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?"

Comments

HD

[El Lobo]

What a wonderful life will be when a computer will contain NO MOVABLE mechanical components. This is actually the real bottleneck in modern machines and not processor power as many people think.

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.

Re:HD

[Anonymous Coward]

I had no end of problems with CF cards while doing some embedded systems work. Surprisingly, the limited write cycle was the least of the problems; mostly the cards tended to die due to improper powerup/power down where, presumably, transient currents would somehow fry the card. It happened to several brands and I never understood why they didn't have integrated protections from this sort of thing. A second, more sinister type of failure was due to mechanical shock; it seems the wires within the chips (those gold ones connecting the silicon to the pins) would break. Found this out the hard way after moving a chip to a working card. (soldering was most likely not the cause, since the card started working again with the original chip put back into place).

Here is a small, clueless suggestion

[GreatBunzinni]

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$.

Effect on Battery life?

[LehiNephi]

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)?

Cringley's metal film disks

[goombah99]

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.

Re:An extra $600?

[imsabbel]

Sorry, you dont really get more economy of scale than flash already has.

There are improvements ahead with further process shrinks, but to get the same storage than a decent big HD has, you need roughly all chips of a 20cm wafer.

And creating 100s of cm^2 of memory-quality dice isnt cheap.

Re:Just in time for Macworld?

[BWJones]

Yup, people eager to line up to pay over the odds for flashy underpowered trinkets are the ideal market for the initial release of this technology.

Ha ha ha. Seriously though, the ideal market for this technology has been defense related work for a number of years now. However, costs are decreasing to a point where we can now start putting these drives in Toughbooks (to make 'em even tougher), or portable devices that do tend to get bumped and thrown around a fair bit more. Just witness my last passage through customs here in the US where a "Homeland Security" officer inverted my laptop bag, dumping out the contents onto a desk from over a foot high. Laptop, point and shoot camera, cell phone and a portable hard drive loaded with photos all came crashing down. If there were flash discs instead of hard drives, I would have been perhaps less pissed off.

The other category where flash drives are absolutely critical is for lots of remotely control data gathering devices. One of my friends who has been working on remotely piloted vehicles has been clamoring for just this sort of technology as it is much more rugged than hard drives for their applications (hard landings).