32 GB Flash Storage Drive Announced

Audrius writes to tell us TG Daily is reporting that Samsung has just announced a new 32 GB Flash storage device. The aim of this new solid state disk (SSD) drive is to completely replace the traditional hard drives in many laptops on the market. Some of the advantages offered are the 1.8" form factor, read speeds more than twice that of a normal hard drive, and the promise of 95% less power use.

Comments

Not the biggest power eater

[Dwedit]

During heavy disk read activity, the HD is only uses 15% of all the power. (source) The real key to decreasing laptop power consumption is dimming the screen, which can reduce power consumption percentage from 26% down to 7%.

Re:Current drives only up to 80GB?

[joeygb]

The author is talking about 1.8" hard drives like what is used in the iPod. I don't know about you but I have seen Apple selling any 400gb iPods yet...

Re:What about the limited number of writes?

[kebes]

This is certainly a valid worry. As I understand it, however, modern flash memories have more or less dealt with this problem, because:
(1) The number of rewrites is now quite large (hundreds of thousands?)
(2) The writing-to-disk software/hardware implements "load balancing." If you rewrite the same file 1000 times, it won't use the same exact block on the flash disk for each of those writes. Instead it will move from block to block with various writes/deletes/modify actions. This, coupled with some "slack" (the actual disk size is a little bit bigger than the "useable" disk size) allows for the wear to be distributed over the whole device.
(3) The system uses conventional error-correction and flagging of bad blocks.

As another poster pointed out, magnetic hard disks also have a limited number of rewrite cycles. But in practical terms we usually don't reach this limit. For critical applications I imagine you'd use a RAID of flash disks just like a RAID of magnetic drives.

Re:Technology currently in use already

[vidarh]

I very much doubt they use flash based SSD's for performance enhancements.

Most large scale systems that use SSD's to increase DB performance do so using DRAM (mainly) or SRAM based units with battery backup, RAM based RAID and controllers that dump the data to disk either on an ongoing basis or in the case of a power failure (using battery power to keep things up at least long enough to write a consistent snapshot to disk).

The units are ridiculously expensive, but far faster than anything you'd manage to get with flash or harddisks (typically they're maxing out the controller/bus you connect to them via).

Re:Interesting ....

[gstoddart]

Those are real hard drives, with flash memory interfaces. Good try though, and $6400 probably is too high anyway (4 GB CF flash cards can be found for approximately $300).

Hmmm ... are you sure about that? They call it a Solid State Disk and say it's based on NAND Flash memory.

The article certainly sounds like it's not using any spinning-platter/read-write heads technology -- that would not really be solid-state. That seems to be how it uses less energy and makes no noise.

To me, this doesn't sound like a "hard drive", but a big whack of Flash memory which is treated like a hard-drive.

The $6400 figure comes from the article:

One of the few 32 GB Flash disks on the market is currently sold by Silicon Systems: The device comes in a PCMCIA form-factor and is priced around $6400.

So, it's not like the posted pulled the number out of thin air.

If it's got no moving parts, it's not what we would traditionally call a hard-drive.