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32 GB Flash Storage Drive Announced

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the laptop-that-could-survive-for-more-than-30-mins dept.

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.

4 of 381 comments (clear)

  1. What about the limited number of writes? by jay2003 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I have the understanding that flash memory has a finite number of writes and that conventional filesystems with their update of metadata even on file read could essentially wear out a flash drive quickly if it was used as the main disk drive (as opposed to digital camera use or the like where access is comparably infrequent)

  2. I'd buy it by Eightyford · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I'd buy it. All that is needed is a wireless link to a network attatched file server. 32 GB holds a lot of non-multimedia files.

    --
    Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
  3. Re:Data Integrity by nbert · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Just make sure your filesystem rarely does or needs defragging, and does not log every read.
    On a flash drive it's not really important into how many segments a file is split or where they are located since there's no head spinning back and forth. So there's only a problem if your fs does defraging automatically, but it's quite easy to switch this off (at least for developers)
    Guess we have to reconsider some habits we've got accustomed to if traditional hds are replaced.
    --
    I don't read replies by ACs.
  4. flash wear-out by soundofthemoon · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Flash memory cells will indeed wear out after some number of writes. This number is typically pretty high, on the order of a million writes. For most file operations that will probably be a higher MTBF than a magnetic disk with moving parts. Any significant problem would be with hot spots, like VM backing store and file system tables. However you can level wear by using cells in a something like a round-robin fashion. Remember that contiguity isn't an issue with flash because there is no seek time waiting for the head to move. There will probably be some challenges in balancing wear leveling against optimizing file system and VM performance, but in the long run flash drives will likely be much faster and more reliable than magnetic disks.