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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!
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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?
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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...
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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and with the speed increase not see a difference. I have wanted this since my first 286.
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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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?
hm. Where I come from the future seems to be always 5 years in the future. ;-/
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)
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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.
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Does fragmentation matter when there are no heads to move?
Some filesystems (ie Reiser4) move or consolidate files (aka "defrag") in the background , and don't know what kind of block device they're on. You'd want to tell it not to do bother doing that then. Except the kernel/ATA interface still reads and writes by the block, but a block in some filesystems (Reiser4) may contain parts of several files, so you'd want to eventually consolidate files so you don't have to read/write a whole lot of blocks to access a single file which might be smaller than a block.
A worst case scenario would be a filesystem similar to Reiser4 with consolidation turned off, and lots of files growing by small amounts frequently.
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.
Perhaps someone could invent a file system that fits better with the new hardware. Filesystems today are designed for disc access -- tomorrow's hardware requires tomorrow's software. And I bet Reiser will be on top of that too! :-)
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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.
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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.
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The problem is that you want an apples-to-apples comparison of apples and oranges. The primary reason for hard drive failure is failure of the mechanical moving parts. The primary reason for flash drive failure is destroying a cell by writing to it too many times. Also, your statement about it being "trivially obvious that defragging any kind of drive reduces its lifespan" isn't quite as trivially obvious as you think. A hard drive will almost certainly suffer a mechanical failure long before it's gone through its allotment of spare blocks. On a flash drive that's written to a lot, bad blocks cropping up will probably be the first thing to go wrong.
If you buy a flash drive, fill it with data, and then never write to it again, you can read all you want and it's minimum MTBF will be ~10 years (AFAIK, there's no reason they couldn't last longer, it's just that more testing needs to be done to prove that they will last longer).
Another problem in comparing hard drives and flash drives is based on what kind of environment they're subjected to. Flash drives are usually portable devices that live in pockets, and are subject to static shocks and being plugged/unplugged on a regular basis. hard drives for the most part live in computers where they're protected from the elements and aren't often disconnected, especially not with the power on. In your case, I'd be willing to bet that your flash drives are dying from a failure in the onboard controller (rather than individual cells dying). It might be interesting to purchase a small USB hard drive and compare how long it lasts when subjected to the same environment as your flash drives.
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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.
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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.
Can you provide the link for the Economist article. This is an area of interest for me.k .html
My own research shows the opposite is happening. Flash is charging hard after disk and the rate it is catching up is accelerating.
http://www.mattscomputertrends.com/flashvsharddis
I am due to update this years figures but a quick analysis shows the trend is continuing.
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.
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>> 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