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Flash Memory HDD for Notebooks Launched
ukhackster writes "Traditional magnetic hard drive platters could be on the way out, thanks to SanDisk's launch today of a hard drive based on flash memory chips. The device can store 32GB of data and is meant for notebooks . SanDisk claims that using flash chips means faster access and better reliability, so less danger of a serious system crash wiping out all your valuable data if you drop your laptop. The downside, though, is price. At an extra $600 dollars, are price-conscious consumers going to be interested?"
Hrmmmm..... just in time for Macworld? Oh please, oh please, oh please.....
I've written about this before in a number of places, but most recently here on my last trip to Argentina, but I am hoping that we will see a revised 12in Powerbook nee MacBook Pro (or smaller) in the next Macworld because I really do miss the smaller form factor. It would be tremendously useful for travelers and photographers as well as giving us better battery life.
I am currently using a 15in Powerbook that I traded up from when the 12in Powerbook was cancelled, but a smaller footprint would help tremendously with travel. With the 15in Powerbook/Macbook Pro, I love the illuminated keyboard and the performance, but would be willing to pay a premium to carry a smaller laptop, subnotebook or tablet running OS X. It does not even have to have an optical drive as I rip movies I purchase or rent to the hard drive for long airline flights and in fact, if we could get flash drives down a bit in price (or get a sweet deal on bulk purchases for the manufacturer), it would be possible to even get rid of the hard drive provided we could still pack 30-40 GBs of storage space in the device. Battery life would be improved and if you combine it with a 10in diagonal new technology LED display (or OLED), we may even be able to get away with seven or eight hours of honest full on battery life. So Steve, come on dude. We've talked about this before several times. The technology currently exists or is damn close and I am sure there is a market for such a device, so please, please, please.
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But price-conscious consumers won't be the initial market; it will be security conscious businesses that don't want to risk losing valuable data worth much than $600. They will buy enough of them for the price to move down the demand curve, and into the consumer market. Look for them to be standard issue in 3-5 years.
What was once true, is no longer so
By definition, a person who is "price conscious" will most likely not spring for the +$600 pricetag. The cost/GB is way too high. I see it being introduced just as any other technology - early adopters will get half-baked, Rev. A quality devices and pay a large premium for them. Once adoption becomes more widespread, prices will come down, and the "price conscious" (read: patient) folk will reap the benefits of the early adopters' beta testing.
" At an extra $600 dollars, are price-conscious consumers going to be interested?"
Economy of scale will ensure that it's not $600 for long.
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
Those things are ineffective , slow, power hungry,relative unreliable, etc. I wonder how they dis last so long.
Oh well, we are still using wheels in our cars so... maybe it's not so surprising after all.
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
When can we get flash memory for strippers? We're already paying out the ass to see their tits. I'd like to remember the experience a little longer.
Such a system is obviously not aimed at those for whom price is the main consideration. For those interested in performance, however, an extra $600 may well be worth it. I paid more than that to upgrade my laptop screen to a very high resolution, because it was worth it to me. I could definitely see myself paying an extra $600 for a system with this, though it would also need to have an actual, larger capacity harddrive, too, for my data.
.... Being in the next iPod in 5 - 4 - 3 - 2.....
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
Since flash is so great for laptop HDs, why not get a small flash memory card to serve as the HD instead of that whole shebang? For example, why not mount the root and user partition on a small 2GB flash card, which in eBay goes for less than 40$, and then mount the /home partition on a regular HD? Possibly I'm missing something important here but as far as I see it, 40$ are a whole lot less than 500$.
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
Any modern CPU is fast enough for me these days, and I don't need a real big screen on a laptop. What I want is good, solid construction, and long battery life. How much of a laptop's power use is due to the hard drive? And how much of that is saved by using a flash-based disk?
Speaking of which, can someone show me how power consumption is divided among the parts of a laptop (CPU, chipset, wireless, drives, graphics card if applicable, LCD, backlight, etc)?
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Where's cringley's metal film disks? He said they were going to be in produciton soon and would cost less, use less power and have lower latency to flash even when spun down. They also work at elevated temperatures (suited for cars and embeddeds) and are insanley shock resistant. They could even be spun up to 30,000 rpms making them have higher data rates and lower latency. And they were lower profile than conventional disks. They sound a lot better than these flash compromises since there's no compromise. It's just an ultra-low power hard disk.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Doesn't flash memory have a limitation on the number of writes
that can be done before the memory becomes unable to store data?
