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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.
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.
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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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.
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.
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?
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.