Dell Releases Flash-Based Laptops

joetheprogrammer writes "Dell has announced that they are going to offer a special configuration option with its Latitude D420 laptop that will allow users to swap clunky old HDs in favor of a 32GB SanDisk Flash hard drive. The only hitch comes with the price tag, which is set at a rather expensive price of $549. This will definitely ensure the laptop is set for a very high-profile consumer. 'The 1.8-inch 32GB SanDisk SSD, which SanDisk announced in January, increases performance by as much as 23 percent and is three and a half times less likely to fail when compared with HDDs currently available for the Latitude line, Dell said. The drive, currently available in North and South America, costs $549 -- on par with the 32GB drive Sony is offering exclusively in Japan for the Type-G Vaio. SanDisk will expand SSD availability to Europe and Asia in the near future.'"

Comments

I for one...

[Corpuscavernosa]

... welcome our 32GB SanDisk Flash hard drive in our laptop overlords. Dammmit. That sucked so bad.

Re:I for one...

[Zeinfeld]

The cost is not very important. Whatever the drive costs today it will cost less in a years time.

What is rather more interesting is what eliminating the hard drive will allow in terms of laptop design. A compact flash card is much smaller than a hard drive, the volume saved will be significant on compact format laptops.

Another interesting difference is that it will be easier to make the drive easily removable on compact laptops. Today this tends to be a feature of the larger models which means that corporate IT depts are less willing to offer compact units.

Re:I for one...

[lee1026]

Isn't the keyboard the bottleneck in how small a laptop can be?

Re:I for one...

[DigitalCrackPipe]

A compact flash card is much smaller than a hard drive

Actually, what the article is talking about is a 1.8 inch drive - the smaller form factor for laptop hard drives, just with no moving parts. The news here is that the flash-based device has the same bus as a hard drive and has enough capacity to replace, rather than complement, the hard drive.

While 1.8 inch drives are already in laptops, this may further push towards smaller drives as flash technology shrinks.

Re:I for one...

[Zeinfeld]

Actually, what the article is talking about is a 1.8 inch drive - the smaller form factor for laptop hard drives, just with no moving parts.

The form factor is not relevant here since the flash drive is merely an option on an existing chasis. We won't see any size reduction in the machine until there is a chasis purposed designed for a flash drive.

64Gb compact flash drives are already available - at a price! So there is no difficulty fitting the memory into the machine. And several makers already offer 8Gb SD format cards. It is something of a pity that the HSD format has been cocked up so that it won't stretch beyond 32Gb but there is no understanding idiocy.

Ideally a machine would have three flash slots capable of taking a drive with at least a 32Gb capacity. By the time it is affordable to fill them that is going to be SD/HCSD. That allows for one drive for the boot disk and installed software, a second for user data and a third to back up either of the first two or alternatively to take media from a camera or such.

While the keyboard and screen define two of the important size constraints on a laptop, thickness and weight are equally critical. If you look at the compact format laptops the hard drive is actually a fairly significant constraint on the design. They are certainly a major reliability issue. Moving parts are bad news.

For this all to work though someone has to tell Microsoft that they have to support NTFS on removable media. I am fed up being told that I can't encrypt data on my USB drive.

Re:I for one...

[CastrTroy]

I am fed up being told that I can't encrypt data on my USB drive.

If you want to encrypt the data, just use TrueCrypt. It offers many different ciphers and is available for multiple platforms, including Windows and Linux.

Re:I for one...

[morcego]

Considering the screen on my laptop is twice the size of its keyboard, I would say no.

Re:I for one...

[potat0man]

Not yet it isn't. How many keyboard-sized laptops are there? Not many.

Re:I for one...

[Digital Pizza]

32GB SanDisk Flash hard drives can kill anyone they want! 32GB SanDisk Flash hard drives cut off heads ALL the time and don't even think twice about it. These guys are so crazy and awesome that they flip out ALL the time. I heard that there was this 32GB SanDisk Flash hard drive who was eating at a diner. And when some dude dropped a spoon the 32GB SanDisk Flash hard drive killed the whole town. My friend Mark said that he saw a 32GB SanDisk Flash hard drive totally uppercut some kid just because the kid opened a window.

And that's what I call REAL Ultimate Power!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

If you don't believe that 32GB SanDisk Flash hard drives have REAL Ultimate Power you better get a life right now or they will chop your head off!!! It's an easy choice, if you ask me.

32GB SanDisk Flash hard drives are sooooooooooo sweet that I want to crap my pants. I can't believe it sometimes, but I feel it inside my heart. These guys are totally awesome and that's a fact. 32GB SanDisk Flash hard drives are fast, smooth, cool, strong, powerful, and sweet. I can't wait to start yoga next year. I love 32GB SanDisk Flash hard drives with all of my body (including my pee pee).

Re:I for one...

[Bobartig]

This is not a compact flash drive, its a 1.8" solid state drive. It basically looks the same as the drives you find in an iPod, and about the size as a PCMCIA card.

That being said, compact format laptops have been using these for a while, and they didn't get that much smaller, just a millimeter thinner or so.

I don't really see how this makes drives easier or harder to remove. The big jump in that respect was SATA connectors which have fewer pins and less insertion force. Making a removable drive architecture still introduces the same problems (more points of failure, structural weakness) that make them more expensive than internal ones.

Re:I for one...

[Vexorian]

Isn't the domination of laser media a bigger problem? (Not implying it is, just asking)

Re:I for one...

[andy_t_roo]

this comment is typed on a 14.1 in laptop (dell insperon 640m), it has a full sized keyboard (14 in i think), with only a 2cm margin at the edges. It looks like it would be moderately difficult to engineer this any smaller w/o shrinking the keyboard.

Re:I for one...

[navyjeff]

That reminds me:

How many people out there miss the IBM Thinkpad 701C keyboard?

Re:I for one...

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't the keyboard the bottleneck in how small a laptop can be?

The keyboard is the bottleneck on the width of a laptop. It's not yet the bottleneck on the depth (front to back) of a laptop, nor the thickness. So there's plenty of room for improvement.

Re:I for one...

[soupforare]

I miss subnotebooks of any type. Japan's the only place that gets the goods these days. Even the smallish 12 and 13" models coming out here are widescreen! Ridiculous!

Re:I for one...

[StarkRG]

I'll 1-Up you on that. I've got a 11 inch wide screen. There's the 2cm margin on the edges, and about an inch at the front for the mouse buttons (it's an eraserhead pointer). Really the only problem with the keyboard is the positions of the arrow keys, they're shoved up into where the right shift key is making the shift key the least wide key on the board (and making you hit the up arrow when you meant to hit the shift).

Re:I for one...

[askegg]

To paraphrase Sun: "The keyboard *is* the laptop".

Re:I for one...

[RealGrouchy]

Perhaps for some consumers, but most of the (keyboardless) tablet PCs I've seen have been as big as, or bigger than, most small laptops.

- RG>

Re:I for one...

[evilviper]

Isn't the keyboard the bottleneck in how small a laptop can be?

Nope. I have a full fledged keyboard on my Psion5. It measures about 3x7" and 100WPM+ typing on it is no problem.

Frankly, it looks like notebook manufacturers couldn't design a DECENT keyboard if they had several feet of space to work with... Things can get much smaller, and be EASIER to type on than current notebook keyboards.

The screen size may be a bit of a limit, but only because people have been convinced they need 17" screens by existing displays. Make a smaller screen, with a higher DPI, and widescreen aspect, and it would be just as easily usable.

The only notebook size limit I care about is the CD/DVD... So long as my notebook is large enough to fit a DVD burner, I'm happy with the size of it. How crappy the keyboard is, may be another matter.

Re:I for one...

[pho3nixtar]

Considering the screen on my laptop is twice the size of its keyboard, I would say no. Isn't the point of having a screen to be able to actually see the screen? Personally, I like the fact that my monitor is big enough that I actually have to dilate my pupils in order to see everything on the screen. Gotta keep up that daily exercise regiment for my eyeballs...

Re:I for one...

[morcego]

And that is relevant to the keyboard being or not what limits a laptop size because ?

Re:I for one...

[Anonymous Coward]

Apalling.

Re:I for one...

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't always suitable though, for example I can't use a Truecrypt USB drive in our student PC labs, as I don't have admin rights in there for everyday use. Ditto for any public Internet cafe/conference centre/library PCs, which are probably the most common place you'd want encryption.

Personally I'd be happy if Truecrypt would design a "Truecrypt Explorer" type app, so that I can get stuff in and out of a Truecrypt volume without having to install the driver (think similar to Winzip). At least then I could be fairly safe in the knowledge that at least if my USB pen got lost then it was reasonably secure, even if I'm not taking full advantage of all the security Truecrypt offers.

Re:I for one...

[rbanffy]

The IBM Thinkpad 701 had a very clever mechanism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_keyboard) that kind of folded the keyboard while you were closing the lid. It sure should be a mechanical nightmare, but allowed IBM to reduce the width of that particular model a good one and half inch while maintaining a very comfortable keyboard.

Re:I for one...

[bhiestand]

Nope. I have a full fledged keyboard on my Psion5. It measures about 3x7" and 100WPM+ typing on it is no problem. For you. I have fat fingers. I've tried using those keyboards, and it's nearly impossible for me to type with any accuracy because my fingers have a tendency to hit the neighboring keys. And no, I'm not incredibly fat.