I acknowledge my familiarity with flash memory is at best cursory.
Who ever mind this flash device when it only can carry 32GB if today we have notebooks that has 160GB.
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Can you stop calling them "flash hard drives"? They are precisely not hard drives, but flash drives. It is like saying "liquid crystal cathode ray tube" or "electric internal combustion engine".
The sooner you fall behind, the more time you have to catch up.
So long as we need fans to manage temperature. Those are much, much cheaper to replace, though.
I have a 7 year-old laptop with a similarly aged drive and the whole thing still works. Will the flash drive last that long given normal to heavy usage?
Don't SSD drives smoke the pants off of conventional hard drives? Does anyone have details?
I can't imagine my laptop being the only source of my "valuable data". Admittedly, it's a bit of work, but I'm constantly synchronizing files back and forth between desktop and laptop. So I did a quick Google search to see how many cases of laptops containing valuable data there were. This article has some fun anecdotes about dropping laptops.
Seriously, though, there's some kind of marketing idea that dropping laptops is a huge problem. Apple's solution was one of the biggest gimmicks I've ever heard of. Do people constantly drop their cell phones, Blackberrys, PDAs, etc.? Do they not back up the "valuable data" to another location in case it's stolen?
I'm not going to pay an extra $600 simply for the extra reliability. Surely there's better advantages to publicize?
mandelbr0t
"Please describe the scientific nature of the 'whammy'" - Agent Scully
They don't have a single actual read/write speed rating given in the whole article and you know what that means. It's not as fast as they say cuz they tested it in unfair circumstances or something. But still, it'd be sweet to have a solid state hard drive, especially in iPods since they break A LOT with their current storage technology.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
I'm listening to a Sansa right now with 8 GB flash. These things are great. As far as I'm concerned, they ARE the "ipod killer". I actually got a 2 GB iPod Nano for XMas, but my GF said that it was so pathetic, she went out and bought me a top of the line Sansa (cheaper, too).
Why all the complaints about the price? This is about more than security, too... it's about power consumption and speed, too.
My thoughts?
Price:
$10/GB is not out of scale with current flash pricing, but nonetheless, the pricing will continue to fall. Initial release of "new" technologies like this inevitably start off pricey, usually dipping 50% after a year. I see this type of product falling even faster.
Advantages:
Forget security. The name of the game is power consumption. Hard drives (and DVD-ROM drives, too) suck a LOT of power on a laptop. Flash-based HDDs should offer a considerable improvement in battery life, and for many people, this is the "killer app" that will move this product from bleeding edge to consumer-level.
Yup, I had a simular idea in mind - buying a Cardbus/CompactFlash adapter (cause CF cards are the cheapest) and plugging it in the Cardbus slot (that's not used anyway). After that I'd leave about 10% space for backups and use the rest for ReadyBoost (which seems to be intelligent enough to cache stuff).
Nah, I don't think it'll be power. Honestly, where do you go in the modern world that doesn't have power? In fact, when I get a new laptop, the first thing that I do is get rid of the battery. They're heavy, hot, and they're rarely useful.
I'm buying flash drives for reliability in my business computers.
Flash memory has (depending on which technology) a limited life of 10^5 or 10^6 write operations. Now imagine your swap space being on flash.
Get used to the notion that this will mean you have to buy a new drive as these wear out now too. and older drives will start developing mysterious read errors, so will also need additional space-consuming data-redundancy for an error recovery strategy.
Conventional wisdom / rumor is that these non-volatile memories have a limited number of write cycles before they fail. I still haven't heard anyone explain why that wouldn't be a problem for these drives. Anyone?
Why does this use IDE at a time when IDE ports are staring to goway?
Hybrids ;)
or, combustion engines are electronically controlled... which is true of modern engines, as they're controlled via ECM (throttle-by-wire).
If anyone cares to google for "compact flash ide" you see a number of devices $20 that will allow you to use a compact flash card as an IDE hard disk. (desktop or laptop)
You can get an 8G compact flash card for about $160. Sure it isn't 32G, but it is enough to put a full install (Windows or Linux) and have some space for your stuff. Your music collection and pictures will probably have to live on the USB drive you already have because laptop dis drives usually die after a year or two anyway. (Usually from the abuse)
With these new disks would be a great time for manufactures to align their specs with the consumers mind. i.e. 1,000,000,000 bytes does not equal a GB. For once I would like to buy a drive and actually be able to use 34,359,738,368 bytes and not the crummy 32,000,000,000 they are selling.
