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Samsung Announces Solid State Laptop
An anonymous reader writes "Samsung has announced they'll be manufacturing solid-state laptops, with an eye for a June release in Korea. Everything you wanted from a laptop: faster boot times, quicker storage access, less noise, longer battery life. Laptop Logic has the story." From the article: "Now to the features of this laptop: Celeron M 1.2GHz, 12.1-inch screen, 512MB DDR2, Wireless LAN 802.11b/g, Digital Multimedia Broadcasting TV, and measuring 2.5 pounds. Price? $3,700 and only available in Korea in June."
Seek time for a 7200 laptop hard disk: ~ 10ms
Seek time for solid state hard disk: < 0.1ms
They're at least a hundred (if not thousand) times faster and on sale for $160 USD for 32GB size of it. Now, why is the laptop so damned expensive? You also forgot to say "less heat." Which is my biggest concern with the lifetime of my laptop and my sperm count.
My work here is dung.
So 32gb of total storage. Not too bad, really.
I was getting tired of replacing the vacuum tubes in my current laptop.
...I was getting tired of replacing the vacuum tubes in my old model.
I remember when I bought my Celeron M laptop and was dismayed to find that the only difference between a Celeron M and a Pentium M was cache size and the fact that the Celeron CAN'T CLOCK ITSELF DOWN to SAVE POWER. If you're shooting for lower power consumption among other things, shouldn't they use the Pentium M? In the same vein, higher on-die cache means fewer RAM accesses which means LOWER POWER CONSUMPTION. This in combination with eldavojohn's point seem to indicate they didn't *quite* think this thing through...maybe.
Sadly, the article exerpt skirts the question of drive capacity, normally people don't skip that part, but for this, they have reason to. It appears to be 32GB, which is about the capacity of my four year old notebook but the drive, if sold by itself, probably would cost a couple thousand dollars, meanwhile a 160GB mechanical notebook drive costs about $250.
If you have a lot of money and don't use much space, then I suppose it is a fine option. It probably would go well in the more rugged of the Toughbook series.
The fact that the two of you came up with the same joke at the same moment scares me.... offtopic mods? please?
I am full of goo... black evil goo
Those are the things I've always wanted in women too.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
*Device not RAD hardened. Device may lose data when subjected to EMPs occurring both naturally and manmade. Do not rest device upon Tesla coil. Do not rest device upon Jacob's ladder circuitry. Avoid use in nuclear fallout. See manual for other precautions.
I wonder, how much trouble is it to make something like this on your own?
I know that some laptops have flash-card slots, and in others you can plug in a PC-Card reader for a flash storage device.
How feasable (and how expensive) would it be to arrange a hard-disk-less machine that boots off an "internal" (not USB) flash device, using off the shelf products?
TFA says the solid-state harddisks are more durable than conventional laptop harddisk. Is it? I thought that Flash RAM wear was one of the main reasons things like that haven't been done before... Have the technology evolved? The write-count is higher now?
only old people will use hard drives on their laptops.
turn off your pagefile / swap partition and it should last a while. otherwise, i wouldn't give it more than a year.
"Celeron M 1.2GHz, 12.1-inch screen, 512MB DDR2, Wireless LAN 802.11b/g, Digital Multimeida Broadcasting TV, 32GB storage, 2.5 pounds.
Price? $3,700 and only available in Korea in June."
There's a 20-30 gram difference in weight beetween the solid state storage and a HDD, I'm not seeing any numbers on improvement to battery life in TFA, but HDDs aren't the biggest drain on battery life anyway.
This laptop costs around $2500 more than it would if it had a HDD in it. I can't imagine who'll pay $2500 extra so they can use their laptop in libraries which don't tolerate the faint background noise of a HDD.
I'm looking forward to solid state laptops, but all this shows is that it's still too early.
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
run Linux?
Everything you wanted from a laptop: faster boot times, quicker storage access, less noise, longer battery life
They look more like requirements women would have for, um, "devices" other than laptops.
I wonder how long before the drive wear itself down to an unusable size? Especially with an normal WinXP installation. I've heard that the Embedded XP has a special write delaying mechanism that bunches together disk writes to minimize wear? Anyone know if that's true or not?
btw I'm interested in putting Linux onto a CF flash disk, they're dirt cheap on ebay nowadays and with a ATA to CF adapter I could have fun expermenting with SS storage. Apart from not using a journalling FS like ext3 anyone have experiance/advice on how to minimize write wearing?