The screen size may be a bit of a limit, but only because people have been convinced they need 17" screens by existing displays. Make a smaller screen, with a higher DPI, and widescreen aspect, and it would be just as easily usable.

The only notebook size limit I care about is the CD/DVD... So long as my notebook is large enough to fit a DVD burner, I'm happy with the size of it. How crappy the keyboard is, may be another matter. I couldn't disagree more. I don't care if the screen has a billion pixels per inch, if the screen is 5" wide I am going to have trouble reading it while it's sitting on my lap. I don't necessarily need a 15" or 17" screen, but I do need it to be a certain proportion of my field of view in order for me to be able to actually read text on it. I'm not even going to go get into eye strain issues here.

It sounds like you simply use your laptop as a portable DVD burner. That's wonderful for you, but many of us need to be able to write or review documents, code, edit photos, create presentations, take notes, read email, and simply work on their laptop. I've tried to replace my laptop with a PDA, but it's simply too difficult to actually be able to see most of a document at once. I don't know many people who would still prefer a laptop over a portable DVD player if their keyboards were unwieldy and the screens painful to read text on.

Re:I for one...

[bkr1_2k]

Volume, and power. Not spinning disks and driving motors will enable a much longer battery-life, I would presume.

Re:I for one...

[Anonymous Coward]

For you. I have fat fingers. I've tried using those keyboards, and it's nearly impossible for me to type with any accuracy because my fingers have a tendency to hit the neighboring keys...

LOL YOU MUST BE INCREDIBLY FAT THEN

...And no, I'm not incredibly fat.

Dammit.

Re:I for one...

[sgtrock]

I'd have to say that you're very likely the exception, not the rule. For example, I can't type 100 WPM on the best keyboard ever made, let alone on one so small. The last time I recorded my time was about 25 years ago, though. I think my best time then was about 35 or 40 wpm, and that was on an IBM Selectric. (Best 'keyboard' ever made, IMO) Nowadays I suppose I'm down to about 20 or less. I spend a lot of time going back and correcting errors due to my fingers getting ahead of my brain. Age'll do that to you. :)

I'll grant you that laptop keyboards aren't all that hot, but still. I need something I can actually use, not an interface so small that it doesn't have any place to rest my hands.

As far as a screen goes? No way do I want something that's only 7" wide. I use a Dell 610 with a 8.5" H x 11.25" W screen at 1024 x 768. I like a lot of text on the screen at once. At this resolution, with this screen size, 8 or 9 point text is readable, but it starts feeling uncomfortable after a while to my old eyes. I find myself going to 10 point more and more. :( Now imagine how I feel on when I get a good 20" LCD monitor at 1600 x 1200 in front of me. w00t! Hog heaven! :)

I'm not saying that I want to lug around a laptop that big, but I sure don't want something as small as the form factor you're talking about, either.

Re:I for one...

[sootman]

I really want to see Apple* make what I call the MacBook Elite:** ~10" screen, ~10 GB flash-based "HD", no optical drive, light, thin, great (10 hours?) battery life. Not your primary "center of your digital life" kind of machine, but a small, light, great-for-traveling secondary one. Maybe some software that would let it sync with your desktop, just like an iPod:
Sync MacBook Elite?
[x] Desktop
[x] Documents
[_] Movies
[x] Music (just part of your collection, like how you manage a Shuffle or Nano)
[_] Pictures
I just bought a 2 GB Sony flash drive for $20--I *know* this could be done economically.

Lots of people value lots of different things about laptops. It'd be great to see one focused solely on those who value portability*** and battery life above all else but who want the power of a laptop with a real OS and a nice big screen and don't want to step all the way down to a PDA.

* Why Apple? 'Cause I like Macs, and there are already tiny Windows laptops.
** MSRP: $1337 :-) Seriously, I'm thinking of the original meaning of "elite."
*** Portable in the backpack/purse/suitcase sense, not the shirt-pocket sense.

Re:I for one...

[zopf]

Hurry up, neural interfaces and practical, wearable display glasses.

Re:I for one...

[RedBear]

Isn't the keyboard the bottleneck in how small a laptop can be?

It shouldn't be. Even full-size keyboards could be made much more compact in various ways: folding keyboards

Re:I for one...

[evilviper]

I've tried using those keyboards, and it's nearly impossible for me to type with any accuracy

The keys are about 3/4ths the size that of a normal keyboard. So, at worst, you could expand that to about 9" wide, and accommodate everyone with fat fingers.

I don't care if the screen has a billion pixels per inch,

It's exceedingly clear you've simply never seen any screens with a very high DPI, and are just jumping to conclusions based on the low-res screens that you currently use.

if the screen is 5" wide I am going to have trouble reading it while it's sitting on my lap.

5" is ridiculous. Based on the keyboard, the minimum width would be 7" anyhow. That makes for about an 11" monitor.

It sounds like you simply use your laptop as a portable DVD burner.

That's complete nonsense. I mentioned CDs only because they are fairly large, and quite necessary on a portable computer. I never even suggested how or if I use it, so you're entirely inventing this in your own mind.

Re:I for one...

[evilviper]

For example, I can't type 100 WPM on the best keyboard ever made, let alone on one so small.

The point was simply that on a compact keyboard (if it has been well designed) you can type just as well as on a full-fledged desktop keyboard. If you can't type well to begin with, of course it's not going to make things better, but it won't make it worse.

I need something I can actually use, not an interface so small that it doesn't have any place to rest my hands.

Resting your hands on a notebook is pretty sub-par to begin with. Assuming it's thin enough, resting your hands on whatever the notebook is resting on, is much more comfortable.

And if you really don't like that, it would still be quite easy to have some kind of wrist rest that slides out when you open the lid.

I use a Dell 610 with a 8.5" H x 11.25" W screen at 1024 x 768.

That's not a very high DPI... That makes all the difference.

You can have a huge, 50" (low-def.) TV, and text will look horrible and completely unreadable on it. Meanwhile, a PC monitor 1/10th the size, with a much higher DPI, is easily readable. DPI is the difference. You simply haven't seen any 7" screens with a very high DPI.

Re:I for one...

[rAiNsT0rm]

That is where design and innovation come into play. There have been attempts such as the swivel/fold out keyboards and many other ideas... now it is time to truly create a better mousetrap. Same with screens, I truly do not need anything more than 12-14 inch for a laptop. If it is a desktop replacement I can always hook into a 17" widescreen, and when I am on a bus, plane, train, automobile, etc. it actually fits. The battery bonus, weight bonus, etc. are also all benefits.

Re:I for one...

[pho3nixtar]

And that is relevant to the keyboard being or not what limits a laptop size because? For make profit glorious speaking english, please.

What I meant was that, just as keyboards/keypads can become too small, so to can the screens that the keyboards/keypads create output for. And it was meant as a slight joke.

Re:I for one...

[sgtrock]

"The point was simply that on a compact keyboard (if it has been well designed) you can type just as well as on a full-fledged desktop keyboard. If you can't type well to begin with, of course it's not going to make things better, but it won't make it worse."

As others have pointed out, the keyboard size that you are talking about would not be comfortable for some segment of the population. Several pointed out that their fingers were too large to fit on keys that small and that close together. I've noticed since I read this that I can keep my fingers on the home keys with just enough room to clear properly as I type on my laptop keyboard. However, it feels small already. I can't imagine that I'd be happy with a keyboard that was crammed into a form factor that was four inches shorter.

"Resting your hands on a notebook is pretty sub-par to begin with. Assuming it's thin enough, resting your hands on whatever the notebook is resting on, is much more comfortable.

And if you really don't like that, it would still be quite easy to have some kind of wrist rest that slides out when you open the lid."

I keep my laptop on my lap. So, I should be resting my wrists on either my legs or a thin sheet of pull out plastic instead of on the relatively sturdy surface of the laptop cover? Or carry around a board or something to put the laptop on?

"That's not a very high DPI... That makes all the difference.

You can have a huge, 50" (low-def.) TV, and text will look horrible and completely unreadable on it. Meanwhile, a PC monitor 1/10th the size, with a much higher DPI, is easily readable. DPI is the difference. You simply haven't seen any 7" screens with a very high DPI."

A higher DPI display would be nice, no doubt. However, I'm having trouble reading 8 or 9 point fonts on paper these days. :(

The point is that all laptops represent a set of design compromises. The current form factor is one that I find very useful. I have no desire to move to a smaller device until someone comes up with a reasonably rugged, halfway decent keyboard that expands to be full sized.

Re:I for one...

[evilviper]

Several pointed out that their fingers were too large to fit on keys that small and that close together.

To which I pointed out that the keys are 3/4ths normal size. Scaling it up to 9" wide would accommodate anyone who can type on a standard keyboard.

I can keep my fingers on the home keys with just enough room to clear properly as I type on my laptop keyboard. [...] I can't imagine that I'd be happy with a keyboard that was crammed into a form factor that was four inches shorter.

Existing laptop keyboards are horribly designed, as I already explained. Bigger, smaller, they'll still be horribly difficult to use, for no good reason.

The "four inches shorter" bit is nonsense. With a different arrangement, you can easily have larger keys, in far less space. Existing laptop keyboards suck. Period.

So, I should be resting my wrists on either my legs or a thin sheet of pull out plastic instead of on the relatively sturdy surface of the laptop cover?

If you'd ever tried it with a flat keyboard, you'd see that it's really quite comfortable to have no wrist rest, even when your keyboard is resting on your lap.

Also "thin" doesn't mean weak or flimsy, by any stretch of the imagination.