Does anyone else think 32GB might be bigger than they need? I wouldn't spend $600 more, but I would spend $150 more for an 8GB version and just leave my MP3s at home. I realize Vista won't install on 8GB (then again, maybe its close), but OS X (without GarageBand and iMovie) or XP should fit on there just fine.
The metric system was devised in the 18th century with the prefixes kilo, mega and giga. Just because some lazy asshat decided that 1024 was "close enough" to 1000 when talking about computer memory doesn't mean everyone else has to follow suit. Hard disks have been using K = 1000 since before processors standardized on binary arithmetic.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
I can't take it anymore!
Attention taggers: "no" is not a tag, it's an opinion. Same goes for "yes" and "maybe". Submit it in a post or STFU.
"The NAND flash contained in the SanDisk drive, in fact, only contains one bit of data per memory cell. SanDisk makes NAND flash that can hold two bits of data per cell and, through Msystems, has technology for expanding that to 4 bits of memory in a cell. Increasing the capacity can thus be accomplished without massive technological breakthroughs."
A more reliable laptop, which is lighter, less prone to failure from abuse, and may even last longer on a charge, at the price of not much storage space and ... the price.
Seems like the target market should be the military.
My Linux systems have a 4GB CF card that stores all static files such as programs, libraries, and config files. I have the partition with these files (yes it's /) made read-only and noatime. You really only want to use it for these files because flash media has a limited number of writes it can handle.
It does speed the system up though and it makes it a lot less likely to suffer an unbootable situation which is really the reason I switched to flash. I got sick of needing to rebuild or restore my whole system every time the drives wore out. Yes, you can use RAID but it's still seems wrong to store my data on the same drive(s) as my OS and applications.
Add RAM and get rid of swap/virtual memory too as it'll greatly speed your system up and prolong it's life. If switching to such a system make sure you buy actual flash media and not a micro-drive in the form factor of flash media. It doesn't do you any good to try to switch to flash if you're actually using a wee hdd. Also I suggest carefully checking the speed and compatibility of the flash media before you buy it because some brands and lines work a hell of a lot better and faster than others.
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I would be really glad to see these sort of devices become more widespread. We have a few solid state devices at work for our critical, high performance apps. For what we bought when we bought them, the price was through the roof. But the performance can't be beat. It's like having a persistent ramdisk to store your DB to. It really gave a huge performance boost to us, because the DB concurrency controls force it to wait alot for any I/O, including other transactions doing I/O.
This is a bit different than what we have, but it's still better than many of the disk options out there. And the price difference is negligible when you consider it next to 15k RPM disks.
From the link: If like me you thought that flash memory wouldn't be affected by fragmentation, then you'll find these results quite an eye opener. Looking at the write performance, you can see that while there is no difference in performance between the card states for 512B files (as you'd expect, since they'll fit in a single block, and therefore won't ever be fragmented), for 32kB files, the fragmented card has dropped to half the performance of the defragmented and blank cards. By the time you hit 256kB files, the fragmented card has dropped to almost one quarter the performance of the defragged card, and one eighth the performance of the blank card! The relative performance seems to be maintained at the same level for 2MB files as for 256kB files. With read performance, the difference doesn't get huge until the 2MB range, but then we see a massive drop in performance. Honestly, I thought that there wouldn't be a significant performance loss. Apparently, there is. My guess is that this is less of an issue as the on-board flash controller gets quicker, as well as if the drive interface to the flash is quick, but it's definitely data for consideration.
I havn't read up on flash lately but I was still under the impression flash had problems with wearing out from writing to the same sector too often.
That's fine for a thumb drive but can it really handle the truly massive constant data restructuring generated by the pr0n? I'm assuming it can't.
I'm not even going to ponder the economic success of an expensive hard drive which is unsuitable for the primary data storage need of geeks everywhere.
I've been waiting for these for too long. I am a pilot with a small two seat airplane and have an iPAQ that is currently getting data from my GPS for moving map S.W. and feeding data to my autopilot. I've gone this route because laptops with hard drives don't survive more than a few weeks of being bumped around in the sky. The move to a flash drive is great! $600 is so far down in the noise as far as aircraft costs go that it seems very cheep to me. Sign me up! I'll put it in my Acer 12" Tablet PC and mount that on my panel. Going from 4.5" screen to 12" will be GREAT!
