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Samsung Announces Solid State Laptop

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the hug-him-and-squish-him-and-call-him-george dept.

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."

21 of 114 comments (clear)

  1. Seek Time & Reduced Heat by eldavojohn · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Seek time for a 5400 laptop hard disk: ~ 12ms
    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?
    Everything you wanted from a laptop: faster boot times, quicker storage access, less noise, longer battery life...
    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.
    1. Re:Seek Time & Reduced Heat by TheGreek · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Seek time for a 5400 laptop hard disk: ~ 12ms
      Seek time for a 7200 laptop hard disk: ~ 10ms
      Seek time for solid state hard disk: < 0.1ms

      Number of rewrites on solid state storage: ~1 million.
      Number of rewrites on a laptop hard disk: Until the drive mechanism dies.

      Hope you don't do a lot of swapping on your solid state flash hard drive.

    2. Re:Seek Time & Reduced Heat by RedDirt · · Score: 2, Informative

      Methinks the SSD in the title of that drive means something other than Solid State Disk. If you do a froogle search for the model number, none of the other resellers include that feature and they're all in the same neighborhood pricewise.

      --
      James
    3. Re:Seek Time & Reduced Heat by CastrTroy · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I think that 1 million writes could last you quite a while, providing you got rid of some extra unnecessary writes. Get rid of swap and just have 1 Gig of RAM. That should be enough for most of today's applications. It's not a database server, it's a laptop. Since it's solid state, there's no need to defrag and move files around. Maybe make the drive smart so that if the bit doesn't have to change, then it won't "write" to it. I think that this would work for a lot of people. Most people I know aren't that tough on their hard drives. Besides, with people changing computers every couple years, I don't think that the 1 million write limit will cause that many problems.

      --

      Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
    4. Re:Seek Time & Reduced Heat by Whiney+Mac+Fanboy · · Score: 5, Interesting
      Number of rewrites on solid state storage: ~1 million.
      Number of rewrites on a laptop hard disk: Until the drive mechanism dies.

      Stick some dram cache on your ssd drive & it's likely to outlast a typical hdd:
      With usage patterns of writing gigabytes per day, each flash-based SSD should last hundreds of years, depending on capacity. If it has a DRAM cache, it'll last even longer.
      --
      There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
    5. Re:Seek Time & Reduced Heat by dextromulous · · Score: 2, Informative
      That's what a solid state drive is - lots and lots of ram, plus a battery. The end.
      You're right, that is a type of solid state drive. However, I believe an RTA is in order here... it's actually in the title of the page: "Samsung Q30-SSD Flash Solid State Laptop"
      Stop with the dumb assumptions and think.
      :-)
      --
      There are two types of people in the world: those who divide people into two types and those who don't.
    6. Re:Seek Time & Reduced Heat by ms139us · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Number of rewrites on solid state storage: ~1 million.
      Number of rewrites on a laptop hard disk: Until the drive mechanism dies.

      Hope you don't do a lot of swapping on your solid state flash hard drive.

      Why does this myth refuse to die? These do "wear leveling" which moves the writes around the flash and means that you would need to write the whole drive one million times.

      Let's do some math. One million writes of 32 GB equals 32,000,000 GB, or 32 PB.

      Suppose you average 10 MB/s of writes the whole time your laptop is in use (good luck pulling that off). You would have 3.2 billion seconds of use, or 101 years of continued use.

      Let's see a hard drive take that kind of pounding.

    7. Re:Seek Time & Reduced Heat by dgatwood · · Score: 4, Informative
      Wear leveling on aggregate devices like a flash hard drive is of very limited effectiveness without operating system intervention. To understand why, you must understand how wear leveling works. The basic premise is that the chip carries a certain amount of extra storage---say 25%. Each time a block is written, that block is mapped to one of these unmapped blocks and its previous allocation unit is freed for future use.

      There are two major flaws in such a mechanism. The first flaw is that it assumes that you can spread the load evenly among these spares. This varies from manufacturer to manufacturer. We will assume that the flash is made by someone whose algorithm is good. The second flaw is that, AFAIK, generally speaking, existing blocks are not remapped unless they are actually being written. The reason for this is that flash writes are relatively slow. To illustrate why this is a problem, it is necessary to give a fairly concrete example.

