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Flash Memory to Rival Hard Drives
Skal Tura writes "Samsung will start producing 16 gigabit Nand Flash chips this year, nudging the memory technology towards use in notebook PCs and maybe even edging out hard drives in some products in the next few years."
Some more information about the NAND flash memory can be found here.
One nice thing about this article is that it clearly explains the difference between a gigabit (Gb) and a gigabyte (GB)...something the article referenced in the story seems confused about.
From the article referenced in the story:
And from the article referenced above:
Sorry to be picky, but I'm a stickler for detail.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Burnout.
What is the burnout like???
Me failed English...
FreeBSD over Linux. If my comments seem odd, this may explain...
Seems like they're playing fast and loose with capacity: "will start producing 16 gigabit Nand Flash chips this year" vs. " currently in products such as USB drives and digital cameras in capacities of up to 8GB." Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't 16 gigabits = 2GB?
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
I think the post needs a correction. It should probably read:
maybe even edging out hard drives in some PAINFULLY SLOW products in the next few yearsDon't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
I am not interested in a notebook with a 2GB storage capacity. *Maybe* a handheld device, but not a bulky notebook. 1996 was ten years ago, let's get real.
This article indicates that Windows Vista won't fit on a 16 Gigabit drive? And I thought MS was disk space hungry today. I used to use a gigabyte partition for Mandrake Linux - including applications and configuration - but not user data. Windows XP needs a gigabyte without applications. MS is crazy.
Simon's Rock College
i dont know about long lifed, since a flash memory card has a limited number of writes anyway. This is because each one of the memory holding transistors has an extra insulating layer between the gate and the emitter, so electrons are "forced" throug, trapping the bit and therefore the data. There is only so many times (in the 10s of thousands) you can do this, and then is toast. If you use it as a hard drive with crappy memory paging, it will die soon.
"The quality of life is inversely proportional to the number of keys on your keyring."
There are linux distros that happily run on flash. Damn Small Linux comes first to mind. It's possible, in fact many people have done it, to build a computer with no hard drive; just flash.
The current problem is that you get only a limited number of writes to flash. TFA doesn't mention that. It is a problem but not an insurmountable one.
Good job Samsung. I've got to NAND it to you...
This just in! 3 out of 4 people make up 75% of the population.
Hard disks may be physically larger and slower for random access, but they are faster than Flash for large sequential reads, much in the same way that the hare is faster than the turtle in that old fable.
We'll most likely see Flash storage grow in cell phones and PDAs, not in notebook computers. If you were a pilot, you wouldn't just have the mechanic swap out the propeller for a Rolls Royce jet engine. You'd want the whole plane overhauled to handle the increased stress on it. Better to have a system designed from the ground up that could handle the new engine rather than try to bolt it onto an older, proven design.
I, for one, welcome... oh never mind.
As flash drives become more and more popular, more dollars will pour into flash research and development. And applications will learn to accomodate the strengths and weaknesses of flash. I think we'll be seeing some really neat things over the next 10 years. Terabyte flash drive, anyone?
...just my 2 gil.
hmm... I have to see the data sheet of the new chip before backing you. Right now I'm developing embedded system that uses small flash (2M-bytes) as storage. Apart from the bulk erase thing kept me headache (you can NOT erase/re-write data byte-by-byte, instead you have do that with a huge block of storage), the main problem with flash is its erase cycle. That is, you can only write/erase certain number of times before the block go dead. Sure, all storage have such problem, But with flash, the number is quite low. For smaller flash, it's usually 100,000 Cycle for each block. Keep in mind that Flash is a type of EEPROM, ie., it's a ROM. They're not meant to be written often.
Because it will be half the (marginal, for the manufacturer) cost.
Most flash cards (SmartMemory etc..) and USB thumb drives are nand based.
It's not like it's something new and completely unproven. Solid-state disks (SSDs) have been used for years in server-applications, especially for large databases, where the speed of harddisks or RAID just won't cut it. This is an expensive solution, but if you have gazillions of transactions (think mastercard), it might still be cheaper than more traditional solutions (add more servers, add more disk-cache, make sure things don't fail).
Given that it has worked pretty well at both the server-side as well as in gadgets and appliances, I'd say flash-memory notebooks are going to happen pretty soon. It's just a matter of hitting the right pricepoint. Today you can (theoretically) get a 2GB SSD for the same price as a 200GB HD. This is pretty uncool, although I would believe many enthusiasts would buy it, if there were producers of cheap SSDs (today only high-end SSDs exist).
But if you could get a 20GB SSD for the same price as 200GB HD (which is a sane estimate, given the article), things start to make sense. It would be enough for running MS office on a laptop, and seriously reduce startup-time, as well as battery usage. Given it's performance, it would also be a great add-on for desktop computers (put the OS, most used applications, and swap-space on it, and use traditional harddisks for your videos/music/porn).
How is a 2GB flash drive with only 100,000 erase cycles supposed to rival a much faster 500GB hard drive with a much, much longer life span? I think someone just wants to push their product...
2GB per chip.
It IS possible for the notebook to have more than one of these chips in it...
Slashdot: nearly a million monkeys, but still no Hamlet.
yeah, that's because it's over the posting limit (i know because i just tried to paste it in)
No moving parts = no noise.
No moving parts = tough.
No activity when quiescent - no heat.
I, for one, welcome our new NAND overlords
"Cats like plain crisps"
I'd expect an announcement for new higher calibar bar-lifting hardware performance to come from the company that does this pretty much exclusively (unlike Samsung and all the others who dabble in flash memory). That notwithstanding, I'd also expect the bigger guys who are spread out into other products to buy out a threat slash potential asset like Sandisk. Does Sandisk no longer have top-notch proprietary R&D having been beaten to the punch? Or is this a very specific kind of advancement that it isn't so significant.
Newegg, Maxtor 300 GIGABYTE sata $125. Available NOW.
Vapordeals, Mysterymem, 16GB(?) $90. Available ???
What's the R/W speed of these things? What's the R/W burnout on these?
How many writes will they take before they fail?
Maxtor is claiming a 1 million MTBF / 5 year warranty on their 300gb drive.
No way in hell flash or any other memory is every going to compete with that,
not in price, performance, capacity or endurance.