Probably already been patented, but here goes. Use flash for a large read/write cache for the hard drive. Somewhat like a RAID set-up except that cache write data would only be tranferred periodically. If you kept track of the read information so that frequently used data on the disk would stay in the cache and not be swapped out. Maybe disks could be designed to run at low speed for power saving as well when they are being infrequently accessed.
Super Talent are already doing this, but have only reached 16gb
http://www.supertalent.com/press/ide.php/
These drives are on sale - I saw a site that sold them for about GBP 370. One year manufacturer's warranty, so I guess they usually last at least that length of time under a 'common usage' scenario.
Sign me up for the flashy trinkets. They are also 1.5 or 1.8 inches rather than 2.5!
.5 the cost
in 1.5 years well have 2x as much at
What kind of interface does it use? I remember there was a review of a samsung one that used ATA66, not exactly the best interface in the world. Shouldn't these things be able to actually use the capabilities (bandwidth) of SATA2 unlike most HDs today?
I'm more interested in seeing what Apple does with ZFS formating for regular drives, but also having a flash drive would solve the problem of booting from the ZFS drive? It wouldn't have to be 32MB for just that.
Why not just run a ramdisk? No problems with read/write cycles. Optimally, you'd have a 4 gig ramdisk for the OS and the flash drive/whatever for the apps. You only need a few gig for Windows and the associated swap-space. Sure, you'd need to have it monitor the status of the battery, but how many years do lithium batteries last? Have the OS save to a partition on the flash drive when it shuts down and load it in when it starts up. It could last for decades this way. I had a laptop almost 15 years ago that did this, in fact. 1Meg(heh) ramdisk and it was silly fast. With solid-state drives, though, there would be no chance of data loss from losing power(or at most the clock rolls back to your last bootup).
Don't assume the way *you* use your laptop is the same way that everybody else uses theirs. I'd find my laptop a lot less useful without a battery.
Cheers,
Roger
Do you have any better hostages?
Do you really want to support a company that requires IE to view their product page? Just look at the 32gb SSD product page in IE and Firefox. It is almost impossible to browse with Firefox, but it does look great in IE!!!
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Did they consider the lifespan of the flash memory? What about the several-thousand-rewrites-and-goodbye?
There are two kinds of people - those who are radioactive and those who have already decayed..
I remember being very thankful that thumb drives caught on. Over the years, I have been asked to recover data off of CDs that were cracked and 3.5" disks that had been put though heck. 3.5" disks were the worst. People would bring them in full of sand or with seriously damaged outer shells. With flash drives, I have seen them crushed, run through a washing machine, and partially melted by fire - but was able to recover the data most of the time. They are a huge improvement over the old storage media.
Now, we are talking about replacing hard drives. People drop laptops, they operate them in heat, and even drop stuff onto them. Breaking your laptop is bad, but many will agree that the data can be worth far more than the hardware. With any luck, flash memory will prove to be more durable, faster to access, and require less power. I am sure Toshiba will look at the technology for toughbooks, as will anyone who needs to store data on gear that will take a beating. It would make jogging with your video iPod a lot less worrisome, wouldn't it?
The idea of only using flash for the operating system, while storing data on a regular hard drive is the wrong way to go. Granted, they are looking at just speed enhancements, but I want all the goodies for my data as well.
Andrew Borntreger
Champion of cinematic disasters
This is probably the first step to what Mark Cuban Predicted a year ago. It is just a matter of time for demand to make the price of these drives go down enough to replace "Prehistoric" media formats such as CD, DVD, BlueRay, etc.
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This whole thing got me to thinking that maybe I should replace the harddrive in my older laptop with a CF+IDE adaptor. Granted I can't seem to find anything greater than 4GB at stores, but SanDisk does sell 16GB CF cards somewhere. The CF specification has a limit of 137 GB (at least the old specs do). In terms of price, a 2GB CF + IDE adaptor will cost about $40-$50, which isn't too bad.
I'm not down on the technical limitations for putting this into practice, but I'd say a PCI card or something with loads of SD-slots on it would've been interesting; so that you could combine their storage capacity, and make all of them appear as one drive, and so have all the card's capacities rolled into one drive.
I'm thinking something like a virtual file-allocation-table, that is being created from each card's content at boot-up, (either a battery-backed ram chip on-card, that sorts it out based on what is on there, _OR_, a separate SD card functioning as "/" in regards of summing up how files are allocated, and that master-card could be four times the required space, so as to swap FAT-placement to lessen wearage..) -Each sub-card should perhaps have their share of the allocation table, but I don't know.
Surely fun, if not practical..
