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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?
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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.
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2,000,000 hours = 228 years and 4 months or so. Who the hell cares if you make it to 5,000,000?
So on average, it will last 570 years instead of 228?
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.
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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.
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?
Putting a FAT partition onto such a device, or into a file via loop mounting, only gives you wear levelling. It does not buy you integrity. If you eject a FAT file system before mounting it then you are likely to damage the file system (potentially killing all the files in the partition). This might be correctable via a fschk.
Proper flash file systems are designed to be safe from bad unmounts. THese tend to be log structured (eg. YAFFS and JFFS2). Sure, you might lose the data that was in flight, but you should not lose other files. That's why most embedded systems don't use FAT for critical files and only use it where FAT-ness is important (eg. data transfer to a PC).
Engineering is the art of compromise.
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.
"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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