A higher DPI display would be nice, no doubt. However, I'm having trouble reading 8 or 9 point fonts on paper these days. :(

Backlighting, sub-pixel rendering, high contrast, and other tricks could make a screen easier to read than paper.

The point is that all laptops represent a set of design compromises.

No, they don't. They represent an utter and total lack of any design at all. No effort was made to make them usable in the slightest. Key placement is practically random. Screen size, type, and placement is just "whatever" costs less, looks good in the specs of the unit, and where ever there is spare room. Disc placement is where ever it fits. Port placement is absolutely random, and based on the layout of the motherboard.

Absolutely no thought is ever put into ergonomics of laptops. Nobody does, so nobody feels they'll lose any customers if they also don't bother. PDAs have ergonomic design, because the tighter constraints absolutely require it, and in turn, you get tiny PDAs that are easier to use than far larger notebooks. Size isn't remotely as important as design.

The current form factor is one that I find very useful.

Of course it works, for loose definitions of the word. You've simply never tried anything smaller, and better designed, so you don't know that it could be much, much better, in even less space.

This could be useful

[Anonymous Coward]

Now Vista will boot in under five minutes.

Re:This could be useful

[__aaclcg7560]

Isn't the minimum disk requirement for Windows Vista set at 40GB? I'm not sure if you would have enough room on a 32GB flash drive to run Vista and minesweeper.

Re:This could be useful

[Celt]

Dell have a special OEM version of Vista that doesn't include minesweeper, this free's up 10GB and allows it to run on the flash drive

Re:This could be useful

[renegadesx]

What if I want to play Solitare?

Re:This could be useful

[Zantetsuken]

Isn't it obvious? You gotta ditch the 15 year old BSD network stack that used to take 500k because it got bloated to make Aero look pretty and keep WMP11 from letting you listen to your music, thus now making the net-stack 5 gig's... and remember "It's a feature, not a bug!"

I hope the Sony drives ...

[WrongSizeGlass]

... aren't made by their battery division. ;-)

Re:I hope the Sony drives ...

[www.famousstamps.org]

Lol.. yeah so what happens when the battery uh.. runs out?

Re:I hope the Sony drives ...

[DeadChobi]

Umm, the same thing that happens to a USB flash drive? Does your digital camera lose its pictures when you take the batteries out?

Re:I hope the Sony drives ...

[www.famousstamps.org]

Ohh right, I thought it just disappears haha Whoops.

Re:I hope the Sony drives ...

[CastrTroy]

I had a Palm 100 that used to erase itself when you took the battery out, or when the memory ran out. I never understood why they didn't use non-volatile memory on those things. Or at least have a backup battery. Even my TI-86 has that.

Re:I hope the Sony drives ...

[Steve001]

CastrTroy wrote:

I had a Palm 100 that used to erase itself when you took the battery out, or when the memory ran out. I never understood why they didn't use non-volatile memory on those things. Or at least have a backup battery. Even my TI-86 has that.

It is possible that at the time PalmPilot was introduced non-volatile memory was too expensive to allow them to use it in an affordable handheld computer. I know another factor was space, where there wasn't enough spare space for one more sticker.

One advantage of volatile memory was it made Palm handhelds fast. No bootup time, just turn it on and, immediately, you are right where you were when you turned it off.

I didn't have a problem with volatile memory. Some of the data on my current handheld (a Palm T/X) has been around for more than 5 years, and the data has moved through at least five different handhelds. The key is to hotsync your handheld regularly, and to quickly swap out the batteries (in less than 1 minute).

How would I know if the HDD failed...

[ForestGrump]

How would I know if the HDD failed if it no longer has the "click of death"?

Re:How would I know if the HDD failed...

[__aaclcg7560]

The "click of death" has been replaced by the "bit bucket clang" to indicate a dying hard drive.

Re:How would I know if the HDD failed...

[bcat24]

You may have been joking, but I'd be seriously interested in knowing this. How exactly does flash memory behave when it fails? The last thing anyone wants is for their drive to silently corrupt data.

Re:How would I know if the HDD failed...

[crabpeople]

Same way as most hard drives: Delayed write fails, disk errors in event viewer, devloping bad blocks, frequently needing chkdsks, bsods.. HDDS make a big fuss when they are failing. Its way easier to diagnose than most things. When in doubt, ghost it and see if theres a performance improvement with the new drive.

That said, ive had flash drives go from working fine to dead in a few short static induced moments. As these drives will be inside the PC and far less likely to be treated like a portable drive, hopefully it won't have those over handling issues.

Re:How would I know if the HDD failed...

[edwardpickman]

How would I know if the HDD failed if it no longer has the "click of death"?

We former owners of Deathstar/Deskstar drives affectionately call that the "Death Rattle".

Re:How would I know if the HDD failed...

[mhmehkri]

No, there will be a flash of death

Re:How would I know if the HDD failed...

[v.dog]

I lost a 1GB flash card in my PDA because it locked up while I was writing to it, and I made the mistake of re-booting. Working at a major electronics retailer, I saw countless people who had fried their MP3 player or pen drive by pulling it out/powering it down without dismounting it first. Would you really want a 32GB drive that could suffer the same fate it you had to reboot after a BSOD?

Re:How would I know if the HDD failed...

[m94mni]

From what I've heard, writing fails first. Thus, unlike platter-based HDDs you can still read the data.

Re:How would I know if the HDD failed...

[Lord Ender]

I had one die suddenly (probably from a power or static issue) and it got REALLY hot. That's a problem hard drives don't have.

yussss

[SuperStretchy]

is three and a half times less likely to fail when compared with HDDs currently available for the Latitude

Ok... now seriously, how reliable are the normal hard drives to begin with? 2 days x 3.5 = a week. yay!

Re:yussss

[sortius_nod]

As someone who supports Dell machines (and no, I'm not a Dell employee), I can attest that in a corporate environment most drives last well into the warranty, if not, past the warranty end date. Our biggest client uses a mix of 90% dell, 10% HP machines. They even fork out for extended warranties just because the machines are so reliable.

We even support older machines that are way out of warranty with a support contract, good old Dell GX150's (P-III, early P-IV). There are some even with original 9GB HDDs in them, which only get replaced due to lack of space, and not from failures.

Re:yussss

[Anonymous Coward]

so say about 1yr or less.

Re:yussss

[SuperStretchy]

The only difference is that it seems you're talking server/workstation-type drives where heat and compact-ness are less of an issue. I've personally had the joy of replacing a laptop hard drive in both my brother's inspiron 6000, my girlfriend's 8000, and a friend's 6000. Granted, one of them I got to work again after I found a program by Steve Gibson (no plugs here, sorry) for hard drive recovery. One of the others has something broken inside (i can hear something bouncing around inside) and in the last one (my favorite) the head took a nose dive into the platter, causing a brain-numbing and eyeball-shaking screech. All died because of heat issues, I assume, but with the amazing amounts of storage now and the ever-decreasing square inchage to put it on, something is bound to give sooner or later or sooner.

Wow

[www.famousstamps.org]

That is so cool.. no more spinning harddisks. YYYeeaahh Baby!!

Re:Wow

[PopeRatzo]

Sounds like a quieter computer to me. Every little bit helps. I use my computer to make music and video and although my computer has gotten quieter over the years, thanks to clever engineering and cooling technology, it would be nice to have no moving parts at all.

You don't realize how loud these things can be until you turn them off.

Re:Wow

[wwpublishing]

Oh yeah.. so true. My 10k RPM Drive is insanely loud. Flash would be a lot faster too right?

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Very unlikely to be faster for at least a little while.
However, it would have much faster seek times.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

"Aw, man, if I was older, I would totally start jacking off right now."

Less likely to fail?

[Anonymous Coward]

"and is three and a half times less likely to fail when compared with HDDs currently available for the Latitude line" Dell said.

I wonder how they tested that. I would think the failure rate of a flash hard drive would be much better. Basic anything you can to break it, would probably also damage components on the motherboard.

Re:Less likely to fail?

[gyrogeerloose]

Is it just me or are there others out there who are bothered by statements like "three and a half times less likely to fail?" From a statistical standpoint, would it not be better to say "less than one-third as likely to fail?"

Re:Less likely to fail?

[iamlucky13]

Yes. They drive me up the wall. How about 3.5 times MTBF or 28% as likely or something like that.

Take a closer look at that statement: 3.5 times (x) less (-) likely

n - 3.5n = -2.5n

What the heck does it mean to say something occurs with a negative frequency?

odd wording

[Anonymous Coward]

The only hitch comes with the price tag, which is set at a rather expensive price of $549.

At first read I thought "WOW!!! A laptop with a 32GB flash drive for $549, that's awesome!!!".

Then I realized that it's the flash drive OPTION that ADDS $549 to the price of the laptop (which I haven't bothered to go look up). Nice going.

Re:odd wording

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, that was my reaction too...

Re:odd wording

[fistynuts]

Me too.

Having said that, 270ukp for a fast 32Gb drive isn't as silly as it sounds. I can certainly remember 10,000rpm Raptors selling for similar prices.

Read/Write speed?

[Manos_Of_Fate]

I was under the impression that while flash drives boasted impressive read speeds, they were fairly plodding in the write speed department. Am I mistaken?

Re:Read/Write speed?

[Tackhead]

> I was under the impression that while flash drives boasted impressive read speeds, they were fairly plodding in the write speed department. Am I mistaken?