A horse can't be sick, you know, even if he wants to.
HDs need air pressure. The article missed that one for why aerospace especially is interested. Somewhere between 17000 ft and 21000 ft altitude, traditional HDs start to fail, and over 21k ft is certain death. Most of them have a note in the fine print that use over 10k ft is not recommended. Anyone ever check a laptop, and accidentally leave it running something that will spin up the HD during the flight, on a plane that doesn't have a pressurized baggage compartment?
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Reading from the cards, (spare physical wearage on the connectors; USB-dongles getting dirty on the "copper," or whatever after so-and-so many mounts,) is "free," right?
-So, I'd chuck any *finished* projects on this kind of storage system, and so being able to read them "forever;" all those files you need just in case but that are never going to be written to again; I'd put them on there..
A horse can't be sick, you know, even if he wants to.
The drive is the thing that does the reading and writing. The disk is the thing that the data is written to/read from.
In floppy drives, you can take the disk in and out.
In hard drives, the disks are mounted and (normally) not removable. But there are still hard disks in that hard drive - round things with data on them that spin.
So, is is Solid State Disk or Solid State Drive?
NEITHER!
Solid State Device. There is no disk, and since there's no disk to spin, nothing is being driven either.
Should really call it SSS, Solid State Storage.
paintball
What really draws me to a flash disk is random access time. For many uses (software development in my case) the real drawback of notebooks is the long random access time of their hard disks, and you can't replace them with fast a 3.5" WD Raptor drive. Reducing build times by a couple of minutes would really help me.
I was under the impression flash ram had (although high) limited number of uses. I would suspect the constant writing and re-writing our hard drives go through would push those limits.
(If at first you don't succeed, do it different next time!)
I'm sending this from a machine with no moving parts, except the keyboard: it has a flash disk, no fan, and an optical mouse. This is a 1 GHz VIA C3 based machine (less then 2 litres volume), and the flash is a 4 GB IDE drive. It takes about 20 W. I also have a Linksys Slug with no moving parts as an NFS server (5 W), and three more lab / development machines all with no moving parts; they have either XScale ARM processors (slugs) or VIA C3 or C7s, and either IDE or USB flash. These machines run more than fast enough for everything that I do, which includes a lot of kernel compilations and C++. Disk space it a bit tight sometimes, but deborphan is my friend, and flash is only getting cheaper. If you want a silent, low-power machine you can already have it, and it will probably cost you less than the alternative.
For me, by far the best benefit of this is the complete silence that results.
You can get an 8 GB USB flash drives for 100 bucks now on pricewatch. why are these so expensive? I predict that some company will be making kids laptops with small say about 20 GB flash drives 1.5 GHz processers some crippled version of Linux in 3 to 4 years for 150 to 200 bucks. And Flash drives will be dirt cheap next time you blink.
Oh well, we are still using wheels in our cars so... maybe it's not so surprising after all.
My car uses an inclined plane, and jet thrusters. My other car is a hamster ball.
But really, the CAR is moving. So you're going to have to have some moving parts to help reduce friction.
Please stop stalking me, bro.
Presumably these flash drives suffer from the same write degrading that happens over the span of a flash drives' life. Usually this won't ever be noticed because people will not be writing data to the drive continuously, but would this type of drive open up the possibility for a virus or other harmful program to repeatedly write to the free sectors of the drive over and over again, quickly diminishing the lifetime of this overall expensive product? The affected user base would be small, granted, but the overall effect would be quite harmful.
One of the problems with magnetic hard drives is that it is nearly impossible to wipe information from a really determined investigator - rewritten bits don't line up with the originals, leaving the old data behind. Flash memory doesn't suffer from this - writing a bit to a zero doesn't leave any residue of the old value - even if you measure the charge on the floating gate.
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
It's not really practical, especially for laptops, but it's a great proof of concept.
The metric system was devised in the 18th century with the prefixes kilo, mega and giga. Just because some lazy asshat decided that 1024 was "close enough" to 1000 when talking about computer memory doesn't mean everyone else has to follow suit. Hard disks have been using K = 1000 since before processors standardized on binary arithmetic.
Which must have been sometime in the mid eighties, right around the time the 40MB drives came out? Because that's when all this nonsense started.