Hard drives are so big and so cheap now that they are cheaper than blank DVD media. You're better off to archive to big drives then store them in fireproof safes than ANY other backup method. I have harddrives from the 80's that STILL have data on them that I can STILL retrieve and use, right now and I've made no serious effort to be overly protective of the drives. In other words, they've been kicking around the house in boxes on the floor. And they are still good. 20+ years later.
Flash memory may have an indefinite SHELF lifespan but you can only write to them X number of times before they fail and they are slow.
Someone is trying to sell the neophytes a bill of goods.
When Vista releases there is going to be a rush to sell more silly crap to people. More upgrades.. Oh boy..
In the meantime, I'll make due with my current system and my Linux.
And as hard drives continue to get bigger and faster and cheaper I'll just add em as I need em.
I did a study which estimates that flash will surpass 3.5 inch IDEs in every price by 2017.k .html
Read about it here:
http://www.mattscomputertrends.com/flashvsharddis
I think it's worth mentioning that the bottleneck in reading/writing large files is an interface problem (usb et.al.) and not actually an issue with the ram. Currently the thing spinning drives have going for them is cost per GB.
Remember your first Nintendo "Mario's"? Plug em in n out, not enough gold on the contacts, but the chips still play if you blow on the contacts.How many disk games have worn out since? How many Hard drives still work with the old games on em? Maybe optical storage or quantum computers will come along., but I can see what has lasted the longest so far.
MYSTERY
You're comparing apples and oranges. The solid state disks you're referring to all use regular DRAM with battery backup. DRAM is a few thousand times faster than flash.
Flash-based drives aren't even up to UDMA66 speed yet. For notebooks, my 60G Hitachi 7200rpm drive will be faster than flash in every situation.
-- *My* journal is more interesting than *yours*...
But you're comparing a desktop hard drive solution to one which is designed to be ultra-portable. How much does a 300GB 2.5" drive cost? (hint: current max size is about 120GB)
For a lot of portable applications, 20 - 30GB of storage is plenty. Esp if it's the size of a credit card and uses 1/10 the energy.
I'm sure speed issues can be circumvented be having some kind of striped (RAID3, is it?) configuration of the individual chips...
If 16Gb = approx 2GB, and there are already 2GB SD Flash memory cards available, does this mean that we could end up with 4GB -> 8GB SD memory cards in the forseeable future?
(Eagerly awaiting next iteration of the Sharp Zaurus!)
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
is it just me or is 16gigabits = 2 gigabytes? 8bits = 1byte AND - dont they already have 2gig flash chips? teque5.95mb.com
teque5.com
If you are going to be a stickler, then you should realize that "B" used to stand for and sometimes still stands for bit. Granted it is much more common nowadays to mean byte. But, that wasn't always the case. If you are going to get technical, it may be better to use OCTET.
http://www.answers.com/topic/byte
Endurance? Hahaha, don't make me laugh. Hard drives are NOT known for their endurance. I've had 5 hard drives die within the past 7 years.
Let's see.. one Hitachi notebook drive died when I accidentally bumped the notebook pretty hard against the table. Then there's the one that died right after a power outage (Purchased a UPS right after that). Also there's the ones that just.. die. Of course, that was a Maxtor, which has a notoriously bad reputation. The list goes on.
Flash based hard drives will be a huge improvement in terms of durability. Notebooks really need this right now, more than anything. Screw huge storage space, none of that matters if your hard drive suddenly dies on you.
The solid-state drives you mention are typically based on battery-backed up, volatile, RAM. Sometimes coupled to a hard drive... something akin to a REALLY huge hard drive cache. They are not based on Flash. Flash memory has a limited write cycle, and is *MUCH* slower in reads than fast SCSI RAID storage.
Hard drives are still about 300x bigger for the same price. Flash is only going to edge forward in lightweight portable applications.
As much as I prefer flash for an MP3 player over a HDD I admit that funny stuff happens to it. I have had some camera CF cards do peculiar things. Especially if there is a power problem when they are writing. Remember the mars rover was hamstrung for awhile with a flash problem. They sorted it though.
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
If you read the specs on typical flash memory, the stuff can last around 10 years until the data isn't necessarily correct.
Doesn't that make them about as good as the dye based CD-Rs that people fear will not be good for archives?
I'm not saying I'm the expert on this -- I'd appreciate it if someone could explain to me that the flash memory will actually last 40 years or so. But I doubt it.
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
When I see some more knowledgable people here talking about putting the OS on flash, reading it to active memory, etc. the first thing that comes to mind (especially given the limited writes) is that it's the right technology to introduce the "trusted" OS - you don't want to write to the OS unless it's a patch, you don't let the user change much if anything, it's in a stable form that is quickly loadable, probably faster that OS on harddrive now that is the technologic foot in the door to entice people to upgrade to it. If they limit the writability with some sort or authorization scheme that is changable with the update, ANY writing can be limited to over a connection to the home server. Sure, a business wouldn't like/allow/purchase that, but I think that the whole trusted computing idea is aimed at controlling home computers, not the business machines, yes? It would seem to be an elegant fit with (my understanding of) trusted computing.
Meh, every hard drive manufacturer has a "notoriously bad reputation" to somebody. Specific lines of hard drives can be lemons if there's some small defect in the production process, and no manufacturer has always been immune to this. IBM had its DeathStar, etc.
No, I think you are quite mistaken. Read up on Hybrid Drives.
The future of laptop hardrive technology is going to be a mixture of hard disk and flash memory technology.
I don't read or respond to AC posts
It's regretable that you've had such bad luck with hard drives.
It happens to some people.
I on the otherhand, have had extremely good luck with hard drives,
I've had a few die on me but they were Western Digital. WD is CRAP. I've
gone through a LOT of WD drives and I finally learned my lesson, I'll NEVER buy another WD, EVER..
I fried a few by putting the power cable on backwards with the PC running, but that was my dumb fault.
As for Maxtor, people say they are crap but I've had no complaint with them at all.
I guess I'm just luckier than most..
>Newegg, Maxtor 300 GIGABYTE sata $125. Available NOW.
>Vapordeals, Mysterymem, 16GB(?) $90. Available ???
No, it is 16Gb (2GB), not 16GB. That is an order of magnitude larger... making your argument even more correct. Flash memory will probably never (in the foreseeable future) overtake or even come close to what you can do with rotating magnetic media.