Yeah, that was a quick google search for 32GB SSD and that was the only returned link.
After doing more thorough researching, I found expensive 32GB SSDs but also 16GB SSDs at around $600 here & here. I know that size is not always directly related to price but I guess the release of this laptop with 32GB means they've found cheaper ways to produce the 32GB versions.
The $3k price tag is probably pretty reasonable considering that two drives equating to the same size would run around $1,200. Heck, after thinking about the number of writes to the disk they're good for, it might benefit you to have your OS and apps on a drive apart from your userspace drive (a la Unix security layout).
Again, I apologize for not researching my link in the original post and for wasting your time. I only hope the discussion isn't waylayed by people pointing out my ignorance.
My work here is dung.
All those who said that it is not a solid state drive are correct, it is just a standard 5400RPM hard drive. SSD is the company that manufactured the drive for IBM (as opposed to IBM/Toshiba/Hitachi/Fujitsu/Moraga/etc...).
Ahem:
/.
1. I, for one, welcome our new solid-state Overlords.
2. Yes, but how well does it run Linux?
3. Yes, but how well does it run World of Warcraft?
Please resume the normal, high-signal discussion.
Oh wait, this is
I've owned a computer or two for several years. I've only had 2 drives fail. Obviously I know everything there is to know about computers and hard drive failures.
What a dipshit.
Can we say ruggedized application?
Solid state laptops would do well out in the field since lack of moving parts would potentially help increase their durability when (not if) dropped. The price is probably comparable to existing ruggedized laptops on the market already.
$ man woman *
-bash:
You forgot:
4. Imagine a beowulf cluster of these.
--Not to be worried, Pitr fix.
Still 2.5 pounds? and only 25 - 50% faster booting Windows? Anyways, its a step in the right direction and I applaud any attempt to bring solid state into mainstream. But at $3700 for a celeron based laptop with 32gb storage, there is a long way to go before I will want one.
Funny though is that they show Windows Vista installed.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Even 2GB should be enough to keep your root filesystems and the programs you use frequently, so you can get the fast booting and low hard-disk usage, and even without load-leveling drivers you can still run read-mostly apps without worrying about write-cycle limits. If you can use a compressed disk format for part of your space, it'll let you do a lot more (compare with Knoppix on a 700 MB CDROM.) That's not hard with Linux, though with Windows you'd probably either need to use two separate drive letters unless you can get NTFS to run on the flash drive.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Those liquid state laptops keep dripping on my pants.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
....dickhead
That is to say, "user replaceable". Knowing Samsung, it will be. My TV (DLP bulb) and printers (toner refills) are wonderfully designed to be user maintainable.
I'd prefer NiMH batteries to LiON, but if possible, I'd like the choice of which to put into the machine. Make a removable battery pack accessory that will accept NiMH batteries (AAA's would be nice, but even C's could work for me). I could use the LiON for when I needed absolute best portability, and the NiMH all other times.
32GB would run a simple working Linux distro. I'd really like about 60GB.
Ok, so you can get to the first bit of data quickly, how long does the flash drive take to stream out bits 1 through 524287 ? Last I checked spinning bits under a read head was actually winning that statistic.
Start Running Better Polls
These should end that scary grinding sound when I rotate my laptop when the hard drive is being used.
The fastest spinning notebook drive consumes a maximum of 2.5W. The lowest powered notebook CPU is 6W, but the T series Core Duo currently consumes up to 31W. I think from that information, it should be obvious where to put the heat minimization effort, i.e. you don't worry about the heat of the smallest item when the biggest consumer is more than 10x that.
>> [...] longer battery life
:-)
> Those are the things I've always wanted in women too.
GillBates0, truly you are a Slashdot icon
What if you just mirror two standard 32GB parts? Isn't that what RAID is for? So what if the MTBF is 10% of a regular drive...keep a fresh one in your laptop bag and you're good to go.
Hey Doofus,
That's not a solid-state harddisk....
If a 32GB flash disk exists, it will probably cost more like $1600 than $160.
Every companies IT department would be buying only solid-state laptops if the cost of the solid-state disk was trivial.