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Intel Stomps Into Flash Memory
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.'"
Yeah. Would you choose a neurosurgeon who pokes around people's brains in his spare time? I wouldn't.
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.
read rates of 28 MB/sec
Shouldn't a solid state device be able to be read faster than a spinning disc?
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
We know Apple commands a great deal of pricing advantage with their current supplier(s) (Samsung, if memory serves). But, could this be another reason to switch, by picking up Intel CPUs and Intel flash memory chips? Cringely could be getting closer to actually being right - if Intel buys Apple, suddenly iPod, iPhone, Mac, etc. production could go in-house for a huge chunk of the parts.
Just had to throw an Apple reference in there. It's /. law or something.
Maybe in the next few generation, we'll get the best of both worlds, much higher capacities and reliability.
Need to check out how Intel is actually backing up it's reliability claim - if they just replace the drive when it stops working - that may be a cheap proposition for them (it fails a year or two later, even a currently highend drive by that time the drive is small to relative current numbers and they can replace it with a cheap one). Hate for this to become a war with who can fiddle with the numbers the best while the overall quaility remains the same in reality.
I believe I will wait for third-party verification of those numbers. Specifications from the producers tend to have somewhat... generous fine print.
ceci n'est pas une
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
2,000,000 hours = 228 years and 4 months or so. Who the hell cares if you make it to 5,000,000?
8 GB should to be enough for anybody...
So on average, it will last 570 years instead of 228?
It matters a lot if you're using 200 of them at your company...
In most cases the part that fails is the software, not the hardware. For example, FAT is a terrible way to store data you love. To get reliability you need to use a flash file system that is designed to cope with NAND.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
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.'
Yes, because I should be concerned that my pr0n collection isn't making it all the way to my laptop for traveling purposes.
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
To get reliability you need to use a flash file system that is designed to cope with NAND.
Any suggestions of possible candidate filesystems?
Right now, most people that I know of, use flashdrives to move data from one computer to another, in many cases across operating systems or even architectures, so FAT is used less for technical reasons than because it's probably the most widely-understood filesystem: you can read and write it on Windows, Macintosh, Linux, BSD, and most commercial UNIXes.
However, a disk that was going to be installed in a single machine could be more flexible; it would be somewhat more acceptable to use a specialized filesystem there (as long as the filesystem wasn't so specific as to make recovery impossible), particularly if you wanted to maximize reliability.
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Right now, Apple has 90% of its value due to the vision of Steve Jobs and the products he helps create. This is not to say that there aren't many people involved in Apple's success nor that he even thinks up of most of the products like iPod - but he does a great job in realizing those products and positioning them in the marketplace.
Unless Intel can keep Jobs and gives him free reign, Apple would soon go rotten from a mediocre vision of someone who just doesn't get the Apple culture and is looking at the spreadsheets when doing products and releasing "Me Too!" items that look and act like everyone elses. Just look at the stagnation of Apple throughout the late 80's and 90's. Intel certainly isn't that company.
And I think Jobs is too much of a control freak to voluntarily hand himself over to some corporate masters just for a few dollars better margin on a few components.
No but I have seen webpages rendered on a Pentium 1 versus a Pentium III with the same amount of ram and on the same network connection. My guestimate is that about the P2 400mhz w/256mb ram and background processes cleaned up is where the machine doesn't matter and the network connection is the only substantial bottleneck.
Downloading the content is not the only aspect of browsing the web, the machine must parse and render that content as well.
That figure doesn't tell me jack. What I want to know is if I order 100 of these things, how many of them will fail just after the warranty expires?
It's fun to ponder and an interesting combination but it will never happen unless both the management of Apple and Intel both suffer severe brain aneurysms. Why? Culture and the difficulties of vertical integration. Also, if you want to see the dangers of vertical integration, look no further than Sun and SGI. If you are really big like IBM it's possible to be a soup to nuts vendor but even then it is rare. IBM after all just got out of the PC business which is Apple's core market. It's just really hard for management to competently deliver every aspect of the product. It's not impossible but it is really really really hard.