Someday there might just be a 20GB flash drive for $200, and at that point in time, there will probably be a 20TB hard drive that is 10 times faster for $200, or a 2TB hard drive that is 10 times smaller and uses 10 times less power than the 20TB for $200.
Still, seeing higher densities of flash is a wonderful thing, especially for portable/pocketable devices. I am AMAZED when I see how inexpensive a 1GB tiny SD card is! It would just blow my mind away 10 years ago... Bring it on!
Nice rant but you totally mised the point.
A 300 Gig IDE drive doesnt fit in a laptop.
A 300 Gig IDE drive uses loads of power.
A 300 Gig IDE drive has faster sustained transfer speed but much a longer access times than flash. Horses for courses.
Wear leveling algorithms can make the write limit of flash irrelevant.
That the interface (eg, ATA) for accessing storage media usually goes out of date before the media wears out is true for both disks and flash.
The real story here is that flash is trouncing disk in improvements in Megs per $ and will one day catch up to and overtake disk. And it will be sooner than mmost people expect.
Fuck the decietful asswipes who use gigabits for measuring storage and call 10^9 bytes a gigabyte (instead of 2^30). 16 Gb sounds like something until you realize that it's 2 GB.
MOUNT TAPE U1439 ON B3, NO RING
I'd rather add that much RAM on my PC, since they are faster with a similar price.
You definitely should consider that RAM price is dropping as fast as flash memory price.
since flash memory has only a limited number of drive writes, there isnt a chance in hell it will replace conventional hard drives - rival conventional drives in archival purposes, maybe - but with only a limited number of writes, what do you do when it goes bad because you wrote to it to store the database for your forum?
2.4 Terabit Hard Drive, or in layman non-marketing speak, 300GB... I mean 279.4 Gigabytes.
I would like to patent a new measurement unit, called the bi (pronounced "bee"). Not to be confused with the slang used to describe a person with bisexual tendencies, this measurement unit quantifies memory size.
1 bi = 0.001 bit
Fear my 2400,000,000,000,000 bi hard drive!!!111
If I can do it, its probably not worth doing... probably
is it just me or is 16gigabits = 2 gigabytes?
No, it's just you.
Yes but flash will overtake hard drives in most Write-Only Memory applications.
I know this is an off topic question but I remember hearing that the macbook pro uses some type of NAND flash to boot up instead of using the HD. Now if what people say that NAND flash dies after certain read/writes then that would mean a limited amount of restarts as well. Correct me if I am wrong though.
While flash memory may seem ideal it is terrible in dealing with power interuptions when the filesystem is mounted. Just ask apple how many ipod shuffle's and nano's were rendered useless by a power outage. We all know that power interuptions can wreak havoc with any electronic device, but it seems to me that you gotta wear kid gloves with flash
100+MB read and about 50 MB write last I read.
For comparison, a Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 3.5" desktop drive will do about ~47 MB per second.
Platform advocacy is like choosing a favorite severely developmentally disabled child.
If you were a pilot, you wouldn't just have the mechanic swap out the propeller for a Rolls Royce jet engine.
Well done, you have truly lived up to your username.
The problem is that's what the article is talking about, it being used more, to replace HD's in portables.
Sure the Flash memory are growing in size at some rate r per year, but at the same time the need for more and more disk space is also growing at some rate r'. ... I doubt it.
I can't say if r > r' so much that in the course of the next few years we'll see HD disapear
They are susceptible to ESD. Data can be lost in an instant.
CDs and IDE Hard Drives are more reliable.
...how "wear leveling" solves any problems. I get the concept: http://www.dataio.com/pdf/NAND/MSystems/TrueFFS_We ar_Leveling_Mechanism.pdf but maybe I'm reading this wrong.
Considering your "virtual erase unit" (VEU) to be a multiple of the physical erase unit, you still have to have a significant number of these VEUs so you can remap things, lowering the flash density as you increase the reliability. Make the VEU too large, and the leveling algorithm doesn't give you that much time. Make it too small, the flash chip is now twice the size. Not only that, but in order for the VEU to remember where to map what, it itself has to be flash. What happens when the VEU flash area gets worn out? How would you even detect that the VEU is getting written too much without, oh, keeping track of THOSE times in flash too.
And what happens when the disk is mostly full and there are only a few empty sectors to write to, as most data gets overwritten? Guess you're screwed then!
No, I don't think this is a very good trade. Flash has a physical problem that needs to be solved with materials science, not computer science.
1. Unless you are running a 64 bit system, you can only address 4GB
2. When the power goes out, you'll need to reinstall your system
You are in a maze of twisted little posts, all alike.
That's 100k per block, not for the entire drive. The wear-leveling algorithms will make sure that even if you constantly re-write the same file, that part of the memory won't get worn out.
With a 512-byte erase block size, that is 419 billion writes. With a 4K erase block size, that's 52 billion writes. Use a 20GB drive instead of 2GB, and you'll get 10x the writes. And, the computer can warn you before the memory stops re-writing.
5 trillion writes is 10,000 writes/second for 13 years.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
Yes, because 1 million writes is so not worth the 100+ MB per second read/ 50 MB per second write speed. That's the industry standard. For some extra money you can bump that to 5 million with a 5 year warranty.
What does my brand new laptop do? About 20. Even the newest fancy pants Raptors peak at 80 MB per second at the edge of the disk.
Considering how late your comment is, you should have read all of the above by now. Even still, if you didn't know these things you should know better than to spout off like some kind of funduhmentalist christian. Do you really believe the scientists and business people with all of their learning and experience have missed out on an obvious truth that only you know about.
Know what?
Digg.com called, they want their "conversation" back.
Platform advocacy is like choosing a favorite severely developmentally disabled child.
You know, I wonder, can someone please make NOR flash? I mean it's functionally complete too. Anyone know of any available NOR flash?
I wonder if I'm misinterpreting the meaning of NAND in this instance, where the hardware uses chained NAND gates to store values. Can't the same design be implemented using NOR's?
Yes indeed on all accounts.
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As for what you can do right now, ONE TB will run you about $500.
Just 5 years ago that amount of storage capacity was SciFi movie stuff of the future.
Now it's only $500 and 3 days UPS ground away from reality.