If you're using an SSD in a laptop, you've got a pretty reliable way of powering a huge on-drive write cache. Even a "drained" laptop battery will have no trouble powering a solid state drive for a few seconds after the power-hungry CPU and display have shut down.

Re:Read/Write speed?

[Echnin]

Well, IMHO read spead is more important anyway, at least for most users. If you're going to work with a lot of data, you'll probably want a bigger drive than 32 GB anyway. Now, with faster read speed, applications such as Office and Photoshop and such will start up a lot faster. Swap file access will also be faster (arbuably, just installing 8 GB of RAM or whatever might be more economical and effective). Anyway, it'll be a lot *snappier*!

I wonder if we in the near future will see hybrid systems with flash-based drives for applications and swap space, and hard disk drives for data storage.

Re:Read/Write speed?

[prelelat]

I think I remember reading about a drive that did just as your talking about, it had a hard drive platter but the most used files(say your swap or cache file) would be pulled to the solid state as well as the OS so that load times with the OS were faster but you had the cheaper storage. I could be wrong on any aspect of this idea, but I think I remember that..

Re:Read/Write speed?

[harrkev]

Swap file access will also be faster (arbuably, just installing 8 GB of RAM or whatever might be more economical and effective).

Not to stray to far off-topic, but you got me thinking...

At first I thought that you were correct about it being better to use more RAM, but the numbers just don't add up...

DRAM is just a capacitor and a transistor per cell. Any sort of flash memory is more complicated, as you have to provide programming voltages, floating gates, etc.

So, why is it that 1GB of DDR ram will cost about $40 and up, while you can easily get a 1GB USB drive for $10 or less.

Why the price difference? I thought that since DRAM is the densest possible memory, that it would also be cheaper per bit, but the prices on Newegg tell me differently.

I do realize that flash memory is a LOT slower and will wear out after a few years, but using flash for swap space seems like a very cost-effective way of doing things. As first I scoffed as Vista for doing this, but now I am not so sure.

Re:Read/Write speed?

[Anonymous Coward]

Robson technology

Re:Read/Write speed?

[bcat24]

I could be totally wrong, but my guess is that the $40 RAM operates at a speed much higher than the $10 flash drive.

Re:Read/Write speed?

[VCAGuy]

At the end of the day, DRAM costs more than flash because of the frequencies they operate at and byte-addressability. DRAM runs at frequencies starting at 266MHz through the 1GHz range...at those frequencies, the process controls have to be very tight to keep defects down to a good level. Also, DRAM is byte-addressable, meaning that you can write/write just one byte from the DRAM. Byte-addressing means that there have to be row and column leads for every memory location. Further, because DRAM has to be refreshed on a regular basis, the chips have higher heat-dissipation requirements.

Flash memory, on the other hand, is block-addressable, meaning that it is erased and written in blocks (usually anywhere between 32K and 256K). As a consequence, reading flash memory is quick, but writing can be very slow. ...that's essentially why flash is cheaper.

Re:Read/Write speed?

[harrkev]

True enough. However, the speed is a by-product of the design. The important factors in silicon production is:
* Raw silicon area (die size)
* Geometry (smaller features = more money)
* Process yield
* Wafer size
* Number of metal layers

Speed is more like a side-effect of the geometry, and the geometry affects the silicon area and yield.

It is just confusing to me how 1GB of SDRAM is a lot more expensive that 1GB of flash memory, when SDRAM should be smaller and cheaper to make.

Re:Read/Write speed?

[maxume]

Perhaps SDRAM is made in newer fabs.

Re:Read/Write speed?

[edwdig]

Perhaps SDRAM is made in newer fabs.

Maybe in some cases, but definitely not in all. If you check Intel press releases, you'll notice that when they reduce the process size, the first thing they make is flash memory.

Re:Read/Write speed?

[the_ed_dawg]

arbuably, just installing 8 GB of RAM or whatever might be more economical and effective

...at a tremendous power cost. That much RAM will consume (280 mA/1GB x 1.8V x 8GB) ~5 W when idle and (560 mA/1GB x 1.8V x 8GB) ~8 W when busy, as opposed to a flash drive that uses milliwatts. Datasheet available here.

I wonder if we in the near future will see hybrid systems with flash-based drives for applications and swap space, and hard disk drives for data storage.

Most likely. It's just one more layer in the memory hierarchy and can be integrated with the hard disk. IIRC, there are already prototypes with flash as a disk cache.

Re:Read/Write speed?

[evilviper]

I wonder if we in the near future will see hybrid systems with flash-based drives for applications and swap space, and hard disk drives for data storage.

I sure as hell hope not.

Slow "Data" is just as bad as slow "Applications". The Applications have to be doing something, and it's likely they're accessing large volumes of user data, like images, videos, music, etc. Even if you only access a fraction of it at a time, the much slower speed is going to make your flash-based storage system seem quite pointless. I really don't care how fast a program starts up, when I sitting there for 10 minutes waiting for it to save a large file. That goes double for latency...

Re:Read/Write speed?

[samantha]

How slow are we talking about on writes to this beastie compared to hard disk? I can't afford to much slowdown for writes for my usage pattern. So does anyone have the numbers handy?

Re:Read/Write speed?

[Anonymous Coward]

>>It is just confusing to me how 1GB of SDRAM is a lot more expensive that 1GB of flash memory, when SDRAM should be smaller and cheaper to make.

Volume, Volume, Volume. The market right now *demands* Flash memory, so much so that anyone with any kind of excess capacity is churning it out as fast as their fabs can make the stuff. This does two things to the memory market: 1, DRAM prices are flat across the board: even if a company did open up a new fab with a smaller process, they couldn't make new DRAM on it because it wouldn't sell. and 2, the prices of Flash ram have plummeted as everyone with capacity is churning the stuff out at Mach 10.

Your margins on Flash are getting smaller and smaller, but because you're making so damned much of it, you're swimming in profits. Meanwhile you can keep printing DRAM on your "old" fabs, keep selling it at the same price, and because you're still moving a rather constant amount of it, you're still making profits in that market as well. So you see, the expense is not at all from the actual cost of the device, rather the lack of demand and volume forces the price to be high.

Re:Read/Write speed?

[Godji]

Get a 1 or 2 gigabyte USB stick. Install your Linux distribution of choice on it. Now your system runs from flash, while you can keep your /home directory where all your data is on the hard drive. The flash system is also easy to clone or move to another machine, and if you are careful to not let it use the Usb stick for temporary files, won't wear out anytime soon.

It's already here. Now, if you were talking about a *Windows* OS that does this, this will never happen. If nothing else, the size of Windows grows faster than the price-feasible USB stick size / flash hard drive, and you can't control what goes where easily.

Re:Read/Write speed?

[should_be_linear]

Its easy: laws of the market: 1GB of RAM is enough to 99% of users (and many that need more will be happy with 2 x 1GB RAM). So there is no real reason for RAM producers to push for larger RAMs for now (especially when large majority of users run 32-bit systems that couldn't make much use of 4GB RAM modules). On the other side, users want bigger and bigger flash disks and are ready to pay for each extra GB.

Re:Read/Write speed?

[sulimma]

DRAM used to use the single transistor as capacitor. But with shrinking feature sizes the capacitance of these became smaller and smaller. To still be able to store and read out the value reliably special chip features called "stacked capacitors" or "trenches" were implemented. These are extremely dificult to manufacture.
Stacked capcitors essentially are huge cirular towers on top of each transistor.

Additionaly, to achieve high speeds with the very small amount of charge in each cell you need to have short bitlines which result in a large amount of sense amplifiers adding to the area of the chip.

Also, non volatile memories like FLASH inherently make it simple to have redundant memory blocks that are mapped over defective blocks: The factory just stores the mapping table in a hidden memory block. This increases yield significantly.

Re:Read/Write speed?

[Anonymous Coward]

How on earth do you figure that it has higher density? Go take a look at Samsung's website in the semiconductor division. It shows what 1Gb DDR2 SDRAM and soon to be available 32Gb Flash. It also shows that if you take a look at power consumption WAY lower consumption for Flash than SDRAM.

What's the power advantage?

[Babbster]

It'll be interesting to find out how much battery life is extended by replacing the hard drive with flash. The performance advantage doesn't seem that impressive given the high cost, but if replacing traditional hard drives with flash can improve battery life significantly then it could be worthwhile - not only for "traditional" productivity, but for mobile gaming which is severely hindered by power considerations.

Re:What's the power advantage?

[wellingj]

SSD Sata is 220 ma @ 5v.
SSD IDE is 37 ma @ 5v.
source

2.5" 7200rpm IDE on full seek 460 ma @ 5v
2.5" 5400rpm SATA on full seek 420 ma @ 5v
source(I think my calculations are correct)

With the increased seek speed of SSD I'd rather go with the IDE SSD because of the huge power savings.

$549 ????

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know highrolers whom have that much to spend? It's like 5 OLPCs!!!

Re:$549 ????

[Man On Pink Corner]

A D420 is a relatively-nice laptop. I think one page on Michael Dell's corporate-blog thing mentioned that he used one himself. It is hard to configure a usable D420 for less than a couple $K.

Re:$549 ????

[rmm4pi8]

My company's premier page lets me configure a D420 with the SSD, Core Duo, 1gb RAM, and CDRW/DVD drive--a typical arrangement for the road warriors who use these things, for $1800. $417 of that is the difference between a 30gb 4200rpm drive and the SSD. And also note that TFA says this is available on D620's as well. I'm pretty excited given the HDD failure rate for our field techs.

