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).

Re:Just in time for Macworld?

[Rogerborg]

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.

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)?

Re:Effect on Battery life?

[imsabbel]

The power distribution in a modern notebook is EXTREMELY dependent on usage and the special model you look at.

Averaged, the biggest power-draw of a modern notebook is the display, followed by the cpu. (this may of course vary if the notebook has a very small display. With equal brightness, power-draw of course increases with display size, until it dominates everything else with those 17" 200cm/m^2 display). After that is chipset and GPU (of course depending on with model you use).

2.5" HDs are actually not very power-hungry. Typical power-draw figures are 5W during spinup, and about 2W while in use (dropping to 0.5W or so during spindown).

The FLASH drive mentioned draws about 0.6W in use, so in average you might gain 1.5W thats about 3-5% of the average power-draw of a modern notebook, and should give you about 10-15 minutes or so more.

nomenclature

[tonigonenstein]

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".

Re:Nah... Sansa...

[OECD]

You got a GF? How how how?