And with HTPC here, 1TB isn't all that big of a deal.
SERIOUS HTPC people will probably want 2-3TB..
As for notebooks/laptops, 2.5" drives are growing/shrinking too.
I do not believe for a minute that NV memory drives will ever replace mag drives.
I've seen these nonsense pie in the sky promises before.
I have one of them right here.
Read about it here --> http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1733
IDE drives aren't hot-swappable, backwards or not, and you need to take proper precautions against electrostatic discharge.
http://outcampaign.org/
Sony has with 4 Gig pendrives. It has problems for now, ie cant transfer files >1gigbyte and only one file at a time. It was manufactured in China and offered to employees at approx 70USD. So this news is crap.
Beats swapping over the 'net to NFS...
You could've hired me.
You seriously miss the point, and not just because you're comparing a desktop solution to a notebook solution.
Flash will be the storage medium of the future. I'm working on several proposed implementations now. Yes, there are issues to overcome, but the number of writes is not one of them.
Hard drives are big and cheap now, there's no doubt about that. But flash drives will become big and cheap at some point. The slowest flash memory is faster than the fastest hard drive.
And your MTBF canard shows that you don't understand that MTBF is a measure of reliability, not endurance. That 1,000,000 hour MTBF means that you should experience and unexpected failure once in every million hours, assuming that you perform maintenence and replace the drive at the intervals recommended by the manufacturer. It does not mean that the drive will last for a million hours. It won't.
By all means, stick with your hard drives - at some point, everybody will politely chuckle under their breath and point to the poor luddite who won't change.
RTFA. 16 gigabit, not gigabyte.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
It's bigger than that, it's not going to rival something so big, it's going to be faster than most drives and you are so silly I wonder if you are that way intentionally. Let's quote the article:
For mobile PCs - particularly thin-and-light models that do not require the larger hard drive capacities - the technology could extend battery life because solid-state Flash designs would be far more efficient than hard disks. Hardware design, durability and performance - particularly the boot-up sequence - would also be improved.
Hard drives are not ideal in laptops. They are mechanically fragile and break when you drop them. The quickest way to extend battery life is to spin down your drive, but there are only a limited number of times you can spin them up before you burn the motor out. Laptop hard drives are typically slow, loud, hot and suck power. Most of my laptops have drives less than 16 GB, so I'd never see the difference.
The techniques to extend the life of flash drives are well known. You put files that are rewritten often onto a RAM disk. That's how palm computers work. My Handspring gets by with 4MB of memory and is a useful tool. My Zaurus does much more with it's 64MB and a 512MB SD flash card.
When your OS has adequate networking, you don't need to lug around all 500 GB of your music, photos and movies. If your OS has a 12 minute half life on any network, you might lug around an external drive. I leave mine at home tied to a cable modem. It's easier to sync that with everything.
The best laptop is just big enough for a keyboard, screen and network hookups and weighs less than three pounds. It's just fast enough to run your stuff without burning your lap and it does not have sound like a vacuum cleaner. It runs for at least four hours without a charge, ideally twelve, so you don't have to lug around a power brick. Flash drives are part of that laptop.
They are attractive as upgrades to my current laptops. At the predicted price of $90, it's cheaper than most laptop drives on the market. I'll be happy to drop half a pound of noise, heat and power drain from my current laptops when their eight year old drives start to fail.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
It was a fucking joke. Using flash as swap is as good idea as running NFS over dial up.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
Digg.com called, they want their "conversation" back.
That alone deserves insightful moderation.
5 million writes? that might be true with the 180nm technology (actually it's not, with 180 it's more like 100k), but with samsung and toshiba pushing to 55nm this year and 45 soon after, they can't even guarantee more than 50k.
worse yet, flash retention is going down too because of the smaller gates and use of multi-level cells. one electron jumping off the gate when you have seventy million of them in your huge gate is no problem, but when you are only holding a few dozen of them things in your tiny little gate, it's a much worse scenario.
you either work for the company you advertise, or is just a fanboy. no way 16Gbit chips can have this much rewrite capability.
First: "Just 5 years ago that amount of storage capacity was SciFi movie stuff of the future."
:)
And then: "I do not believe for a minute that NV memory drives will ever replace mag drives."
Looks like someone prefers to be surprised.
6000 networked desktops at my place of work, Windows XP notwithstanding, almost all 40G+ hard drives, most probably 90% empty, >200,000G of empty disk, bumps up the $/useful G somewhat, must be some market for 4-8G "drives" right now [again]!
That's another notch off the old power meter as well. I'm fairly sure flash-based media uses a lot less than the spinning of drive heads etc on a standard hard-disk.
With all the advancements in computing that tend to require more power, that's a nice change. Especially since my mini-ITX system currently uses around max 35-40W already, including drives... this would likely be less if I used flash drives (an quieter).
I'm not sure your analogy holds. These sorts of flash drives would be beautiful in portable devices, but I can see a terrific value using them in laptops. Imagine putting 5 x 16gb flash drives in a laptop in a RAID 5 array, giving 64GB usable space (more than enough for most laptops). You'd have a few huge advantages.
1. You'd save a terrific amount of power (spinning CDs and HDs kills batteries faster than about anything).
2. In a RAID 5 array (so long as only 1 drive fails at a time), if you have a drive failure, you could have a little program popup and say "look part of your HD has died. You haven't lost any data, so don't worry, but get this serviced immediately."
3. With the RAID 5 controlled by the computer, the read/write times would be unreal. Fastest loading ever. 10 second boots and instant program loading!
4. With solid state memory, no more hard drive heads scratching the hard drive platters if you drop your laptop.
5. Flash memory is small. Even 5 chips would be much smaller than a 2.5 inch hard drive. More importantly, it is flat. So you could get laptops half inch thick (assuming a slot loading CD drive).
I'm sure there are other advantages too, but this is what came off the top of my head. If we could get read/write speeds on flash drives up to the speeds DDR RAM has and you could have a computer that, when unplugged unexpectedly, doesn't lose anything it wasn't writing at that very millisecond. Boy wouldn't that be a leap ahead. (Windows Vista has an optional feature that uses flash drives as memory. Not as good as real RAM but leaps faster than virtual memory).
To be honest I can only see Apple implementing something like that now, but eventually it'd hit the PC market. HP still innovates even if Dell doesn't.