Great for students

[geek]

I know that I've risked a lot of HDD damage over the years at school, lugging this laptop around, dropping it in hallways etc. If the rpice was right and the drive a bit larger, say 70g I'd be very interested. 32g is a little small for me, but on the right track.

Re:Great for students

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually it's 54mm x 8mm x 71mm and weighs 59g. Why would 70g be better?

Re:Great for students

[ross.w]

Wait six months or so. You'll get your wish.

Re:Great for students

[emj]

My hard drives weighs in at 40GB and I had no problem replacing it with a CF card at 16GB.

Re:Great for students

[pilgrim23]

A 32gb flash HD is a GREAT idea. Seems to me, one could make a laptop with a REALY small form factor and spend time protecting other things (Screen, keyboard) then worries about drive saftey. 32gb is plenty for the opsys and a few files. As to other stuff (movies, music); get a external 2.5 enclosure preferably with a firewire port. Firewire needs no external power support on a 2.5 enclosure and, you can get up to a good 100gb using regular tech. Most times you don't need the external anyway so why lug it around; stash the class notes on the flash and head towards the dorm to finish the paper and store permanant on the normal drive. best of both worlds...

Re:Great for students

[La Fortezza]

That's a great idea EXCEPT I have yet to see a non-Apple laptop with a powered 6-pin firewire plug. Yeah, you can get an add-on PCMCIA firewire adapter with 6 pin plugs but of the ones I've seen, they too are un-powered.

Re:Great for students

[pilgrim23]

good point. so...get a Macbook, pull the drive, slap in the card, load OS X then load either Parallels or use Bootcamp and install XP (or something more vistarded). done.

Re:Great for students

[Anonymous Coward]

USB 2.5 inch drives also don't need any other power source, and work with everything. The firewire-referencing poster is just being a misleading Mac fanboy...

Wowie!

[Wylfing]

Flesh-based laptops, woohoo!

Oh...darn.

Re:Wowie!

[ettlz]

You're not one of those people who prefer a nipple to a touchpad, are you?

Re:Wowie!

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

You're not one of those people who prefer a nipple to a touchpad, are you?

What kind of nipple sits in the middle of a crack?
We always called them 'clits' where I come from.

Neat to see

[Skadet]

It's neat to see a consumer-level incarnation of this technology. I don't think I'm going out on a limb by saying that solid-state storage will be the norm in portable devices where impact is a real liability -- after all, the iPod kind of pioneered that. Even with impact-protection devices like the ones Apple has for their hard drives, physical damage is still a real-world problem. The faster access times are a welcome benefit, but for now are not the main focus. So, kudos to Dell. The "rather expensive" price will fall, and it'll become the norm. It will be interesting to see how much more bloated apps become when access time isn't an issue.

Re:Neat to see

[Weezul]

It will be interesting to see how much more bloated apps become when access time isn't an issue.

Yes, but massively increasing the price of storage, and reducing the maximum capasity, will help fight other bloat too.

Devils Advocate

[fishthegeek]

This is a long time coming, and I'm excited about this but has anyone really considered that one of the benefits of mechanical storage is that the data can still be pretty easily recovered if the hdd isn't bootable any longer. How easy or difficult would it be to recover data from an SSD drive if it isn't bootable? I'm thinking that putting it in the freezer just isn't going to work any more.

Re:Devils Advocate

[bcat24]

Couldn't you just connect the SSD to another computer as a secondary device and access the undamaged data, like you can do with hard drives right now?

Re:Devils Advocate

[wellingj]

I disagree because you will be able to use a logic levels to read the data. So instead of having more specialized hardware you will need more specialized software and some minor hardware hacking (hack an old usb key) to get the data out. I would also guess that there probably be less random data corruption compared to magnetic problems of HDD. Can any experts on stuff like this comment, because I just did a lot of guess work (^^;

Re:Requiem for Macintosh: 36% Growth

[Anonymous Coward]

what does this have to do with the parent, the topic or with Mac being over? I'm not sure but did you even post into the right topic?

two questions

[free space]

1- Why only 23% faster? I thought mechanical HDD's were the bottleneck in modern computers and that replacing them with purely electornic components would make the machine run many times faster.

2- Must the users permenantly use the solid state drive, or can it be replaced/hotswapped with a normal hard drive when storage capacity is needed more than speed?

Re:two questions

[NerveGas]

Flash-based drives have MUCH lower latency than spindle-based disks. If your drive has an average seek time of, say, 15 milliseconds, you're limitted to about 60 I/O operations per second no matter how little bandwidth you're using. While the actual transfer speed of flash is roughly similar to a current hard drive, the decrease in latency will be very appreciated in some situations.

Re:two questions

[Brad1138]

#1- That was my thought also. The time it takes for a computer to boot is mostly due to the "slow" transfer of files from the HD. You would think it would boot a LOT faster and run a lot faster. The answer is probably that if you have enough memory on your computer, you aren't using your HD that much, mainly for loading programs and booting, the rest of the time it is running from memory that is faster than flash mem or the HD anyway.

Re:two questions

[NC-17]

Sandisk has a demo of laptop boot/shutdown times on youtube here: http://youtube.com/watch?v=SBhj56gIUuA

It impressed me, sign me up when the 64gb ssds are ~$200.

Re:two questions

[evilviper]

1- Why only 23% faster? I thought mechanical HDD's were the bottleneck in modern computers

The main reason is probably just that Flash is slow. If you had sticks of DDR400 in there, instead of Flash, it would probably scream along.

The HDD is considered to be the bottleneck these days, but it's not significantly behind the CPU... If there was a sudden jump in HDD speed, the CPU would be the biggest concern once again. And, in fact, the bottleneck depends on your workload... When I want to encode a video, the CPU is the bottleneck. When I want to edit a video, the disk is definitely the bottleneck.

HDDs generally get a bad rap, through no fault of their own. They're actually pretty damn fast for their purpose, though capacity is growing faster than performance can, and causing issues that way. Their reliability is better than many solid-state components in my experience, but every time a motherboard dies, people brush it off, but when an HDD dies, their data is GONE, and they rant for the next 10 years about how moving parts in computers are horrible, even though it's just as likely that the on-board electronics failed, as anything mechanical.

Re:two questions

[Anonymous Coward]

1- Why only 23% faster? I thought mechanical HDD's were the bottleneck in modern computers and that replacing them with purely electornic components would make the machine run many times faster. I was wondering about that too. The access time should be a lot shorter.

2- Must the users permenantly use the solid state drive, or can it be replaced/hotswapped with a normal hard drive when storage capacity is needed more than speed? Just get an external hard drive and put your media files there.

Re:two questions

[Lord Ender]

While the actual transfer speed of flash is roughly similar to a current hard drive

WHAT?? In my tests, mechanical drives were about ten times faster than solid-state drives for data transfer.

Obviously, seek time is almost zero for SSDs, while it is several ms for mechanical drives. But that is the only speed advantage.

Everyone needs to understand this:

Flash drives are slower than hard disks except in cases where only a very small amount of data is being read (meaning seek time is non-negligible in relation to transfer time).

If you are moving files, using audio, video, pictures, or large documents, SSDs will slow you down, at the trade off of increased reliability and energy efficiency.

You're "write"

[Skadet]

I believe you're correct. According to the datasheet for the SanDisk 32GB:
Internal transfer read rate: 62MB/s
Internal transfer write rate: 36MB/s

Whereas, for example, the Maxtor MobileMax 40GB drive (for comparison) says:
Sustained Internal (MB/s) 42

Maybe it averages out?

Re:You're "write"

[WindBourne]

If you are reading a sequential file, then yeah, I can believe 42. But for doing random access (which is in general, what you will do), the heads move. The speed WILL plumet. OTH, for the flashram will remain at the full speed.

What About The Number-Of-Writes Limitation?

[Steve B]

Don't flash drives crap out after a few hundred thousand writes? That may not be a problem for most people's data and apps, but it would play hell with a Windows swap file. (Can a swap file be load-balanced to different parts of the flash drive without overhead that would lose much of the advantages of replacing a hard disk?)

Re:What About The Number-Of-Writes Limitation?

[ross.w]

Safest way around this is to have more regular memory. If you have two gig or more you aren't likely to need a swap file unless you are rendering video or something. You shouldn't be using a laptop like this one for that.

Re:What About The Number-Of-Writes Limitation?

[WolfWithoutAClause]

More like 10 million writes.

I would certainly hope and expect that the flash drive has some kind of wear averaging so that repetitively writing to the swap file moves the hot bits around the harddrive.

Re:What About The Number-Of-Writes Limitation?

[OverlordQ]

According to the SPEC sheet, the MTTF was 2,000,000 hours. Which is above nearly every HD out there. I'd probably be correct in assuming that they figured the write-limit into their testing.

Re:What About The Number-Of-Writes Limitation?

[migmog-gomgim]

Also, how are they coping with the fundamental limitations of flash? As I understand it, on flash you can write a few sectors at one time, you can read as much as you like at a time, but you can't OVERwrite data in place, instead you have to write it somewhere else, and keep a note interally that the original location is now invalid and ought to be erased. Also you have to erase in BIG chunks which takes a long time. AND you also have to copy any data which is still valid to some other location before you can erase. In other words - LOADS of overhead.

So, to fit a filesystem such as NTFS which was designed around the assumption that you can write and overwrite without restriction onto a flash device, there must be a big overhead in marshalling all this data into the flash.