Honestly, I'll wait for Phase-Change non-volatile RAM to become commercially viable. Hundreds of thousands or read/writes that Flash has compared to the reads/writes capabilities of most standard RAM chips today, and which PRAM promises to deliver as well. As often as my drive's contents change, Flash HDD is *NOT* the way to go for me, no matter what. But, being made for Laptops is a good idea, since it's a low-power alternative to magnetic storage, but the short lifetime just isn't worth it. (I've already worn out two 1GB SD cards within a year with my constant read/write habits.)
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Assuming that with wear levelling and other technologies we were able to take care of the limited write cycle problems with Flash memory, would it ever make sense to use Flash not only to replace hard drives, but also RAM? There would obviously be a performance hit, but how much? It would be like permanently swapping (faster than with the current hard drives though), except without the actual need for the swapping operation, thereby simplifying memory management in the OS. A major benefit would be that turning off your computer wouldn't mean exiting your applications and closing your files, everything would stay in memory as you left it. It would be much cheaper too...
Basically my noob question is: how much faster is RAM read/write compared to Flash?
Please give us direct access to the device -- none of this CompactFlash HD emulating crap. Windows can emulate a hard drive if it wants to -- Linux is developing an FS specifically designed for Flash devices, that operates directly on the Flash, not even as a block device.
Remember -- Flash is funny. You don't overwrite, you erase, then write -- in fairly large blocks. You want to intentionally fragment stuff, so you write evenly over the memory, so you don't wear it out as quickly -- but you also want to keep the chunks defragmented, even delay writes a little (Reiser4/XFS style), so you can overwrite a whole block at a time.
All in all, I'd much rather trust Linux/jffs2 to manage my Flash than some arbitrary hardware inside a CompactFlash device.
And speaking of OS choices... Why are you so desperate for OSX on such a device? I mean, you realize you've just reduced yourself to grovelling because your OS vendor needlessly restricts the hardware you run it on? You realize that the moment someone produces such a device, I'll be able to run Linux on it, but unless you're very lucky, you won't be able to run OS X without cracking it?
Regarding battery life -- my old Sharp Actius had some 9-10 of battery life, and it was a subnotebook. If you want battery life, it's simple: Sacrifice performance, and don't do much with it (read a book or something). Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like any manufacturer wants to do that.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Think volume, not storage size.
So Sandisk gets press for doing this. Memtech and Bitmicro have had solid state flash drives for well over a year, with SCSI, SATA and PATA interfaces as well. And they range up to 64Gb.
Bitmicro
Memtech
And there are most likely even more out there. These are just the ones I know of.
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Just a quick question Zonk -- I need you to settle a dispute I'm having with a friend over the title of your article-"Flash Memory HDD for Notebooks Launched"... I took the position that HDD in your title meant high-density-device. Hopefully I'm right and he owes me $100. If not, please delete this comment before he finds it.
Thanks
I guess you had the MM10. The newer MM20/50/70 is much more usable. Same Clock speed, but with the eficeon chip, it seems like 50% faster. I liked them MM10 because it would last hours on battery and was small enough to carry around, but then I felt like it /needed/ to last a long time since it took an hour just to boot XP ;)
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I am personally excited about this news. Its about time we get rid of the biggest bottleneck in computer performance... hard disks. They suck bad.. in fact they reach a new level of suckedness. Mechanical, power hogs, slow, prone to failure.. the only thing going for them that flash memory cant touch yet is storage space, and of course the corresponding price. Flash drives (that is, those designed to act as a hard disk replacement) are incredibly fast, reliable, built in error correction and redundancy, and not near the power gulpers of traditional hard disks. A 32 gig drive is plenty of space to hold your OS (or more if you desire) and applications. Now it may not be enough though for personal files. I know I personally use 160 or gigs of space. But in the OS and apps I use, not over 6 gigs. plenty of space left for those that are on the go and can sync up to their home / work servers. Its time to upgrade to the 21st century, lol One thing I want to know though... why use flash? Why not use traditional RAM modules instead? You can solve the problem of data being deleted by adding a small power supply to hold it. I head of a company trying that but not much else.
Yes, it was the MM10. I didn't trust Sharp again, though, for a couple of major reasons:
Now, I've discovered how much I dislike certain aspects of the Powerbook, and I could be talked into getting another Actius, or something like it. But this time around, I want it to be able to play DVD video -- the MM10 choked on that, either the CPU or the video card, but it was not just Linux -- and I want it to have at least 40 or 50 gigs of storage, unless it's all solid state. Other than that, it's software (Linux) issues that I can fix myself...
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
One power glitch, one failed cap or resistor in the power supply. Bang. There goes your entire drive. At least flash can survive without power.
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