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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.
I could see this having a pretty big impact on digital video cameras, too. No moving parts to break while you're running around with a handheld. Very cool!
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
This will only work if they can get the prices of flash down.
$50.00~70.00 per gb is still nothing in comparison to $0.40~$0.80 you can get on hard drives.
Will this still be useful for critical applications? What's the current failure rate of flash memory?
Those who know, do not speak. Those who speak, do not know. ~Lao Tzu
It seems like a nice way to go (solid state). I wonder what the life of a unit like this would be. Flash drives might be droppable, but what else can kill them? Somehow I feel better imagining that my stuff is magnetically etched into a platter... I guess I'm just old...
the future is now....
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)
and the promise of 95% less power use
In my experience, promised things usually fall flat on their face. Microsoft springs immediately to mind.
And hopefully, Flash drives will replace the current magnetic platter ones. It's kind of odd for one of the most important devices in a computer to be the only moving one (And therefore the most susceptible to damage, especially in laptops).
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
a 128 GB at an affordable price. I'm already near capacity on my 80 GB HD as it is...
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
These flash drives still have very low rotational speeds. I'd wait a few years until they get them spinning a little faster.
If you RTFA you would see the target price is $750 and $1000 ... $6400 is the price of current flash hard drives in that size range.
I had one of these years ago.
Ohhh, G i g a b y t e s - thougt it said megaby...
I believe he was probably talking about the upper range of commonly available laptop form-factor drives.
Whats "Multiple Times"?!?!!?
Like 600? Or 600,000,000? If it were the later I don't think there is any reason for your post.
...but still too expensive for the common user. $750-1000 for 32 GB...I think not. And while the performance numbers they quoted are better than the average laptop sized HDD and about on-par with desktop dized ones, 57/32 MB/s still isn't even saturating the bandwidth of modern hard disk interfaces.
When are we going to see flash type drives that are cheap AND super fast? After all, secondary storage is perhaps the only remaining perfomance bottleneck in computers these days (well, that and crappy ISPs that don't/can't give you more than a few mips up and a little more down, but I digress.)
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%.
This technology has already been put to use in a commercial environment, and has given outstanding performance from what I've seen. The game EVE Online http://www.eve-online.com/ has already done this with their clustered servers and greatly reduced the lag. Keep in mind that this is a game where there is only a single universe (No shards or other servers) and they quite often push over 20,000 simultaneously logged in accounts at a time.
When placed in the right environment, this technology just screams. A good example would be for huge database operations that have hundreds if not thousands of concurrent accesses. The databases that maintain the pay information for the US Military come to mind easily.
Someone had posted this on another flash drive story here but it basically went that if you reserved 10% or so of the drive simply to keep rotating blocks it would last as long as a hard disk, more or less.
~S
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...
It estimated to cost$700 - $1000. While this may seem like a lot, for something new, this isn't. I remember reading how much a hardrive would have cost for an old IIGS that had maybe 8 disks worth of storage space I think. And although expensive, $700 isn't expensive enough to be out of the reach for consumers. Just expensive enough to be out of the reach for most sane typical consumers.
In undeveloped countries, the consumer controls the market. In capitalist America, the market controls you.
Price point on the 32gb drive is expected to be $750-$1000. The $6400 product is a currently available military grade drive. It'll take a wee bit more abuse and temperature range then the 'cheapest bidder' built one that will hit the commecial market.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
and with the speed increase not see a difference. I have wanted this since my first 286.
Gizmos Gagets For Ninjas
Only price is the barrier now for the slllloooooooowest parts of a computer.
Most flash can handle something like 100,000 erase cycles. And most flash file systems have wear-leveling algorithms to ensure you're not hitting the same sectors over and over. Even with standard usage they should be good for several years at the very least.
These wont burn the palm of me with my 7200 RPM 100GB drive I have in here at present. Problem I worry about is reweite lifetime. We wont have to defrag would we as the read time from any location is constant from any memory address, correct? Its a great step however I can see HYBRID drives being big news rather than 100% SSD except on "web tablets comebacks" and Viao type devices. For the power munchers here with Ferrari's Hybrids would be welcome.
They ought to put the number 14967401 in the dictionary definition of 'tanking'. I certainly hope you won't be here all week :-)
Ouch- keep in mind that my 6 megapixel camera, if available a few years ago, would have cost more than some cars....