In addition, the device has to do wear levelling in order to prolong its life given the limit of X write-erase cycles. AND NTFS is notoriously bad for fragmentation. How does the device cope with that?

How would such a device cope with a swapfile, which may have small parts of it being overwritten VERY frequently?

Perhaps this should only be used on a machine with sufficent RAM that swap is not required....????

I'd be very interested in a real life review of a machine with a flash hard drive. I bet there are going to be all sorts of problems with it cropping up over time.

Re:What About The Number-Of-Writes Limitation?

[Timoteo47]

Flash drive technology has advanced over the years including increased the number of writes you can make to the memory cell. Also, the drives use a wear leveling algorithm to spread writes evenly across the entire disk. This is all transparent to the OS. This is really cool stuff and I can't wait to replace the HDD in my laptop.

Re:What About The Number-Of-Writes Limitation?

[LnxAddct]

That was the case 5 years ago. Flash drives have long since matched and beaten regular harddrives on reads/writes. The only aspect where they aren't superior to spindle based hard drives is in cost.
Regards,
Steve

Re:What About The Number-Of-Writes Limitation?

[Anonymous Coward]

That reminds me that if you use tools such as Sysinternal's (now Microsoft's) FileMon, RegMon, or Process Monitor, you will notice that Windowze XP keeps on overwriting the same file and registry over and over every few seconds, even when the system is idle, has no connection, and has no scheduled tasks. If you think it's bad that virtual memory goes corrupt, just imagine what will 1 million write cycles do to the registry!

Re:What About The Number-Of-Writes Limitation?

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

From StorageSearch

The way that SSD oems deal with the management of write endurance internally within their products varies but they all have the common theme of scoring how many times a block of memory has been written to, and then reallocating physical blocks to logical blocks dynamically and transparently to spread the laod across the whole disk. In a well designed flash SSD you would have to write to the whole disk the endurance number of cycles to be in danger.

For this illustrative calculation I'm going to pick the following parameters:-
Configuration -- a single flash SSD. (Using more disks in an array could increase the operating life.)
Write endurance rating -- 2 million cycles. (The typical range today for flash SSDs is from 1 to 5 million. The technology trend has been for this to get better.)
Sustained write speed -- 80M bytes / sec (That's the fastest for a flash SSD available today and assumes that the data is being written in big DMA blocks.)
Capacity -- 64G bytes (Actually single flash SSDs are available with 160G capacity in 2.5" form factor from Adtron and 155G in a 3.5" form factor from BiTMICRO Networks. The bigger the capacity - the longer the operating life - in the write endurance context.)

To get that very high speed the process will have to write big blocks (which also simplifies the calculation).

We assume perfect wear levelling which means we need to fill the disk 2 million times to get to the write endurance limit.

2 million (write endurance) x 64G (capacity) divided by 80M bytes / sec gives the endurance limited life in seconds.

That's a meaningless number - which needs to be divided by seconds in an hour, hours in a day etc etc to give...

The end result of 51 years for the absolute worst case possible.

Re:What About The Number-Of-Writes Limitation?

[Jeremi]

(Can a swap file be load-balanced to different parts of the flash drive without overhead that would lose much of the advantages of replacing a hard disk?)

IIRC, there is often firmware logic in the better flash devices to do that sort of load-levelling in hardware, so you don't have to rely on the computer's OS to do it. Of course, it may be that flash has gotten enough more reliable that that sort of firmware magic isn't even necessary anymore, I don't know.

Re:What About The Number-Of-Writes Limitation?

[samantha]

What a minute. Either this is a fit replacement for hard disks or it is not. If it is not we need to calm down the WooHoo a bit and say much more clearly what it is and isn't good for.

Re:What About The Number-Of-Writes Limitation?

[Sleepy]

>According to the SPEC sheet, the MTTF was 2,000,000 hours.

I don't think it's appropriate to measure flash life in terms of MTBF. Apples and oranges. Oversimplified, there's wear happening to a running hard drive even if there's no read/writes. On a SD card there's "no" wear if there's no writes.

flash memory "wears out" after NNN writes. A good flash chip will distribute that wear evenly over the chip (and I suspect this may be done even if it 'fragments' the file). So the lifetime of a flash media is based on the quality of the media, the amount of writes, and the amount of free space on the flash (because, again, the writes will be distributed and more empty space means greater balance).

I don't have an answer either. :) It depends on your OS even, and how often you patch it, since the very act of uncompressing system patches and updating the OS will affect the "MTBF" of the flash drive. There's also the variable of swap file usage.

Personally, I'd rather see laptops with an internal array of SD memory slots that I can boot off of. This would allow the user to enlarge their disk by plugging in extra cards and incrementally replacing them.

Re:What About The Number-Of-Writes Limitation?

[ross.w]

It is a new device that replaces hard disks in some applications. That range of applications will increase over time as the downsides are overcome and the price comes down. Similar to digital cameras vs film, or cars vs horses & buggies.

a step in the right direction

[techtakeaway]

it's just what laptops needed, and the flash hard drives will only get bigger in capacity.. the fastest drives like SCSI & the 10kRPM SATA2, have always been a bit smaller than their larger slower counterparts. If you need storage on a laptop, get a 500gb drive and put it in an external enclosure, having windows running off a flash drive sounds like it should be great.

Re:a step in the right direction

[DFJA]

having windows running off a flash drive sounds like it should be great.

and having Linux running off a flash driver would be even better.

The REAL use: Ruggidized laptops...

[nweaver]

This would be REALLY good for a ruggidized laptop, as vibration + HDDs are not a pretty combination.

Also, I'd assume this would help on the power budget, and really speed random-access workloads.

Is the flash removable?

[microbee]

It'd be very handy if the flash could be removed and carried in pocket.

Re:Is the flash removable?

[Rosonowski]

Well, there's no reason it couldn't be, with a switch to kill power to the SSD before you pull it, from a sliding tray or the like. I know my inspirion 8200 has only one screw holding the hard drive in the laptop, the rest is secured in a tray that comes out the side.

Re:Is the flash removable?

[Stonent1]

I've had a D420 apart before. The hard drive is underneath the touch pad. It is one of the smaller drives like they used in the iPods. The connector to the laptop is different as well. it is about a 1cm plug on the end of a ribbon cable that is connected to the drive. It appears to be IDE but I'm not sure, it could be SATA. All the the other current Dell laptops are SATA now. With that being said, it is not very easy to remove the drive. You have to take the keyboard out and the palm rest as well.

Re:Is the flash removable?

[Nimey]

Get a USB stick and install your stuff to it. Newegg has 16 GB sticks for between $136 and $200.

On a decently ruggedized laptop, the drive will be encased in rubber or some other shock-absorbing material anyway.

I wonder....

[volpe]

... what the price/performance ratio would be if you took an ordinary 200GB 7200 RPM HDD, dropped the speed down to 4500 RPM, and put in, say, 4 GB of level-2 cache (on top of the 2-8 MB DRAM cache) in flash memory.

Re:I wonder....

[Brad1138]

Isn't that close to what Vista has with ReadyBoost?

Re:I wonder....

[silas_moeckel]

You would nearly half the transfer rate of the drive by dropping the rotational speed. Access time is important when you can not cache the files to memory on read. If you read up on ready boost or whatever vista calls it it seems to only matter on memory starved systems so I would rather put 4GB of primary ram into a system than pay for 4GB of flash on a disk. Sure if your already maxed out in ram (a very expensive proposition for my idea of a workstation) it might start making a difference. The best bang for the buck to increase raw drive performance is raid as most OS's support it in software with very little overhead 2 drives can double your disk performance. Now having said that I would love to see ready boost or similar with something like those asus sata ram cards.

flash is not so bad

[Anonymous Coward]

Back in the 80's that was true. Modern flash designs last longer and are more reliable -- more on the order of 10 million writes (actually, 10 million block erases---you can change 1's to 0's in an individual byte any time you want, but you can't change them back without erasing a rather large chunk at once, usually like 64K). And even then, your OS might be able to detect the bad blocks and avoid using them, allowing the other 98% of the blocks, that haven't had as many writes, to keep being used.

Conventional hard drives wear out and break too. I'm guessing these flash drives last longer than today's conventional hard drives.

Works like a charm

[emj]

I have been doing this on and of for two years, I first bought a 1GB CF and placed it in my PC CARD port so I could use my basic stuff with out using the harddrive. It was very nice, but sadly a bit slow, I think it was the PC-CARD -> IDE converter that was the problem. Then a year ago I bought a IDE 2.5" -> CF converter and a 2GB flash, and it works wonderfullly. The 2 GB is enough for most things, and I get no HD heat, nor noise from it. Wonderfull.

Though the CF converter or CF card I have doesn't support UDMA, which still makes things slow, but it's ok.

Current setup:
X40 + 1GB DRAM + 4GB CF

Re:Works like a charm

[phrasebook]

I thought the X40 had a 1.8" HDD, and with a different connector to regular 1.8's so you were very limited with disk choices. How are you using a 2.5" converter with it?

Clunky??

[Anonymous Coward]

A very loaded word.
Now you can replace your Clunky HD with a Expensive, Tiny, Slow Flash drive.
Not quite on the level of the Optical Mouse vs the Ball Mouse.

Really?

