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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. MTBF by Eternauta3k · · Score: 5, Interesting

    '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.'"
    Is this hours of use or "real time" hours? I don't know about other people but my pendrives spend most of their time disconnected.
    --
    Yeah. Would you choose a neurosurgeon who pokes around people's brains in his spare time? I wouldn't.
    1. Re:MTBF by Target+Drone · · Score: 3, Insightful

      5 000 000 hours = 570.397764 years I don't know how Intel came up with those numbers

      From the wikipedia article

      Many manufacturers seem to exaggerate the numbers to sell more products (i.e.) Hard Drives to accomplish one of two goals: sell more product or sell for a higher price. A common way that this is done is to define the MTBF as counting only those failures that occur before the expected "wear-out" time of the device. Continuing with the example of hard drives, these devices have a definite wear-out mechanism as their spindle bearings wear down, perhaps limiting the life of the drive to five or ten years (say fifty to a hundred thousand hours). But the stated MTBF is often many hundreds of thousands of hours and only considers those other failures that occur before the expected wear-out of the spindle bearings.
    2. Re:MTBF by smallfries · · Score: 4, Funny

      Yes of course they tested them for 5 million hours, after all it's only 570 years. Don't you know your ancient history? The legend of Intelia and their flashious memerious from 1437AD?

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  2. WTF? by xantho · · Score: 3, Insightful

    2,000,000 hours = 228 years and 4 months or so. Who the hell cares if you make it to 5,000,000?

    1. Re:WTF? by Kenja · · Score: 4, Insightful
      "2,000,000 hours = 228 years and 4 months or so. Who the hell cares if you make it to 5,000,000?"

      Mean time between failures is not a hard perdiction of when things will break. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MTBF

      --

      "Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. Re:Wear leveling in hardware by EmbeddedJanitor · · Score: 3, Interesting
    The cards with internal controllers do something like you say and you can thead the SD or SmartMedia specs for details. They manage a "free pool" primarily as a way to address bad blocks, but this also provides a degree of wear levelling.

    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.
  6. Re:Why? what does it matter by Reason58 · · Score: 5, Funny

    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. In 20 years from now, when hard drive capacity is measured in yottabytes, will you really be carrying around a 512MB thumbdrive you bought for $20 back before the Great War of 2010?