Volume production will bring prices down. Remember the $2000 component CD burners in the late 90s?
I can't wait until I can afford all these GBs of flash tastiness!!!!
And All I Ask is a Tall Ship And a Star to Steer Her By
The device you link to has only 2.5" and 3.5" form factors available. This device fits in a 1.8" form factor. Nice try, though. I can see why you post as an AC.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I'm trying to close on buying a house! And Samsung, Apple's iPod Nano flash supplier comes out with this?
APPLE, please PLEASE do not come out with an Intel Mac portable featuring a flash drive (with its tasty power consumption, lower power and low low low seek times) after I clean out my savings! I would have been exceptionally happy to have a PowerPC flash computer a year ago or 6 months ago, or even maybe 3 months ago, but I'm cleaning out my savings here for the part of a house that the bank won't cover!
Wait 6-12 months for a flash based portable and I'll forgive you for going to Intel.
$1000 == Ouch. Definatly a high end laptop feature. That's more than many people pay for their whole laptop.
I read the internet for the articles.
RTFA- their write speed is reasonable (at about half that of current hard drives, supposedly, though see below for questions about this) and on a 32GB drive with a reasonable usage pattern- well, how often do you reformat an entire drive? With over a million writes on modern flash memory, it's going to take you a while to use up all the writes this drive has.
And now for that questionable bit, from the article: While the SSD's capacity of 32 GB cannot compete with traditional hard drives that currently offers up to 80 GB space,
I don't know abut you, but I've seen hard drives in this price range offering up to 500GB and one USB/Ethernet external that offers 1TB at less than 2x the price. Which throws the write speed into question- if 80GB drives are considered their max.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Flash memory has a write endurance limit. This limit is the number of times the flash memory cell can be written until it can not be restored to its initial condition. The industry refers to this as the erase cycles. The endurance is rated between 10,000 and 100,000 erase cycles for different types flash memories.
Please stop APK.. you're only hurting yourself.
I'm reminded of Star Trek. We all know that Star Trek is the way of the future. Talk about beating a dead horse. But this story made me think back on the episode where Cmdr. Data is swapping all of those USB flash drives into a different order to overcome some technical problem. USB and Flash memory are therefor, conclusively, here to stay for good.
It will be nice to have the additional capacity on GPS devices and tablets used for aircraft navigation. Traditional HD's have trouble above 12,000 feet because the head's "wings" don't produce enough lift at lower pressure.
My question is how many write operations is it rated for? Others list 300,000 -- is that a lot or a little?
How about a "FlashBelt" which can take 10+ flash chips, a flat rechargeable battery, and Bluetooth for storage accessible by mobile phones and visited terminals? $100 32GB chips would be great, but even just forcing down the price of 10GB chips below $10 would make personal storage more "intimate".
--
make install -not war
Ruggedized applications.
Example: a mechanic using it to interface with a car's OBD port.
He's not going to be writing to the HD a while lot, but you know damned well that it's not going to be treated lightly. 32GB is pleanty large to put and OS and the diagnostic/tuning apps on.
Make that laptop low enough power to plug into a cigarette lighter and you got a nice tool.
Another example: Some geologist needs to take data off of some geophones in the middle of places with names like "Desolation Wilderness". A laptop with a longer battery life and a HD that is going to survive being in a backpack is going to make things alot easier. Hiking out 10 miles to the middle of nowhere isn't something that you want to have to re-do because something broke or you ran out of battery life.
I don't forsee anyone having one at the next LAN party. Though given the number of people with hilarious setups, it could happen. Afterall, who'd buy a 150GB HD that cost $350? (WD Raptor)
If you think education is expensive, you should try ignorance -- Derek Bok, president of Harvard
Which,the article adds, are considerably more robust (at least in terms of temperature ranges) than what Samsung is shooting for - which might be part of the price difference. On the other hand, if you just took 32 1 GB CF cards you would be paying around $1100, which makes their target price sound very reasonable (although far too expensive to be widely adopted I would think - I could see possibly paying double or even triple the price for the advantages, but not ten times as much for something of questionable utility for most people).
That's probably Taiwanese dollars, that's where the byline is.
0.0308676(Taiwan/US) * 6400(Taiwan) = 197.55264(US)
That's still $6.20 US/GB so still not very desirable, but if they can EoS down, and get the battery life trade off it may be worth it.