[Corpuscavernosa]

A Troll mod for a bad joke? C'mon...

those seem like pretty crappy specs

[llZENll]

23 percent faster? 3 times less likely to fail? what the hell is going on here? a flash device with 32GB should be able to be striped like crazy and give 100-10000 times the transfer rates than HDD, and with almost 0 access times compared to HDD, they should be 1000 times faster to seek, giving a 100000 - 10000000 times performance increase.

Also with no moving parts they should be about 100-10000 times less likely to fail. And should use about 100x or less power than HDDs. Who is designing these things?

Re:those seem like pretty crappy specs

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't you just love making up statistics.

Re:those seem like pretty crappy specs

[ztransform]

While we're throwing statistics around, last time I checked (which was a while ago) flash chips could be written a maximum of 10,000 or 100,000 times. This makes it useful for recording photographs or storing mp3s, but for a read-write medium that is regularly updated, there are serious risks of wearing out the flash?

Now, most flash drive systems try to minimise the odds of reaching that write number limit by re-assigning pages within the flash unit.

I'd just like more confidence that flash can be overwritten more often before seriously considering using it for anything other than a read-only file system for a laptop.

Re:those seem like pretty crappy specs

[vidarh]

It's more like 100,000 to 10,000,000 depending on how expensive chips you use, and it's per erase unit, and it's not writes but erases. The latter two points are important, because it means that even if erase units are large, you can still write to the erase unit multiple times (until you've filled it), so you can split it into convenient block sizes, and you'd typically either use a flash translation layer or a flash specific filesystem that avoids erasing the unit until there are no free blocks elsewhere to minimize writes. In practice that means you have to have either an extremely high write load or an almost full drive with a medium level of writes to run into problems. A simple way of increasing the reliability then is for the flash drive to have some extra "hidden" capacity and present a smaller logical drive and remap the erase erase units, combined with write leveling (occasionally moving data around even if it hasn't been modified, to move frequently rewritten blocks around the drive).

Re:those seem like pretty crappy specs

[ztransform]

I wonder if flash drives could include a maximum-erase-count for each erase unit, that the operating system could query to get an accurate age of the device (by determining the erase unit with the greatest number of erases).

Then your laptop could say "clone flash drive now.. only 20% of lifetime remaining".

What is special about the hdd versions?

[vanyel]

I've recently tried to install centos and freebsd on various cf cards with an ide adapter (my home router's hard disk is dying), and neither are happy, getting timeouts and various errors. My understanding is that the cf interface is ide, so why should it be a problem?

Re:What is special about the hdd versions?

[emj]

I have no problem at all.. Must be your adapters.

Re:What is special about the hdd versions?

[phrasebook]

Have you tried the CF in another computer? It might be the router itself which is dying.

Re:What is special about the hdd versions?

[vanyel]

Yes, the router remains functional, nothing critical has been lost yet, so I've been testing on another machine, though I did try originally with a 4G PQI cf card in the CF slot in the router machine (a shuttle xpm, only about a year old, but which seems designed to cook drives if you leave the cover on, as is the case with all too many cases).

There have been some indications that the problem is that DMA isn't working, and someone mentioned there's a non-dma mode for linux that I haven't had a chance to try yet, but that seems "unfortunate", though as a router, it's not actually going to do much disk I/O. I'd also prefer to use FreeBSD, as ipfw syntax is actually readable and makes sense to me ;-) (though I'm getting used to iptables since we use a lot of centos at work). FreeBSD is the one actually getting errors though, Centos just times out and is really slow. I need to investigate configuring it for non-dma to see if that solves the problem.

Knowing that it's *supposed* to work is a big help though, I was thinking that there may be some more fundamental problem that would require specific CF support in the kernel...

Re:What is special about the hdd versions?

[Alphix]

Most CF-IDE cards I've used only support PIO, not DMA. Try booting with "ide=nodma"

Re:What is special about the hdd versions?

[toddestan]

You don't have the computer's BIOS set up to spin down the harddrive after a while, do you? Generally, CF cards don't like that much.

Re:What is special about the hdd versions?

[vanyel]

Not if I noticed it, but the systems aren't getting far enough to be idle.

secure deletion

[infolation]

...and how can data be recovered from a flash HD if it fails or is overwritten? Is there a flash-ram equivalent to scanning tunnelling electron microscopy data recovery?

Would a flash HD laptop be the ideal solution for the paranoid? Would this be a way of running an operating system without leaving any unwanted traces of previous activity without needing to boot from a live CD or scrubbing the HD with darius boot and nuke?

Mod parent informative

[volpe]

It seems to be. I wasn't previously aware of ReadyBoost. Thanks for the link.

Not quite big enough

[AbsoluteXyro]

I'll be all over this when the drive sizes start approaching 100GB. Seems perfect for a laptop. Maybe I'm just hard on my stuff, but my laptop drives are always, always fucking up.

Re:Not quite big enough

[flyingfsck]

Buy three and use RAID0.

Flash Disks

[normuser]

Watch for flash disk sales. afew months ago I got some 1GB SD cards for US$10 each.
One of those is enough to install your OS. then one or two for data and your good.

"Old clunky" hard disk drives?

[dfsmith]

Why doesn't Dell supply "new quiet" hard disk drives that the rest of the world uses? B-)

Does anyone have random small block write performance figures?

Supply and Demand

[camperdave]

It's simply a matter of demand. As demand for a product goes up, the price goes up. Demand for DRAM is high, so the price is high. 1G flash drives just don't have the demand, especially with 4G, 16G and higher models in the market.

$540 hd with $15 POS gma 950 video

[Joe The Dragon]

and it comes with windows vista eating up 15GB of that 32gb HD.

Effect on battery life?

[steppin_razor_LA]

I'd be very interested to know what sort of effects this has on battery life? I'm not sure how much energy the CPU vs Screen vs HD consume...

Re:Effect on battery life?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd be very interested to know what sort of effects this has on battery life?

Is that a question or a statement?

You can't just make a statement and add a question mark on the end. I'm sick of seeing people do this (usually on the web and more so in emails).

Re:Effect on battery life?

[Mikeeee84]

An interesting chart showing power use comparison can be found here

high MTTF != reliable

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the so-called 1 million hr MTTF 'enterprise' hard drives are no more reliable than their economical counterparts. In the case of flash-based drive, there aren't even any known long-term reliability reports, so the estimate means nothing.

Re:high MTTF != reliable

[Anonymous Coward]

Links for those who don't bother to read the whole article:

[1] http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2099467,00.as p
[2] http://blog.godshell.com/blog/index.php?/categorie s/2-Technology

CAN have lower latency

[SuperBanana]

Flash-based drives have MUCH lower latency than spindle-based disks.

That should read "CAN have much lower latency." I've seen USB flash drives tested that had +100ms seek times, and it's not always the 5-6MB/sec class drives; some of the 10-20MB/sec flash drives were this bad. The fastest USB keys are around half a ms or so, which is perhaps a 8x improvement over the fastest magnetic drives.

Flash memory can be glacially slow, have limited number of write cycles and poor reliability, and controllers can be slow as well- and as this stuff gets more into the mainstream, I guarantee some companies will use cheap components to boost profit margins or undercut competitors. We're already seen it in the USB flash drive market; I've witnessed at least a couple of these things get corrupted or stop working after daily use in an office environment, and they were all pretty much no-name brands or freebies.

This competition isn't entirely a bad thing, as the cheap junk will put some pressure on the "good guys" pricing-wise, but the tradeoff is that we'll have to look before we leap with the credit card.

Re:CAN have lower latency

[NerveGas]

USB flash drives are a different matter.... that's like saying that a Lexus might not perform well because a Fiat doesn't.

  =)

As for the limitted write-cycled, yes... but it's worlds different than it was in the old days, when flash got its bad rep - which was, at the time, deserved.

steve

RAID?

[scooter.higher]

But can you put a few of these flash drives into a RAID array?

Re:Twofo

[Anonymous Coward]

Their computers don't burn very well and let off icky fumes. I prefer cedar chips and hickory logs myself.

High-profile customer?

[TopSpin]

The only hitch comes with the price tag, which is set at a rather expensive price of $549. While I've seen many people saddled with low-end laptops I have never spent less than $2K for a personal laptop or had an employer pay less for hardware with which I was expected to do my job. Breaking $2K for a laptop is easy; just spec enough resolution and RAM for the desktop replacement role and you're there. I have also spent >$500 on good disks for both personal and professional use.

I predict Dell will be surprised by the number of customers that opt for this. Disks are slow, vulnerable power sinks. A laptop with a solid-state disk offers a lot of value. These disks are small but size is only one factor; speed, reliability and efficiency are all equally valid and flash disks measure up well.

Yes, this is early adopter stuff, but $500 is not a deal killer even now. Doesn't really matter much; a year or two from now and it'll be $250-300 and 4-5 years from now it will be default on all but low end products. Think of it this way; prior to sufficiently large solid-state disks the only option was traditional hard drives. All of the people who might have paid more but couldn't now have a choice. Guaranteed success.

Flesh-Based

[General Wesc]

Is this human flesh or other?

Re:Flesh-Based

[Anonymous Coward]

It's made from the flesh of stupid questions.

In the past....