      Assume that you have a flash device that is full (so that every logical block is mapped to a physical block). Assume that the vendor left an extra 25% overhead for wear leveling. If you rewrite random portions of the disk, there will be significant improvement in longevity, as each block is only rewritten 4/5ths as often. However, if you rewrite the same single block, you only have to wear out the 25% overhead plus one block. Assuming a 32GB disk, that's one million writes times 8GB + 1 block. (I won't speculate on the block size.)

      But it's worse than that. You probably don't have a single 32GB flash part. It's probably a bunch of flash parts that are, at most, a gig or two, and in all likelihood, smaller. If each part is only 512MB, you can create a catastrophic failure of that part (effectively preventing any further writes to the part) with only one million writes times 128MB (a fourth of 512MB) + one block. Thus, even if you randomly use all the blocks on a single flash part and ignore all the others (which is typical usage for the first part of the disk, assuming the consecutive flash parts are mapped linearly), that takes the time down from 101 years to less than 2 years. If you do the "repeatedly write one block" technique, that reduces it from a couple of years to under 5 months.

      Now all of these problems are, to some extent, solvable, but they would require a cross-chip wear leveling mechanism, coupled with OS intervention (or a relatively smart on-disk controller) to periodically remap random blocks without modification. I'd be surprised if either of these was being done.

      In theory, wear leveling makes flash a reasonable alternative to a hard drive. In practice, flash needs to be at least an order of magnitude (and preferably two orders) more reliable before I would ever trust it with anything more than photos in a digital camera... and even for photos in a digital camera, I carefully limit the number of times I will reuse a flash card to ensure that I never run into these sorts of problems.

      --

      Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.

  2. Disk Space by Kraegar · · Score: 2, Informative
    The fine summary forgot the important aspect of these laptops, the disk space. From the article: "32-Gigabyte (GB) NAND flash-based solid state disk (SSD)".

    So 32gb of total storage. Not too bad, really.

  3. Samsung Announces Solid State Laptop? by tddoog · · Score: 5, Funny
    It is about time.

    I was getting tired of replacing the vacuum tubes in my current laptop.

    1. Re:Samsung Announces Solid State Laptop? by tddoog · · Score: 2, Funny
      Apparently I beat this guy to it by less than a minute.

      I get +5 funny he gets +1 offtopic. c'est la vie.

  4. Finally... by MadRocketScientist · · Score: 2, Funny

    ...I was getting tired of replacing the vacuum tubes in my old model.

    1. Re:Finally... by Golias · · Score: 2, Funny

      PS Thanks for not being a pedantic twat about my typo, was a refreshing change...

      From the way I'm usually a pedantic twat about your typos? I don't remember doing anything like...

      Hey, wait a minute!!! If I've done things I don't remember doing, that means either I'm slightly forgetful, or, far more likely, I will eventually learn to TRAVEL THROUGH TIME!

      Sorry for the fact that I have been / will be a pedantic twat sometime in my future (which is actually the past.) I'm going to be / was out of line. Perhaps I can / did make it up to you by letting you see the pyramids being built or something cool like that.

      --

      Information wants to be anthropomorphized.

  5. Celeron M? by gibbonformayor · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

  6. Drive capacity? by Jeff+DeMaagd · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

  7. Strange... by GillBates0 · · Score: 5, Funny
    Everything you wanted from a laptop: faster boot times, quicker storage access, less noise, longer battery life

    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
  8. Durability? by cronot · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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?

  9. Re:DIY clone? by silas_moeckel · · Score: 3, Informative

    It's quite easy you just hook up a compact flash card to an adapter. You can use any old compact flash and adapters from places like http://www.acscontrol.com/Index_ACS.asp?Page=/Page s/Products/CompactFlash/IDE_To_CF_Adapter.htm
      No extra power required and it fits in a 2.5 inch drive bay.

    --
    No sir I dont like it.
  10. Re:DIY clone? by harrkev · · Score: 3, Informative

    Easy. You can get solid-state 2.5" disc drives. http://www.simpletech.com/oem/ideflashdrive/index. php for one. Remove old hard drive, install new one. Install OS of choice. DISABLE VIRTUAL MEMORY. Done.

    Of course, if you have to ask, you can't afford it.

    --
    "-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
  11. You're Right, I'm an Idiot by eldavojohn · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.
  12. Thank goodness by metamatic · · Score: 2, Funny

    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