"There are no facts, only interpretations." --Friedrich Nietzsche.
While many of us have drives > 200 gb in our desktops, laptop drives are still (on average) around 60 / 80.
Defragging isn't relevant for a flash memory based device... you can have data spread all over the place, and it shouldn't affect your read/write speed like it does on a hard drive. The physical seek time of the head is what causes fragmentation on a hard drive to be a problem. No head, no problem.
MadCow.
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
I'm sorry, is this some kind of new feature I was unaware of?
You've seen 500 GB drives in the 1.8 inch form factor for the same price? Wow, we should talk. I've been looking to upgrade my PowerBook.
After all, I am strangely colored.
Does fragmentation matter when there are no heads to move?
Ah, that's what I missed- 1.8 inch form factor. Thank you. You're quite correct- I've seen it in 3.5" form factor, and drives up to 160GB in the 2.5" form factor that used to be the standard for laptops.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
They were referring to drives with the 1.8" form factor of the Samsung flash drive. The largest drive in this form factor I found in a quickie goole search was actually 60 GB, so 80 GB is probably reasonable. I'm not sure what 1.8" drives are used in - most notebook drives are 2.5" (and are significantly cheaper and offer much larger capacities).
From TFA:
So when idle, it consumes between 50% and 85% less power. Under load it consumes between 50% and 75% less. The only 95% I see is comparing the flash drive at idle to the hard drive at full seek.
Maybe the OP does statistical analysis for government projects...
Find environmentally and socially responsible products on http://buy-right.net
Given the 10k-100k endurance of the flash memory, even the act of booting up a machine with a main flash drive, or starting an application on it, is going to eat endurance cycles.
Worse if you runs Windows, where you can't even scratch yourself without causing a write to the registry. You'll find your 32GB drive shrinking over the months towards zilch.
Guess it's probably ok for portable use, where mechanical drives have a risk of sudden failure. And one can always buy a new flash drive and copy over the data when the old one gets too exhausted.
-- In the beginning was the WORD, and the WORD was UNSIGNED, and the main(){} was without form and void...
http://memory-chips.globalspec.com/LearnMore/Semic onductors/Memory_Chips/FLASH_Memory_Chips
Slightly out of date (claims 100k writes, while current generation flash gets around 300k, I think, but I couldn't find a cite for that quickly).
That should be more than adequate for a typical 2-3 year laptop lifespan.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
I would think the one advantage that Flash drives have over HDds is they're more environmentally friendly (if you don't count the huge packaging they're packed in at retail).
They are small and lighters and take less space (doesn't use as much fuel to ship), don't produce much heat, use less electricity, and I think there's probably less wasteful throwing out a little stick when its bad than an HDD.
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.
I can't figure out what you're claiming. Are you saying that flash has a longer MTBF as long as you don't defrag it. You appear to be saying that - in which case you're suggesting it has a worse MTBF than hard drives.
"The White House is not an intelligence-gathering agency," -- Scott McClellan, Whitehouse spokesman.
whoops.... s/have/haven't
I own a 2GB 1.8 inch drive- but I didn't catch the idea that they were comparing form factors. 1.8 inch drives are usually used in smaller-than-notebook devices- PDAs, MP3 players, and the like. It's also known as the Compact Flash form factor, because the first drives of this size were all Solid State (and the majority still are- though 32GB is a HUGE leap forward in this respect. I use my 2GB drive to store TV shows to watch on my train commute- I can fit about 10-12 hours worth at a low resolution, or 5 hours worth at the highest resolution my PDA will display- 320x240. In 32GB, I could fit around 80 hours worth.....about a week's worth of waking hours....
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
They were isolinear chips.
$1000 next year. .. getting VERY interesting here...
.25" x .375" x almost 0 thickness. That kinda blew me away.
$500 in two years.
$250 in three years.
$125 in four years
$63 in five years.
How I would design my laptop that used this...
1) put in multiple standard SD plugs.
2) have builtin copy function to backup card to another card.
Easy to upgrade as the ram gets larger and cheaper.
I thougth SD ram was small- but a guy at work got a memory card for his cell phone (something like 512mb to hold mp3's) that has an SD card ADAPTER that this teeny cell phone mp3 memory slides into. The darn thing is about
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Further than I thought- and I missed that this phrase was a comparison to laptop drives, as opposed to "traditional hard drives", which would be more like a 3.5" form factor.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
If I'm reading the lastest NAND spot prices correctly, it costs ~$20/gigabyte after the recent drop. That would put a 32gb drive at $640+cost of other components and assembly. I'd safely guess that we're actually talking about less than $500 for the drive when it hits the market.
