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Intel Stomps Into Flash Memory

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the hoping-for-solid-returns dept.

jcatcw writes "Intel's first NAND flash memory product, the Z-U130 Value Solid-State Drive, is a challenge to other hardware vendors. Intel claims read rates of 28 MB/sec, write speeds of 20 MB/sec., and capacity of 1GB to 8GB, which is much smaller than products from SanDisk. 'But Intel also touts extreme reliability numbers, saying the Z-U130 has an average mean time between failure of 5 million hours compared with SanDisk, which touts an MTBF of 2 million hours.'"

9 of 130 comments (clear)

  1. Info. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    Wear-levelling algorithms. Is there a resource for finding out which algorithms are used by various vendors' flash devices? And links to real algorithms? Hint: not some flimsy pamphlet of a "white paper" by sandisk.

    I want to see how valid the claims are that you can keep writing data on a flash disk for as long as you'll ever need it. Depending on the particular wear-levelling algorithm and the write pattern, this might not be true at all.

    1. Re:Info. by EmbeddedJanitor · · Score: 3, Informative
      These claims will be made at the flash level (ie. ignoring what the block managers and file systems do).

      Different file systems and block managers do different things to code with wear levelling etc. For some file systems (eg. FAT) wear levelling is very important. For some other file systems - particularly those designed to work with NAND flash - wear levelling is not important.

      --
      Engineering is the art of compromise.
  2. Spinning states by HomelessInLaJolla · · Score: 2, Informative

    These days the platters spin so fast and the data density is so high that the math just might work out the same for a solid state device and the spinning disc--ie. the spinning disc may, mathematically, approximate the solid state device.

    At first thought I agree, though. Maybe there's something inherent in the nature of the conducting materials which creates an asymptote, for conventional technologies, closing in around 30 mb/sec.

    --
    the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
  3. Re:hmm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Shouldn't a solid state device be able to be read faster than a spinning disc?

    Yes and no.

    With random access the bottleneck is going to be superb - random reads are going to be far faster than any mechanical drive (where waiting for the drive and heads to move) are a real problem.

    With sustained transfers, speeds are going to depend on the interface - which in this case is USB 2.0 - which has a maximum practical transfer rate of... about 30MB/s.

    What's needed are large flash drives with SATA 3 interfaces.

  4. Re:hmm by SatanicPuppy · · Score: 2, Informative

    Not necessarily...Three platters spinning at 7200rpm is a lot of data.

    The place where you make up time with solid state is in seek time...There is no hardware to have to move, so finding non-contiguous data is quicker.

    --
    ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
  5. Re:Why? what does it matter by Jarjarthejedi · · Score: 2, Informative

    MTBF matters because it's random. They're not saying that every drive will last that long, they're saying that the average drive will. Therefore the chance of any drive failing within a reasonable amount of time drops the more the mean time is. So with a 5000000 MTBF the chance of any one drive failing in your life time is incredibly minuscule.

    --
    There are two kinds of fool One says 'This is old therefore good' Another says 'This is new therefore better'- Dean Ing
  6. MEAN time between failures, what does that MEAN by tepples · · Score: 3, Informative

    Did they really test these for 5 million hours or are they just pulling the number out of their ass? It's a mean time between failures. An MTBF figure of 5 million hours means they tested 500,000 of them for 300 hours, and 30 of them failed. A rate of 150 million unit hours per 30 failures equals 5 million unit hours per failure.
  7. Incremental layout and web accelerator by tepples · · Score: 2, Informative

    Remember their old Pentium add which claimed surfing the 'net would be sooooo much faster with their new Pentium, 'cause it's not like it's actually limited by the speed of you network connection? It wasn't entirely false advertising. A web browser on a faster computer can run more iterations of the incremental layout code, so that the data looks like it's coming in faster. A faster computer can run more complex text and mark-up compression in human-acceptable time, allowing for "web accelerator" software that became especially popular during the wane of dial-up.
  8. Wait a minute.. by aero2600-5 · · Score: 2, Informative

    "mean time between failure of 5 million hours"

    Didn't we just recently learn that they're pulling these numbers out of their arse, and that they're essentially useless?

    Disk failures in the real world: What does an MTTF of 1,000,000 hours mean to you?

    This was covered on Slashdot already.

    If you're going to read Slashdot, at least fucking read it.

    Aero

    --
    Please stop hurting America -- Jon Stewart