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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."

5 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 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.
    2. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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