here saw a flash drive that you can plug on a IDE (or SCSI) interface? That may be a very usefull step into replacing HDs.
Rethinking email
a solid-state device to run my OS and games off of, then a holographic drive to store everything on. Anyone like those new 150GB WD Raptors? I want one when they make it holographic, double the cache, and bump it up to 3MB/s SATA II. But most of all cheaper.
The 'Net is a waste of time, and that's exactly what's right about it. - William Gibson
although its perefectly true that solid state memory follows More's law. HDs appear to as well.
Yes and data through the 1990s indicated that the period for doubling the component size was different for RAM, HDs, and processor speed. RAM doubled in about 1.5 years. Hard drives and processor performance doubled in about 2 years and 3 years respectively (or vice versa, I don't remember offhand).
Thus assuming that Moore's law continues to hold, it has been known for quite a while that RAM densities will catch up and surpass those of hard drives. The remaining questions are when will this intersection occur and what will switch over before the intersection occurs. I think that many of the posters are correct that storage for laptops will switch over before the intersection occurs. I think it will still be a couple of years before laptops switch and even longer before desktops switch.
"From the article: 'The average notebook has 30GB (of hard drive storage). How long is it before the notebook has solid state memory? Five or six years"
Well, I know you can take 4 solid-state CENATEK "rocketdrives" & span/stripe them into a single 16gb 'disk'... so, they're 1/2 way there!
(The 4gb limit comes not from the hardware on these units, but from the driver code which is 32-bit & thus, has its inherent limit of 4gb addresseable memory)
Size-wise? We're 1/2 way there in the 32-bit world @ least & that's a design-limitation of memory addresseable here... but, 64-bit systems will open that WAY up.
The only downside of the hardware I mention is, is that it currently is not bootable media.
APK
P.S.=> I'll tell you one thing, point-blank about them - they are WAY faster than even 10-15k rpm hdd's of std. mechanical variety (yes, this includes in the latest WD 150gb 10k rpm "raptor" (I run its ancestors here in the 36gb & 74gb units w/ 8mb RAM buffer on them & 10k rpm rotational rate speed) with 16mb RAM buffer on it + 10k rpm rotation rate speed & even the 'vaunted' Quantum/Maxtor/Seagate "Atlas" 15k rpm Ultra320 ScSi disk... the access & seek times are just many orders of magnitude faster on memory based disks by far, since there is no mechanical read/write head to position & move to find & access files with... speed of memory vs. the FAR slower speed of mechanical componentry (which also has a greater chance of breakdown due to wear since they are moving mechanical parts)... apk
let's think back 6 years or so, notebook hds had less than 10 GB and compared to now this is pretty much nothing you would want. I mean this would not even be enough to have more than just the OS running on it. You want movies, music and pictures, all the space wasing stuff there is. In another six years you probably want 1TB of space on your disc to have all your HD-movies on it. That look a bit impossible to do (at least right now) with solid state storage solutions. Still I think the idea is good and solid state serves a great purpose for smaller devices such as iPods and the like.
The size of your current RAM was the size of your hard drive 6 years ago. The size of your hard drive now will be the size of your RAM in 6 years.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
Flash memory isn't even remotely competitive with RAM memory in terms of performance, so flash won't replace RAM any time soon, not even in PDAs, never mind notebooks. It also has to be erased in blocks, i.e. you can't change a single byte at a time, which leads to serious inefficiencies if used as regular RAM. Finally, it supports a limited number of rewrites, so using it in place of RAM means that it would die really, really quickly. The reason they're only talking about using flash to replace hard disks in certain situations, like notebooks, is that because in other situations, it's just not viable.
However, a variation on your idea about "instant-on" is already being used by PDAs. Some PDAs back up their RAM to flash to achieve instant-on. There's a mention of that in the Wikipedia article on flash memory
Most of these flash devices are limited to a hundred thousand writes or so. This fine for music or cameras, but not for routine computing. So you'll need add intelligence to the operating system to manage this limitation. And you'll still need unlimited-write memory for highly repeated computation.