I read an article in The Economist about Flash Drives vs. Hard Drives. The rate of expansion of them isn't closing much, if at all (meaning everytime Flash gets bigger, so does the HD), so it is hard to see it ever dominating. Although there are many other more current technologys (very much like how NAND is superior to NOR flash memory) which can hold much more information, which will likely become more mainstream in the near future.
The real future of mobile computing without worry for battery power is the laptop equivalent of a sunray. All the damn thing should have is a wireless card a 100mhz processor, a kick butt video card, and everything else should be on a big ass server in some airconditioned room somewhere. I imagine an apple newton looking thing.... or a compaq m300 without half the stuffing. Hauling a harddrive around is just asking for data loss and suffering. Particularly if the harddrive cost you 1000 dollars. When was the last time you brought your laptop somewhere that did not have wireless/wire? Excluding games and coach airplane rides.
I'm afraid I have to call FUD.
... ...
Directory of C:\WINDOWS\system32\config
09/03/2006 14:38 36,700,160 software
09/03/2006 14:38 262,144 SAM
09/03/2006 14:38 524,288 default
17/03/2006 11:12 27,525,120 system
ie the last write to the system hive was 4 days ago. Not quite within my definition of "streaming". And yes, the write times on these files are valid even though they're held open by Windows.
I have this episode on VHS, this is the one where Data gets to bone that hot security officer.
"I bow to no man" - Riddick
So, I see a lot of "But my hard drive stores 500 GB at a fraction of the price" comments. However, a flash drive can be yet another level of caching that sits between memory and the hard drive. The order of data access would then become L* cache, RAM, flash drive, hard drive. 32 GB is plenty of space to load the OS and run normal apps like a web browser, email client, etc. So, instead of writing a page/swap file out to the hard drive, one would be able to write it out to the flash drive instead. This would result in faster reads and not consume as much power (think laptops). Also, since it's persistent (unlike RAM) then you could have better computer boot times. Basically the mechanical hard drive becomes a type of nearline storage device that gets accessed later (and less often) in the pipeline. Does that make any sense? I often fell asleep in my OS class in college.
"Oh dear, she's stuck in an infinite loop and he's an idiot" -Prof. Farnsworth (Futurama)
It actually makes sense to have a wearable storage facility. We do have plenty of gizmos in our pockets, our bags, and some of us have them on our heads. Why not use your existing headset to play MP3s from your wearable storage? Dump a recording of that phonecall to disk. Record video, log biometric data, log your GPS data, Wi-Fi signals, timestamps, security tokens -- all of that. Why does each device need it's own flash? You could netboot them all.
While you're at it, I think that any device signifigantly large enough to handle sharing any kind of volume over Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, you might as well include USB-Master support, a couple of i2c interfaces for the thermistors and accelerometers, and probably support for extra batteries, and optionally a simple display format -- NTSC or simpler. I don't think it would signifigantly increase the package size to add those things, except for the connectors themselves. I'm assuming wearable as in wearable under-the-clothes and discrete wearable computing.
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
They no longer need to sell software. They sell a little hard drive with Windows (SU) installed. It plugs into the computer, it goes out, and configures itself to the system. So, you have a computer that boots faster. This would be your "boot device". Kind of cool, but I could see problems. Only MS could get to the drive, so other OSes have a harder-time in a multi-boot scenerio. Since your OS and your drive are one, you want to upgrade your computer? Nope! You need a new OS disk to put into a new computer. Sorry. Some cool stuff could happen from this development... but some very annoying things could crop up as well.