Regarding culture, Intel has a notoriously combative culture. Intel's products are generally high quality but they aren't consumer products. Intel doesn't have consumer DNA in them really. Their products are for vendors and techies. Kind of like Nutra-sweet, they've mastered the "branded ingredient" strategy (i.e. "Intel Inside" and Centrino) but they don't really sell to consumers directly. You don't buy an Intel PC, you buy a Dell or HP with "Intel Inside". Apple conversely is one of the best at designing elegant consumer products but doesn't really work deeply with other vendors since most of their sales are to consumers. If Apple had to work with other computer vendors in a big way in all likelihood most of the magic of their products would be lost. Both companies have engineers, salespeople, marketing, and company structures to support these VERY different strategies. It would be a herculean task to make the two companies work well together.
Sheesh, I read the headline and thought Intel had developed some buggy chip that somehow stomps on flash memory. Nice, well, at least it got my attention.
Use Ctrl-C instead of ESC in Vim!
2 Million hours MTBF means the time to a failure is a lot longer than my lifetime too. Overkill isn't always better.
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.
False advertising is illegal in many countries. This 5 million hours figure (and SanDisk's 2 million) seems to be based on much shorter tests of large numbers of devices and extrapolating the results based on the assumption that this randomness is evenly distributed. They MUST know that this assumption is wrong. As taught in basic engineering courses, failure distributions are basically U shaped, with most failures on the steep left hand side being detected during manufacture (and hence not counted in their MTBF figures), and those on the right hand side optimally starting to increase shortly after the warrantee expires by fine tuning the manufacturing process to minimise production costs and maximise unit sales.
Intel bough the StrongARM off Digital, then sold it, presumably to focus on "core business" of x86 etc. They've done similar moves with their 8051 and USB parts. It is hard to see what would attract them to NAND flash which has very low margins. NAND flash now costs less than 1 cent per MByte, about a fifth or so of what it cost a year back, and there seems to be no slowing.
Intel seems to work well with high margin devices (Pentium etc) and not so well with low margin parts (USB chipsets, PXAxxx etc).It is hard to see Intel keeping in the NAND business for very long.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I'd like to see a semi-affordable (around $250) solid state storage device in a standard form factor and connection (3.5" SATA), at a decent size (15GiB).
/home and /tmp on a 'normal' large drive (standard SATA drive of decent speed, RAID array, etc.).
This would be an ideal boot and OS drive for me. / and most of it's directories, along with a decent sized swap (2-3 GiB). Put
I've thought about doing this for a while, in fact... but every time I research it out I either come to dead ends with no price info, high prices, or odd interface requirements that aren't suitable for a desktop machine.
So Intel upping the rating to 5 million hours is meaningless. Somehow I suspect that the people at Intel know this...
"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.
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It seemed pretty inevitable to me, that the Intel/IBM/AMDs of the world would branch out.
The generation-old fabs they abandon for CPU-making, are still a generation newer than what most anyone else has available. Repurposing those fabs to produce something like Flash chips, chipsets, etc. seems a pretty straight-forward and inexpensive way to keep making money on largely worthless facilities, even after the cost of retooling is taken into account.
Though they obviously haven't done it yet, companies like Intel have the manufacturing capabilities to leapfrog past all current Flash manufacturers, as far as density is concerned (though, personally, I'd say Flash density is fine, if the price can be driven down).
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MTTF is not MTBF. In the world of metrics, they're different. While they both measure failures, time to fail and time between failures are different measurements for a reason, they tell us different things about the product we're testing.
Whatever man, I spelled it write!
No, more hours can be good - just think, you can pass down your Family Photo Thumbdrive to your kids, who might be able to pass it onto their grandkids, if USB is still available...
