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."

Comments

Seek Time & Reduced Heat

[eldavojohn]

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.

Re:Seek Time & Reduced Heat

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

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.

Re:Seek Time & Reduced Heat

[ms139us]

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.

Re:Seek Time & Reduced Heat

[dgatwood]

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.

Samsung Announces Solid State Laptop?

[tddoog]

It is about time.

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

Strange...

[GillBates0]

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.

Re:DIY clone?

[silas_moeckel]

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.

Re:DIY clone?

[harrkev]

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.

You're Right, I'm an Idiot

[eldavojohn]

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.