EDIT PARENT: I'm sure there are other advantages too, but this is what came off the top of my head. If we could get read/write speeds on flash drives up to the speeds DDR RAM has you could have a computer that, when unplugged unexpectedly, doesn't lose anything it wasn't writing at that very millisecond. Boy wouldn't that be a leap ahead. (Windows Vista has an optional feature that uses flash drives as memory. Not as good as real RAM but leaps faster than virtual memory).
(I removed an "AND" that made the paragraph hard to read)
Not with data on them they don't. Have you read a spec sheet? I think I saw a quote for 10 years last time I looked.
With great power comes great fan noise.
Well, I know the storage media go higher than this. For work I have a Sandisk Cruzer 4GB. However, I'm guessing if I looked inside there might be a severak individual chips (say 4, 8-gigabit/1GB chips). If they could store 16gigabit/2GB on each chip, that's half the chips one would need and either 2x storage for the same size or less size needed.
I'd bet that if you ever measured your actual real-world throughput from your hard drive, you'd be sorely disappointed. Just because it has a max outer zone transfer rate of 60-90MB/sec (I'll assume you aren't one of those idiots who thinks that because you are using SATA-II which is 300MB/sec that you are getting 300MB/sec for all transfers) doesn't mean it really gets that. In fact, you are often doing well to get 10% of that value, once you include the massive overhead of taking 5-10ms every time you seek.
However, let's say whatever you do does mostly sequential transfers so that's all you care about. If you are using flash to replace hard drives, you are probably using more than one of those 16Gbit (2GB) chips. Even if each one is a painfully slow 5MB/sec (and newer ones are closer to 10-20MB/sec) you can run them in parallel. If you used 16 in parallel to create a 32GB drive, it is faster than even the fastest 15Krpm drive, probably faster than two of them striped together.
Yes, its pricey, if those 16Gbit chips were $60/ea (just pulling a number out of my ass) 32GB would be nearly $1000. However, that's really not much more than two 15Krpm SCSI drives, and its far faster, lower power and more reliable. Whatever cost they sell 16Gbit chips for they could probably sell 8Gbit chips for half that, and 4Gbit for half that again. So maybe you don't need 32GB if you just wanted a fast boot drive. 8GB is more than enough for a boot drive for Windows (including Vista I'm guessing) and even the biggest Linux distros. If those 4Gbit chips were $15/ea, that'd be about the same speed for under $300. Sounds like a better deal that those 10Krpm Raptors people swear by, at least for your boot drive and your most important applications.
ATA hard disk:
/unit storage, reliability (RAID, etc) or increased speed at to this, though
/unit storage
a) Low-medium power consumption
b) Noise
c) Heat
d) Varying reliability, but at most I'd say medium as I never trust something important to just one disk
e) High capacity
f) Medium-High speed
h) Medium-Large size (dimensions)
i) Good price
Flash Drive:
a) Minimal-lower power consumption
b) No noise. Zilch
c) Minimum heat if any
d) Some brands have excellent reliability, depending on how you watch your write cycles
e) Low comparative capacity
f) Speed varies by operation (quite fast read, less so for write, dependng on random vs seq operation)
h) Small size but this could be parallel to capacity
i) Currently higher price
So the biggest obvious advantages of flash are really in the size, power use, and noise. Anything where you want one of the three to be low, you might go flash unless you're more concerned about capacity or # writes (say for swap).
As they become more widespread, dampening for such things could be included. Right now there's not much space for it. While it might take more juice to frag a hard-drive, I have seen IDE disks get zipped just as nicely. With the controller card gone, you have a disk full of wonderful data that you... can't use (unless you have a disk for the same chipboard to transplant).
I'm not sure which handles better against magnets, etc, too (is flash succeptible?)
current flash cards are very very slow. ever try one out? booting takes 2 to 3 times as long.
i assume the boards that flash chips are mounted on already do this, but if you have say 4 flash chips making up a single 8 GB flash module, why not treat it like a raid and stripe data across the 4 chips? if you can only write 10 MB/s to each flash chip, striping the data across 4 chips instantly gets you 40 MB/s read/write performance for any block-level action - and most every os will read in block size increments, say 2 KB or 4 KB at a time.
40 MB/s and no seek times? sounds good to me.
sure that'd require more circuitry on the pcb the chips are on, but that's what mass production is for. if 4 striped chips is how things currently work, move to 16 striped chips of smaller dimensions.
Hey, swapping to NFS... now there's an idea...
My
NFS
root
is
mounted via
dialup. What'
s
so wrong ab
out that? OH NO! Office mate's got to make a phone call! Sure hope this unmounts clea+++NO CARRIER
I don't moderate anymore. Karma penalty for 90% fair mods? Can I mod that unfair?
Seems like this is perfect for car PCs. No moving parts, adequate storage for those nav systems and MP3 collections.
your drive is almost full? In that case you're limiting writes/rewrites to a smaller portion of the disk. Your estimate assumes that writes/rewrites are spread uniformly when they are/cannot be spread anywhere near uniformly in the real world. In other words: Your estimate is wildly optimistic.
How about operating system and programmes on the flash and data on the hard drive?
not of course by increasing storage but by incresing MTBF. yes no moving parts => much higher MTBF no moving parts => no seek required => dont incuss 6 mS for a 512B transfer from hard drive plan is to use small flash in conjungtion with regular hard drive and your flash contains everything need to boot your computer. believe me, you are going to love it when you can swtich it on (even windows!) in less than 1 sec.
This sig doesnt exist.
I have looked into the performance trends of flash vs hard disk and I suspect, in a just few years, that flash will catch up to the point that there is no meaningful difference in the sustained read and write speeds between the two. This means when the $ per meg is the same, there will be no logical reason to chose disk over flash, including in a hybrid setup. Could be a few years yet for desktops, 11 years for 3.5" IDE drives according to my study. Probably a lot sooner for 2.5" drives.
k .html
I've linked to it elsewhere here but here is the link to my study again:
http://www.mattscomputertrends.com/flashvsharddis
I wouldn't use that Maxtor as a video recording device on my Dad's racing motorcycle though - it wouldn't even last to the bottom of Bray Hill on the Isle of Man TT circuit. The only practical solution at the moment is tape (and it worries me what a battering that helical scan head on my portable video recorder is getting on road circuits). I'd much rather have a solid state video recorder than tape - especially if the recorder can be made smaller.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
The article (as much as it confuses "Gb" with "GB") doesn't mention if it's actual computer gigabits ie. 16 x 2^30 or if it's the gigabits the marketing people like to use ie. 16 x 10^9.