The article didn't mention shock and vibration resistance, but the flash is likely to be far more rugged than a rotating drive. Might have better temperature specs, too. Once we get flexible flat screen displays, I'll be able to drop my laptop without having a heart attack.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
Samsung announced these drives last year and said that they should be available by 8-05. I have been looking regularly to see when they are going to hit the market for close to a year now. I wish they would go ahead and release them or plan announcements a little better.
r essRelease.asp?seq=20050523_0000123980
If they could get the price down to near $10/GB I would buy one. I don't store mass amounts of audio or video on my laptop so a 16 or 32 GB would be fine for me. The decrease in power consumption and the increase in battery life could make the investment well worth the cost. I can currently get about 5.5 hours of battery life out of my laptop, if this could be increased to 7 or more from the reduced power consumption I would be all for it.
http://www.samsung.com/PressCenter/PressRelease/P
Using Mysql, 25,000,000 cache flushes (yes, 25 MILLION) were forced to disk with not one error! It took a few weeks of pounding the database with 1000 inserts and 1000 deletes at a time. By keeping the number of 'extents' constant, we observed the same inode referenced each write. The count of transactions was in the Billions, but we were only interested in the number of writes, which we watched using tools like vmstat. We averaged about 11 writes per second.
Each generation of FLASH memory seems to get better, and my personal confidence in FLASH for primary OS platforms is rock solid.
That test system has been on and off for several months now with the same FLASH, without changing or updating the OS, and still not a single read or write error reported by the system.
If I could have a 1.8 32GB flash drive I wouldn't need a laptop. I could just use handheld for anything that I would use a laptop for.
Try looking for a high speed high memory pen drive now and you'll spend close to $800 for an 8gb drive
I call BS. Not saying you're lieing, but rather Windows is giving you false information.
Try this. Try installing any program that writes to the registry (most if not all windows program does). After you've done this, try resizing windows in various shapes and configurations (this too is stored in registry). Give it about a minute at the most....now yank the power from the PC.
Turn the PC back on. You might notice the window framing is the same for the folder in which you resized. Also, you will not have to reinstall the application.
Life is not for the lazy.
So, solid state technology can now provide us with a storage device large enough to hold Office.
Open Source, too? Imagine the laptop manufacturers/assemblers, too. They could save on the need to install the obligatory hard drive.
..." ala the blank CD/DVD pricing/padding to combat music & movie "piracy"...
Now, if they could get virtual OS testing done on their hardware, they could reduce the size of or eliminate fans.
Then, if the LT mfrs don't need to ship a hard drive, the weight goes down, too. Then, the form factor can change a bit. That space can be filled with more peripherals, maybe a peripherals dock or insert, where *nuxs can be all-system on the 32 GB disk/stick and data on another removable block; *doze an be drive C:\ on the 32 GB disk/stick, and if there are complaints about vista gobbling up disk space, then that can be a punishment for ms and their bs disk-gobbling campaign. Drive D:\ can be, as in the case of the *nuxs, the data space.
Having the OS and the data forced to be separate due to physical size/memory/storage constraints of the media could be a GOOD thing. Devices can be made smaller, lighter, and less power-hungry. Even if the LCD IS taking some 25-35% of the battery power, having an OS with few writes to its own area, and having users become used to occasionally copying their data to offline storage might be an interesting change in the industry. Now, if the DVD spinning could be dispensed with by having an nutating or wide-scan optical reader... (burning could still need a motor, I suppose...)
Now, to keep ms from creating another anti-trust issue, this time over the access to and pricing of the blank disks... I could just see it now... (sycophantic, shrill ms lawyers and marketing) "We must deter piracy and illegal license us of disks product activation codes.
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
IT would be large enough for business.
Is windows is large and so is office, but thats 10G. The remainder is emails and docs, which don't take a lot of space.
Now, you add movies, mp3, games, etc . . . it won't be big enough.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Window sizing policy is entirely application-dependent. Windows itself does not record window size or position information at all. Applications are free to persist this information however they see fit. Personally, if I chose to use a registry value to persist this information, I would only update the value at program exit, and not at every window resize/position event. Anything else would be poor application behavior on my part.
Regardless, this is not a Windows OS problem and could happen on Mac OS X or Linux just the same. Just replace "registry" with "application configuration file" and you have a similar situation. The problem lies with poorly designed window metadata persistence, not OS-level policy.
how many times does wondiws write to the disk a day during normal use?
5,000 time wouldn't surprise me.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Depends on the version of Windows- but remember, that's a million writes PER BYTE. Turn off the virtual memory and most of what Windows does is reads. Also, even if you have the virtual memory on, a good flash chip controller will fragment the file (remember, fragmentation means NOTHING in terms of read/write speed on a SSD) to spread it across the disk- which means instead of 5000 writes, you get maybe one or two writes per byte.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Read time: Twice as much is worse.