With such a high figure what they are really saying is that there isn't much to break in there, unless you shove it in a fire or run over it with your car. So don't you worry about it.
Usually the MTBF will follow a bell curve (measured) and so there are bound to be a few failures within the warranty period due to manufacturing defects, but they should be small.
If you want to get paranoid about it you could always buy two of them and keep them contents in sync, then at least your MTTR (Mean Time To Repair) will be lower. Note that even with two of them the MTBF remains the same, so either one is still just as likely to fail, but you get time to get a replacement with no down time or loss of data.
Just wondering, doesn't AMD make a whole bunch of money on Flash memory?
I know that they spun off the division to Spansion, which was a joint venture with Fujitsu, but if memory serves me correctly they still own a good section (40% or similar) of the company and make a lot of money out of it.
Conspiracy theories'R'us I guess. It could just be that Intel turned around and said "What do you mean AMD is making a heap of cash out of something that isn't as hard to make as CPUs and we aren't?"
Curiosity was framed; ignorance killed the cat. -- Author unknown
So with a 5000000 MTBF the chance of any one drive failing in your life time is incredibly minuscule.
I have a box full of dead hard drives that would disagree with you, and I didn't typically use lots of drives at once until fairly recently, so most of those failures were consecutive single drive failures....
The numbers are utterly meaningless for individual consumers. They are only really useful at a corporate IT level with dozens or hundreds of drives to figure out how many spares you should keep on hand. Beyond that, they're just B.S. marketing drivel to try to make you believe that their drives are better, and thus keep buying them even after your last eight drives crashed.... And honestly, I wouldn be surprised if the numbers were even in the ballpark for large numbers of drives, judging from the failures I've seen over the years. My experience has been that particular models of drives either work nearly forever or die repeatedly, and there's not much in-between.... :-)
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Rudimentary statistics (IANAS)
The mean just tells us what you have if you get a sample and divide the sum of values in the sample by the sample size. It's one of the three more meaningful "averages" you can get in statistics. I'd be at least as interested in this case in seeing the mode and median.
You can "screw up" a mean by adding one or two samples that are extreme. These disks, say they have a 5 million MTBF as the figure you want, but they all really fail after 5 minutes of use. Problem, right? Wrong! You just get a a few units that are good for 1 or 2 billion years and throw them into the mix. Then your mean value skyrockets into millions! The median or mode averages won't suffer from the same distortion.
Of course if we are dealing with a reasonable, wishfully thinking a normally distributed sample, then of course I would like to know the variance and standard deviation for the sample. This will tell us if all the drives plug away for exactly 5 million years, or if they are just as likely to last 1 million years or 9 million years, or anywhere inbetween or even outside of that.
But all that extra information isn't provided to us. We just get the mean. On its own, mean doesn't mean much at all.
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Where these numbers were smashed?
I suggest: "the Google-net war of 2010" after Google becomes self aware (of adwords)
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I would assume hours of use. If you run windows, when you go idle, something's accessing that hard drive (as evidenced by the little blinking light attached to the HDD activity light,) an slowly killing away your read/write cycles. OT: If anyone knows how to stop XP from doing that, please let me know. When everything's gone, only 21 processes are running. What in the hel is accessing my hard drive, I don't know. BOT: As it stands, I'll not really expect this to last very long. If they used the PRAM technology mentioned a few days ago, those 5 million hours of real-time constant use might be a decent estimate. NAND, I'm not so up on the technical specs, so I can't quite give an accurate comparison at this moment.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
By then it'll be like keeping a 5.25' disk. Sure I still have 3 drives lying around but I wouldnt dream of using them.
It's going to come down to cost. The size is just the market segment they are starting off in.
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1914-1918 was a pretty good war, but I wouldn't go as far as to say it was great. The storyline was pretty weak, especially the beginning, and the effects left a lot to be desired. Hardly any of it was even in colour, and yeah I know black and white's supposed to be all "artsy" but I'd say it's more pretentious.
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