Marketing people like the later because it makes things sound bigger than they actually are.
I stand by my theory that all marketroids harbour great feelings of inadequacy (probably for good reason, ie a small hard disk..).
I'm a perfectionist but I'm trying to cut back.
For me it was very helpful to see it posted -- I'm very much aware of the differences but missed the word gigabit in the article when I quickly read it. Reading that post was in fact "inciteful" to me and if I'd had mod points at the moment I'd have marked it so.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
Then don't bloody use it for paging, just use enough RAM that you don't need to page anything out.
....Didn't see that as I replied. Now they're useless in this thread. Damn my eyes.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
Well, probably not if you have a file system that records access times. Of course you can turn that off.
On the other hand, doesn't flash burn out much faster if it's being constantly written to? It'd make a bad coice for log and swap files, wear leveling or no.
It's an exciting area, but I doubt I'll be an early adopter for the first wave of flash notebooks
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
"Flash! Flash! I love you, but we only have 14 hours to save the earth!"
I think he was actually trying to say that flash cards aren't yet big enough to hold a complete windows folder! He tried to install everything to a 80GB drive but he still filled up his 9GB windows drive. Poor guy, he doesn't know what he is talking about....or is drunk - with this being slashdot, probably both.
now how mats pron dis holdz?
Speed, power hunger and heat seem to give non-volatile memories a plus over HDs.
But for a real replacement of HDs in our PCs we'd need at least:
1. Good "specific capacity", that is the ratio between memory room and physical volume, comparable with HDs.
2. Medium durability. We use to both read and write on HDs. Current non-volatile memories seem to suffer a little bit when frequently updated.
While point #1 seems to become more close every day, point #2 is the weakest one. But maybe someone will package some extra memory to automatically patch the broken banks (or sectors if you prefer).
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
"doesn't flash burn out much faster if it's being constantly written to? "
This is the first time I have ever heard this idea. If you have a source, I am keen to learn from it. It will modify my opinion.
I think that people have a poor perspective on just how long a flash drive can last with wear leveling.
Taking a the example of a theoretical hard disk replacement flash drive of 200GB with a write speed of 40 Megabytes per second and doing some basic calculations shows that it could be written to continuously for just over 15 years before every block passed the 100 000 write mark. The equivalent of todays 200GB drive some 15 years ago was the 210MB disk. There are not many machines running today with 210MB hard drives, let alone dong the kind of work that requires continuous writing to the disk. And 100 000 writes is often considered a minimum. Average failure figures are often quoted as 1 million writes. Worrying about it wearing out just isnt worth the time.
" I doubt I'll be an early adopter for the first wave of flash notebooks"
Wise advice for any technological advancement.
In saying that, there are companies that do make Flash based solid state disks that solve most of these problems. I'd say that even the finite write/erase life is made less of an issue by large ammounts of caching and something akin to RAID 6. Since those manufacturers supply for military applications, be prepared to pay massive ammounts for it.
I can't see the cost of producing NAND Flash chips (even at 16Gb) in high enough quantities to equal the cost per GB of HDs. Once the cost drops further, packaging enough of them for redundancy into a 2.5" form factor with all the caching other circuitry (most likely some kind of hardware RAID 5 or 6 controller) will start to make economic sense. Until then I think we are stuck writing magnetic bits onto spinning chunks of metal. ;)
That was according to a colleague when we were investigating flash as a candidate for a rolling network recovery buffer. I just asked him about the source, and he says it came from an intel or possible microsoft research paper.
Sadly he couldn't find the link, and nor could I after a half hour of googling, which is all I can really allocate out of work time.
I might have another look tonight. I must admit, I'd like to read this paper myself.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
From www.microsoft.com/vista
External memory devices
Adding system memory (RAM) is often the best way to improve your PC's performance. More memory means more applications are ready to run without accessing the hard drive. However, upgrading memory is not always easy. You must learn what type of memory you need, purchase the memory, and open your computer to install the memory--which sometimes can invalidate your support agreement. Also, some machines have limited memory expansion capabilities, preventing you from adding RAM even if you are willing to do so.
Windows Vista introduces a new concept in adding memory to a system. USB flash drives can be used as External Memory Devices (EMDs) to extend system memory and improve performance without opening the box. Your computer is able to access memory from an EMD device much more quickly than it can access data on the hard drive, boosting system performance. When combined with SuperFetch technology, this can help drive impressive improvement in system responsiveness.
EMD technology is both reliable and secure. You can remove an EMD at any time without any loss of data or negative impact to the system; however, if you remove the EMD, your performance returns to the level you experienced without the device. Wear on the USB drive is not an issue when using it as an EMD. A unique algorithm optimizes wear patterns, so that a USB device can run as an EMD for many years, even when heavily used. Finally, data on the EMD is encrypted to help prevent inappropriate access to data when the device is removed.
http://nfs-swap.dot-heine.de/
The rumours in the Mac community are hinting that key products were missing from the Steve's keynote speech due to supply issues with the new Intel Core Duo chips. I'm starting to winder whether it wasn't the Core Duo chips that were in short supply. There were predictions and rumours of "instant-on" hard drive less Macs based on flash chips in the run up to Macworld. Perhaps we still have "One more thing..." still to come?
It'd certainly fit with my own speculations about the Mac Pro line...
Al.The Daily ACK - Eclectic posts by yet another hacker
Yes, and you can re-install your OS and all your apps (and data) each time you shut down, reboot, or have a power failure. (RAM doesn't hold data without power, silly!)
Better not run Windows... you'll be rebooting/reinstalling all the time. At least with Linux you stand a chance of a running system for a few months (or years...) at a time.
MadCow.
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
Hard disks may be physically larger and slower for random access, but they are faster than Flash for large sequential reads, much in the same way that the hare is faster than the turtle in that old fable.