From TFA:
My amazing wife - Artist, Author, Philosopher - Laurie M
I assume this drive is not one chip, but many? So samsung could break it into 4 separate parts and have a 4 drive raid 0 array in a single drive to increase read/write speeds.
I blame geof's speakers.
as oppose to the -200 to 10,000 feet limit on regular hdds
This Sig is removed due to factual inaccuracy
The article says nothing about seek time... Obviously, there is no seek time with a flash drive. Accessing memory is the same cost, regardless of the address being accessed. This presents a potentially massive performance improvement over traditional drives, transfer rate notwithstanding. To me, this is the big win.
If flash drives were more commonplace, it would revolutionize filesystem and database development. No longer would you have to care about sequential access, keeping blocks contiguous, etc. This would change everything. I'm amazed that you don't hear more about this.
some guy hardware hacked a powerbook, replacing the internal hard drive with a 32MB compact flash card. :)
:D
now to find someone who's done that with titanium powerbooks and larger flash cards
for a minute there, i lost myself...
Remember that technologies improve.The flash memory we have today that can take 100,000 writes might not be the flash memory of tomorrow.My first (real) hard drive was a 10gig maxtor that cost around 70.00.Think about the technological improvements and price per gig that we have seen in just the past five years.In another five years we might see (hopefully) just that kind of improvement in flash technology.
Crisis is the rule, not the exception.
Much of the stuff hitting the market today is old hat. Why... It was commissioned by the DoD many years back. What you're seeting today is the result of DoD (and others) requirements for a network centric environment. Many of the innovations you're seeing today is the R&D of the DoD years back. It's not new but it's been proven. Many companies who do DoD work ask that once the technology is well past innovative and no longer useful, they are able to market it to the public. What is available now is the remains of things no longer useable to the DoD. We, the public, are well behind the technology curve. Determining which company came up with the technology and will market it...is the choice...er...chance.
My main concern is whether there will be a heat issue or not. I regularly run Slax off of my thumb-drive and the heat the thing gives off after about 10 min is unbearable (but it makes a good handwarmer in the winter). If this is what I get from 1 gig, what can I expect from 32?
I'm afraid I have to call FUD.
Take a look at SysInternals tools, they have a tool to watch registry activity. Start it up and watch the lines of reads and writes quickly run off the screen. Lots and lots of activity ranging from steady activity to quick bulk bursts. You REALLY need to use the filter when using their registry watcher, because what you are interested in, will be drowned out by the flood of activity. Even when using the filter, depending on the application you are watching, there can be lots of activity.
I'm thinking that this activity is mostly confined to activity in RAM, with the registry cached and then changes are commited to disk perhaps at regular intervals and when someone logs out or shuts down. If your numbers are correct, then I can only assume that not every write to the registry is going to cause a timestamp update on the registry files themselves. Because the activity, including writes, was VERY high when I looked.
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
recording music would benefit from a faster write and read times of a flash drive.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
Give me a bootable NAND C drive built into my mobo damnit! I've been waiting for YEARS! 32 GB is great and all, but i don't need anything over 10GB.. anything over that is rewritable crap that I'd rather store magnetic.
Any fool can criticise, condemn, and complain, and most fools do. - Benjamin Franklin
http://www.bitmicro.com/ have 2.5-inch with sizes of 512 MB to 73.7 GB , but I read that samsung will be the first for the mass market. These solid state storage devices, with there faster access times,can be great for improving mail and database performace without out having to do any upgrades.
This behavior changed with Windows XP. The registry is now _only_ committed when an application asks Windows to commit, or on shutdown.
Most likely it will (and usually is) made on the low level of the drive electronics - sectors as in commands sent over the tape don't map to specific bits in specific chips but are dynamically assigned and rotated, so that FAT while still appearing to be in the same place as always for the OS and disk controller (on motherboard) in fact migrates thorough the physical drive memory being dynamically relocated by the drive logic to new areas, so that no single chip gets unfairly high number of writes leading to busting the memory. This is completely transparent to all the hardware and software outside the drive, except maybe for undelete utilities.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
It's not beyond the manufacturers to include multiple drives. Only a question of cost as I see it.
read speeds more than twice that of a normal hard drive
and FTA:
According to Samsung, the SSD will read and write data at 57 MB/s and 32 MB/s, respectively...
the Flash disk would be about twice as fast as the latest 1.8" hard drive generation, which was measured at a read speed of 24 MB/s by the engineers of Tom's Hardware.