Recent NASA probes have been replacing old tape drives with solid-state memory to reduce the electric cost and unrelibiality of motors. The two Mars rovers use flash memory as well as the Saturn Cassini orbitor. Earlier probes like Jupter Galilleo and Voyager used tape drives.
Maybe you missed the RAM half of RamSan? It's a monsterous RAM disk backed with scsi drives, not solid state.
You people are missing the point. The point isn't to store ... Granted, this is not my only machine.
your entire terabyte collection of hentai on your pocket PC.
The point is that solid state memory provides features that you
can't get from a hard disk drive (and will never get).
According to Steve Appleton, I'm 5 years ahead of my time.
I already use a notebook with a flash drive -- no hard disk at all.
My original 30GB drive died after suffering a little bouncing around.
(You REALLY shouldn't ride with a running laptop on a motorcycle.)
This annoyed me since I don't like to have to be gentle
with my stuff. So I got a CF/IDE adapter (from PCEngines)
that is normally used in embedded systems. The notebook can't
even tell the difference. I use only 2GB of flash. Yes, that is small,
but it stores plenty for a full install of Debian Linux
including all the developers tools that I use plus Firefox,
Thunderbird, etc... I have not missed the extra storage
(OK, not much).
I only had to go thorugh a little bit of extra effort to work
inside the limited space.
I have two desktop machines with about 300GB each. Sure, if
I had only one machine it would be hard to live inside only 2GB.
Features:
1. I never have to worry about it while it's running.
I can move it around, bump it, run with it, have it slide off
the bed with no worries. I've dropped it two feet onto a hard
desk while it was running with no damage
(I was showing off -- I'm not sure how many times the
LCD could survive that).
2. It's not just quiet -- it's totally silent.
3. It's faster in many ways. It boots faster and it crawls over
files faster (grep or find). I don't perceive it to be
slower in any situation; although, I'm sure that you could
measure the burst throughput to be less. Big deal.
4. The battery lasts longer.
Hint:
If you are going to try the same thing then spend $30 on a
CF-to-IDE adapter. Don't try booting off of USB or PCMCIA even
if your board supports it. I tried using the PCMCIA port first,
but it was very slow. I'm not sure why this should be.
um, yeah. you don't work for them. riiiiiight. ;-)
2 10
2 020
;-)
Go-L is a known scam business, selling(?) over-hyped, under-powered equipment
as other-worldly, "killer" rigs. their web-site is a photoshop composite of product
images from other manufacturers/vendors with configurations that are at best, suspicious.
i was going to quote directly from their website, but it's really too much effort to refute
a scam-site when careful shoppers will see that everything is "pre-order".
here's a link from 2004:
http://www.notebookforums.com/showthread.php?t=14
and one from 2003:
http://thewolfweb.com/message_topic.aspx?topic=13
and from 2005:
http://plex.us/outbursts/liebermann.html
and if my poor memory serves me, there was also some noise about this on
some of the other enthusiast sites/forums; some review sites asked for
systems to review and benchmark but were 'rebuffed', to put it politely.
there was one actual review of a notebook they purported to sell, but overall, the
evidence is largely not positive.
their weird history of claiming ultra-high(read: impossible) performance systems
with conflicting equipment specs and configurations lead many to assume
they were fakers, or at the very least over-representing their products. there are
reports of buyers who paid large sums($20k) but never received anything.
i'd ignore these guys for now.
that said, there are solid state disks available for sale, but at extraordinarily
high cost. a google search turns up
Results 1 - 10 of about 1,790,000 for solid-state disk. (0.30 seconds)
which i won't even begin to quote here.
"...that's as white as it gets; all the bits are on..."
Right around the holidays I had a 73GB drive tap out, as in not showing up on SCSI bus scans, as in dead, as in why wasn't I making backups.
[n/t]