As I'm sure you know, the turtle was faster:
"A HARE one day ridiculed the short feet and slow pace of the Tortoise, who replied, laughing: "Though you be swift as the wind, I will beat you in a race." The Hare, believing her assertion to be simply impossible, assented to the proposal; and they agreed that the Fox should choose the course and fix the goal. On the day appointed for the race the two started together. The Tortoise never for a moment stopped, but went on with a slow but steady pace straight to the end of the course. The Hare, lying down by the wayside, fell fast asleep. At last waking up, and moving as fast as he could, he saw the Tortoise had reached the goal, and was comfortably dozing after her fatigue.
"Slow but steady wins the race."
Power.
does it miss features that home/pro have?
does it cost a lot to license? (compared to what white box vendors pay for oem versions of home/pro)
can licenses only be bought in bulk?
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
RAM is measured in bytes not bits. It's MB and GB not Mb and Gb.
It was with an older camera. If I was deleting snaps and the power went off (auto power save shutdown) then the card would not reboot in the camera in many cases. To read the remaining pictures I had to use an adapter -- PCMCIA or USB both worked. Remember this: if your card malfunctions in the camera then all is NOT lost. The FAT table on the card was screwed and pictures were all out of order. Sometimes they had duplicate names! It was messy, but not a disaster as no pictures were lost. Once I figured out the pattern I disabled the power save function if I was deleting lots of pictures. Problem solved.
After snagging the data I could reformat under windows using vanilla floppy FAT, which is the format these cards usually use. No need to worry much. Newer cameras I have had did not have this problem since the cards were big enough not to delete on the fly. Still, if I have to do a rare major delete marathon on my new camera I disable auto off, but only out of paranoia. But the damage I report here is the kind of thing that happens if you pull your card without unmounting it. Anyway no big deal to have your CF card go wonky, but a pain -- especially if it is on Mars. They reformatted and it booted fine. Rovers have kicked ass ever since.
d:-b
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
Always like to learn a neat detail. I knew they rebooted and solved the problem. Cheers, b
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
d:-b
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
I'm not sure your analogy holds.
...
...
... Ya' think?
Go back and read his username. Also, jet engines don't have propellers -- hence the joke.
Doesn't the fact that the Mars Rover used flash suggest that flash is a really solid technology?
I think your hard drive will be upset if you mess with the power during write too. Not to mention your PC.
It still amazes me that hard drives are as reliable as they are, with all those moving parts. Flash doesn't have much to break, by comparison.
The current issue of IEEE Spectrum (the electrical engineers society news monthly) called flash hard drives one of the top ten worst ideas of 2006. First, they say the is over a hundred times higher- $45 / GB for flash versus $0.50 / GB for a commodity disk drive. (People estimate Apple is only paying $10-$20 / GB for nano-pods.) Second, bulk transfer speeds are several times slower for flash than disk. Third, flash can only be written about 100,000 times before it burns out, while disk can be written billions of times.
(DISCLAIMER- not necessarily my opinion.)
According to Tom's Hardware, as of August 2005, the fastest flash on the market, Memina's 4GB, has 30MB/s read and 24MB/s write - assuming it's compatible with your system, which it often isn't. Yes, if someone created a RAID controller for the things, this could go to 100MB/s or more, but that isn't available yet. The access times are great, though, on the better brands - 0.5 ms for the Kingston Elite 2GB or 0.7 ms for the Memina. Crap brands can have ridiculous access times, though - nearly 30 ms.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
The real story here is that flash is trouncing disk in improvements in Megs per $ and will one day catch up to and overtake disk. And it will be sooner than mmost people expect.
I don't see that. I think that we will see 2-4 TB HD when in the next 10 years. I'd be happy if flash caught up, but I'd think that flash would say get to be affordable on in the 500 GB range unless some prices were lowered to make the product very attractive. I think that both techs have a place. I could easily see a system with lets say 16-32 GB of RAM with a 100 GB flash drive and several 1 TB setup with RAID storing next gen. HD TV or DVD. The humans shouldn't really decide which storage medium needs to be used at any given moment, Windox X or Linux should automatically take care of that for the users so that it just works.
In the latest issue of the IEEE Spectrum, the feature article is a list of some of the biggest winners and losers in recent technology. Samsung's play for solid state drives (SSD) breaking into the mainstream hard drive market was listed as one of the losers for several important reasons:
* Significantly higher cost than magnetic drives (60-70 times the price per GB).
* Signficantly smaller capacity tha magnetic drives (even a 16 gigabyte drive doesn't come close to the 80 gigabyte drives that are now becoming standard in a lot of laptops).
* Slower read access (about 1.5x slower), and slower write access (2-4x slower).
* Finite write cyles before the cells start crapping out (10^5 to 10^7).
These are compelling reasons that don't seem to be going away any time soon.
Sorry, forgot to include links:
IEEE Spectrum magazine
And the article describing NAND drives as a loser.
If you fill 95% of the device with some static file, then repeatedly write/erase some small file in that remaining 5%, you will probably cause that 5% area to fail much faster.
Or is the wear leaving algorithm able to move static storage around the device also?
The last manufacturer that I think had a fairly universal bad reputation was Conner, and they were bought out years ago. A friend and I have had a serious problem over the years with WD; other friends swear by them. I prefer Maxtor for the most part, while others won't touch them. Seagate is about the only company where I've never had a drive fail, but others have had them bad out of the box.
Most people here don't have enough experience with hard drives to have their failure biases mean anything statistically. I recognize that WD is a good brand, just that I've had bad luck with them.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
True enough. Nothing against flash. Cannot wait for the near instant boot a flash based computer would have. b
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
slow but steady only wins races when fast isn't also steady.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
The comments on this thread are the first I've heard of a flash drive's limited rewrite capacity. Does this mean MIT is about to supply the third-world with a bunch of laptops whose drives will need to be replaced every few years?
Step into a huge movement. Don't Tread In Me.
... if the driver reads the wear count and does the translation on the fly. This sounds like something that should be standardized, though. Because using it on a foreign computer where a generic SBP2 driver is loaded (and not the special one) would render it useless again.
I could foresee a hybrid hard disk/flash disk, where the high read/low write areas are remapped to flash (say, OS files) and everything else is on disk. Hard drives already have something of this capability with their caching mechanism.
if you use smartd, it can warn you of disk that are about to break down. Disks themselves can correct bad sectors with a checksum per sector, if the sector is really gone it is moved offline and swapped for a spare sector. Similar methods might be used with flash.