57 MB/s is in the ballpark for the read speed of a 3,5" 7200 rpm drive like the Seagate Barracuda 7200.8.
Being used to RAM access times being mesaured in ns, this is rather underwhelming.
This drive should be an absolute success. Who cares about 2 x transfer, by itself ... the seek time is almost always more than time to transfer a large block of date. Plus, the time alone to rotate to the block's location is a huge amount also. At 5400 rpm, 1/2 of a rotation is 11ms, more than the time to transfer almost any block of data. The transfer speed is only good on hard drives when the head is positioned and the disk rotates into position--a 20-50% duty cycle. The flash drive can start transferring immediately and keep transferring--a huge win. Why can't Samsung tell us right now that this runs wickedly fast, or is their transfer rate really some effective speed accounting for the lack of seeks, otherwise we should be seeing 5x plus speeds. This is a trivial benchmark, but if they can make the specs without some odd adjustment this we should have a incredibly productive laptop in a lot of heavy disk based applications--it even would be able to go to sleep way faster. A large premium would be justified easier without any more hesitation for cost.
I find this especially interesting after Bill Gates mocked the $100 laptop for, among other things, "hav[ing] it be something without a disk...". Reading the specs of the laptop, it comes with 500Mb non-volatile RAM; so it does have persistant storage, it's just that storage comes in a different form to a hard drive.
Now Samsung are suggesting that other (all?) laptops "be something without a disk" - is Gates going to mock them too?
My, that was a yummy potato!
There are filesystems specifically developed for solid state storage, have a look at:
JFFS2 and YAFFS
They are being abandoned anyway since most flash drives have built in levelling system (this menans that almost any filesystem is ok).
OPIE, a linux distro for handhelds device, use JFFS2 for SecureDigital cards .
Like the conversation between the hair-dryer and the vacuum-cleaner:
Haidryer : You suck!
Vacuum-cleaner: You blow!
News about the Kettle Open Source project: on my blog
especially when you start reaching the write-cycle life of the FLASH. Hopefully it at least reallocates data and dynamically shrinks the size of the disk in a way that Operating Systems can understand. Most O/Ses expect the partition table to be constant, but if you start running out of cells and the disk starts shrinking, the partition will also have to shrink with it and the OS will need to be aware of that fact.
Well, I checked now and Windows (SYSTEM et al) has done about 300MB of writes in the last 14 hours. That's 300/32000 = ~1% of the space, which means it'll have written to the whole disk once every 1400 hours or once every two months. With a conservative 10000 writes lifespan that should last 1666 years. Even if I take all my apps, I'd be less than an order of magnitude away so 150 years+. Somehow I think this is a non-issue...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
have you ever checked the average person's work computer, most people never delete e-mails, docs, have pictures and music on there too, 32gb really isn't alot of room for most people, they've become accustom to having 160gb of space, they could care less that thier laptop has a 7 hour battery life and weighs only a pound and a half. It works in theory, but in practice it wouldn't hold up. now, as a pocket drive it would be great, i would love to have something that small with that much room, it could also be adopted to MP3 Players too, I jsut can't see it as a feasable replacement for a hard drive just yet, even in buisness markets, even budget laptops now have 60gb, I think thats really the magic number when it comes to bringing in a new tech for main storage (until programs get bigger and the pace of change increases yada yada etc.)
the real question is not price, the real question is, Will it run Linux?
I have files in /var/log that are modified at least 5000 times a day. That's only 200 days wth a million writes.
Granted, load balencing takes care of some of this, but I don't see how you could have any logging whatsoever on your laptop with a drive like this. And for those of us who use laptops for development, heavy logging is a necessity.
I'm not going to pay hundreds of dollars for a drive guarenteed to fail in a year.
I don't see the incentive for them to fix this either. Once you get on a fast, low power drive, you won't want to go back to spinning disks... even if they can run for years reading and writing without problems.
...But I digress. TREMBLE PUNY HUMANS!ONE DAY MY SPECIES WILL DESTROY YOU ALL!
>> I don't know about you but I haven't seen Apple selling any 400gb iPods yet...
:)
I know I'm being anal, but while Apple hasn't been selling 400gb iPods, they do sell 480 Gb (60 GB) iPods