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
You must have something else going on, C:\Windows + C:\Program Files\Common Files + C:\I386 (windows install stuff) is right around 4.5 gigabytes. That's with photoshop and office light installed. Not to mention a bunch of other shit.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Does it really make sense to put swap on flash in leiu of say, adding more RAM? I actually am curious, I want some informed opinions, or at least more informed than mine.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
>>vanilla floppy FAT
That may be the most disgusting 3 word combination ever seen on Slashdot.
Some bring out the best in others, some the worst. Some bring out far more.
I'm not saying I'm the expert on this -- I'd appreciate it if someone could explain to me that the flash memory will actually last 40 years or so. But I doubt it.
In 40 years, you might not have an OS that is capable of reading the flash memory of today if you just pulled the flash memory out of a dusty bin.
Heck... We might even done away with binary all together. We don't know and can't predict the future to an exact anymore because technology is changing at an accelerating pace.
People with punch cards and old mainframe tape drives have the same problem today with getting and those were only 20 to 30 years ago. Even though there might not be any data loss on the medium they just don't have anything that can read it and transfer to a modern device.
The best bet is that in 5 years from now you just transfer everything to a new medium and go with baby steps. Yes it is a pain, but in 5 years you'll probaly be able to store everything in an increasingly small but exponentially larger capacity.
Like doing backups to floppy and then burning those floppies to CDR and then the cd images later to DVDRs and those to Blu-ray/HD-DVD and so on as the technology becomes available.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
I'm suprised that I've not seen anyone suggest this, but I can imagine a solid-state "cache" for a hard disk being very useful. For small writes (e.g. updating file access times), you needn't spin the disk up at all. When the cache fills above a certain threshold, spin the drive up, and write the data back. While doing really heavy work, the drive would bypass the solid-state cache entirely, so you'd get higher throughput. When doing light work, the disk can stay powered off for hours... and you'd have still high capacity.
Okay, so it doesn't fix the problem that hard disks are quite fragile... but it should still reduce power consumption, and should cost less (at least for the short term).
Stuart Brady
This is not yet a rival of hard drives. Cost per megabyte is still too high. Since we can buy 250Gbyte hard drives for around $100 the same in flash is about $11,000. It has a long way to be useful and cost effective as a HD.
Athiesm is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby.
So will we ever get computers where the processor, RAM, and flash memory storage are all on the same chip? it seems like you could make a very space-efficient computer that way, and probably produce the whole thing for less since you would have less individual parts and connectors, etc. Or would that cause heat dissipation problems? When do I get my tablet that is one solid block consisting of one chip, one battery, the display, and a few other minor components? (maybe with channels full of alcohol hollowed into the block?)
Intel has already demonstrated at NAND flash drive used to reduce boot times:
0 0.asp
http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,123053,
So you are probaly right that Apple and Intel might be cooperating on a similar project.
I remember that Steve Jobs gave a key note a few years back on talking about how they wanted to reduce boot times to 0 because it would save people hours a year waiting for the computer to boot. However, I wouldn't expect anything til late this year or 2007.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
We're talking about replacing hard drives with flash memory (not replacing DRAM with flash memory), and the result would be far faster.
"The cadmium atom that has lost an electron becomes a negatively charged ion, which can then be controlled with an electrical field," said Daniel Stick, a doctoral student in the University of Michigan's physics department who participated in the work.
Any 7th graders out there want to point out the wrong physics in that statement?
Is there really no way that the article could be correct on this?
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Not sure how to respond because I don't know what you mean. I know the difference between gigabit and gigabyte, but I'm not sure how it relates to my concerns.
Are you concerned that I mentioned the 4GB address limit and want to point out that 16Gb is less than 4 GB? I realize that, and also realise that multiple chips are often used together, and that his computer already had RAM in needed for running his web browser, etc. TFA was about these chips replacing hard drives, so staying on-topic those are two reasons why RAM is not a viable alternative.
The OP stated he would use them for swap. This could have been a joke because flash does not do well in an extensive rewriting environment like swap, or he could have been serious because swap is one area that would see a lot of benefit from fast random I/O.
The grandparent responded to this that he'd rather just use RAM. Now, you could thing he was arguing for using a "ramdisk" for swap (which is faster still, and doesn't suffer the re-write issues of flash), and my "data is lost when power is lost" is something of a non-issue in that use. Or he could have ben cracking a joke about using a RAMdisk for swap, the place you put stuff when you run out of RAM (ie its just a wacky idea, though some bad memory models made this a good idea in the past).
Of course, TFA is also kind of silly because flash chips have long been used as a substitute for hard drives in systems. The Pix 515 is a BX based 166Mhz PC with its OS on a flash chip, just as an example, not to mention just about every PDA I've owned over the last 5 years. But its a press release you you sort of expect that.
You are in a maze of twisted little posts, all alike.
You're making the same mistake most people do. Flash drives are only going to be as fast as the MFR's implementation of the USB interface. Just as external hard disks are far faster than that bus (firewire or USB) permits. Toshiba's current generation, for instance, MLC NAND chips are rated at 108/45 MB per second. But you'll need a proper interface, which a USB device chain is not.
Platform advocacy is like choosing a favorite severely developmentally disabled child.
Hard drives also are depend on moving parts which make them less accident resistant, give them a 'number of start/stop cycles' issue. They use magentic storage (data will fade out after long periods of time). I'd trust NAND memory in a laptop more than a hard drive anyday. I don't trust technology. I would buy a new hard drive every 5-6 years to replace an old one that could be working perfectly fine. (Usually means I get a lot more storage too, but that's coincidence)
Flash-based drives aren't even up to UDMA66 speed yet. For notebooks, my 60G Hitachi 7200rpm drive will be faster than flash in every situation.
At 16Gb (i.e., 2GB) per chip, a 60GB Flash "drive" would have to contain 30 of these chips, which could presumably be arranged in something like a RAID-0 striped array. So the question becomes... are those Flash I/O rates within a factor of thirty of UDMA66 speed yet?
David Gould
main(i){putchar(340056100>>(i-1)*5&31|!!(i<6)<< 6)&&main(++i);}