[pecosdave]

I recall a day when a mother board could come with just a little bit of cache onboard, and if you wanted more cache, you could buy chips and stick them into the available sockets..... .....Why don't we do this for long term storage now? Seriously, I would love to buy an SATA "Hard Card" (not to be confused with the old HDD on an ISA slot) that had sockets left open. Six months from now when even MORE dense memory comes out, I would love to just insert chips into those sockets and double my drive space. If made properly, with the obvious expectation of losing data, I wouldn't mind removing some originals for more dense storage. The idea of a USB Thumbdrive array has come to mind, that would be a nice desktop storage box where you send your old thumbdrives to pasture, but it doesn't make much sense on laptop, or even normal desktop scale. How hard would it really be to make upgradeable storage like this? Remember, GParted is your friend

Re:In the past....

[CastrTroy]

I recently bought a USB SD reader. And while it's a little larger than most thumb drives, I think it's nice to have something that's expandable. It's much easier to buy another SD card when they go on sale, and have a couple lying around, then to have a bunch of thumb drives all over the place. I don't know why this isn't more popular. Why buy a USB drive that can only be used in computers, when you can buy an SD card, and have it work in Cameras, PDAs, Computers, Wiis, and many other electronic devices.

Re:In the past....

[pecosdave]

I here you, I have a few of those myself, some of the readers are more portable than the others, but I find them to be quite handy.

Business

[massysett]

This will definitely ensure the laptop is set for a very high-profile consumer.

Not really; Dell markets the Latitudes to enterprises. Even with a $549 drive a Latitude is still cheaper than many Thinkpads.

Wear levelling

[spaceyhackerlady]

I researched flash file systems for a project at work, and they all incorporate wear levelling. I ended up designing my own, since we needed a flat, numbered, record-oriented file system, something JFFS2 (for example) couldn't meet.

Many devices (digital cameras, MP3 players, etc.) use FAT, more-or-less unmodified. This limits them to a few million erase/write cycles on important sectors, but I don't think the average digital camera will last that long.

A flash-based hard drive will have different requirements. I'd be interested in seeing how they handle them, but not $549-interested.

...laura

Who cares

[Romwell]

Who cares about flash based laptops, wait 'till FLESH based laptops come out ! [Note: this is a typicall slashdot comment: I didn't RTFA, nor did I check whether previous commenters have already made stupid flash/flesh puns before me. Likely they did. I wonder how many of those are here already... =)]

why all or nothing?

[3seas]

why can't a system have something like 4 gigs flash for faster (near instant) boot and power failure recovery? While using a hard drive for general storage?

Or is there a patent on this?

Wow....

[SilverBlade2k]

wow, 549 dollars for 32 gigs of space.... One can get 500+ gigs for that amount of cash.. which is the better deal...I wonder..

Apple, where art thou?

[CmdrPorno]

I figured Apple would be the first to market with a flash-based laptop.

Also, a 1.8" drive? Couldn't they fit more storage capacity in a 2.5" drive (the size that most notebooks use? I'm sure it would come at a much higher price than $549, but some people would buy it.

Re:Apple, where art thou?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait 'til January '08. Apple will be releasing a fully solid state notebook with a 12" 1280x800 tablet flip screen backed by an e-ink screen (visible when back lighting is off), fanless 5.5v Core Solo CPU and TBD 2.5" flash drive "pack". External DVD writer possibly included. 6Ah battery for about 6 hours of use. Backlit keyboard. TPM chipset. The case will be translucent and made of new lightweight mix of cubic zirconia and plastic. User and application controlled LEDs throughout the case will allow for color change alerts. Weight goal is 3.2 pounds. Price goal: $2000USD. The name: MacBook Duo.

9c8e36b11d8f08cae18708451dbb1433

Re:Apple, where art thou?

[Anonymous Coward]

With the e-ink display, I thought the battery life would be alot longer. What is the weight target?

Re:Apple, where art thou?

[dmnic]

most of the new "smallish" laptops that have come out the past year or so have switched to the 1.8" form factor. pretty much the only laptops that still use 2.5" HD are 13+ inch "full size" units.

Re:Apple, where art thou?

[Anonymous Coward]

I can almost hear the cream hitting the inside of your pants. Also, I ran your post through a checksum generator and it came out as "FANBOI" :D

Re:Apple, where art thou?

[CmdrPorno]

I'll believe it when I see it. Also, I hope it has a keyboard mounted to it. I like the size and weight, but want an ultraportable with a keyboard--I don't "do" tablets.

Not a classic SSD, Flash is much slower

[gelfling]

It's a flash drive. A 'real' SSD is box of high speed ram backedup with its own power supply and battery. It runs a little slower than RAM speed, accounting for error checking, redundancy and formatting. Flash is NON VOLATILE, SSD is not. Non volatile memory is far slower by its very design.

Re:Not a classic SSD, Flash is much slower

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the term "Solid State Drive" is commonly used to any solid-state-based storage solution which presents a hard disk like interface, regardless of the volatility of the storage medium. While you're quite correct that the historical trend has been for SSDs to use fast volatile memory (with a battery backup), the term has also entered common used for systems using Flash or other non-volatile storage. Which is only fair, given that they're still solid state.

Heads of states and celebrities?

[Anonymous Coward]

...rather expensive price of $549. This will definitely ensure the laptop is set for a very high-profile consumer.

Perhaps the OP means "...set for people who can justify $550 if it saves them $1.20 of their billable time each working day during the likely 2 year use of the product." - eg: anybody who works with computers for a living. I've no affiliation with any of these companies - but $500 is insignificant if it makes for a substantially more productive working environment.

Flash-Based Laptops

[cheesewright]

Did anyone read that as Faith-Based Laptops?

Re:Flash-Based Laptops

[Wolvie MkM]

Shhhhh... Jeebus Loves You.

Re:Requiem for Macintosh: 36% Growth

[Mountaineer1024]

Slashdot needs a few automated moderation procedures.
ie, if anyone tries to post a message with the word "switcheurs" in it, they can't do so whilst anonymous.
Of course that'll only kill this pathetic meme.
But right now, it seems to be the most annoying.

SSD

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no HDD. It has been replaced by a SSD.

System Architecture Change?

[Keitopsis]

I find it more interesting to consider the possibilities for a change in the system architecture.

We have the "pure" SSD devices:

If we have a solid state storage, why do we need to force it into the same protocol actions as a traditional disk? All HDD protocols are based on only being able to read one thing at a time. It strikes me a much simpler transport similar to a "low speed" direct memory management system is the next logical step. Would this remove more of the latency from SSD devices? How many parallel reads could you do if you "rebuilt" the architecture?

I wonder if there is a possibility of an office terminal device that uses non-volatile (but slow) memory directly for execution replacing the faster DRAM entirely. While I doubt this would stress modern processors, but the idea of a functional interactive computer as an embedded device seems intuitively to have its advantages.

and we have the hybrid solid state devices:

If we consider the possibility of having "two systems, one execution" and be able to optimize and load only the most used memory segments rather than moving the entire program into the memory. This would reduce the amount of DRAM a computer would require to have similar performance to current technology.

If we are considering a larger permanent storage solution external to the system, couldn't this be served by a LAN service? Combine a high speed network, and most applications can be served as needed. This is an odd extension of PXE and SaaS services. This has implications to change how applications are developed and licensed.

Then there are other implications:

On the software side, you can also reconsider the idea of file systems. You can idealistically present the file structure in any form you choose now that you are independent of consecutive reads, perhaps even multiples of ways of organizing files at the same time. Possibly the ability of going from a deliberate file structure to a relational database structure based on the installation and back again based on what context is most convenient at the time.

Then again, perhaps this is all just happy dreaming with new technology.

Re:System Architecture Change?

[vidarh]

To your suggestion of execution out of flash: It is possible for some types of flash units, but you still need RAM for working memory - flash typically let you change a bit from one to zero or from zero to one (depending on type of flash) on a bit, byte or word basis, but only let you change it the other way in "erase units" that can range from hundreds of bytes to hundreds of KB at the time depending on the unit. This means that applications not specifically written to use memory that way won't be able to use it as a replacement for normal RAM for data that is both read and written.

What makes it impractical for most modern systems to execute out of flash apart from performance (flash is far slower than DRAM still) is things like relocation. On a limited function embedded device that's often an ok tradeoff (you can often KNOW that the total set of applications that will ever be loaded at the same time won't take up the full address space, so you can use absolute addresses.

Battery and monitor are the limits.

[WindBourne]

Sooner or later, one of the companies is going to get bright and drop the battery and replace it with a capacitor. So what if it only has 1/2 hour charge. That would serve 98% of the times that I am off the power grid. If I can recharge it in under 1 minute AND I never have to replace the battery, I will take it. Then the company needs to offer a snap-on battery for the bottom that allows LONG trips (say 4-6 hours).

Re:Battery and monitor are the limits.

[deficite]

Are you high?

Re:Battery and monitor are the limits.

[Ohreally_factor]

I'm not sure if I'd even need more than 10 minutes of battery time most of the time. Unless I really get caught up in whatever I'm reading or working on, I rarely spend more than 10 minutes sitting on the john.

Re:Battery and monitor are the limits.

[justthinkit]

Businesses could have a charging machine. Pop in a quarter and get 15minutes of juice. I love the idea of saving the weight of a battery, the cost of a battery, the replacement cost of a memory-effect shortened lifespan battery and dispensing with the battery brick to boot. It would also reduce the volume needed to house a laptop, making it smaller. And it would run cooler.

Other than laptop vendors not liking the increased reliability, are there any real obstacles to this?

Re:Battery and monitor are the limits.

[WindBourne]

At first, I was thinking that your juice idea was a bit out there. But in light of where electricity costs are headed, you may be on to something.

Well, the super capacitors are really getting into their own. EEStor will be producing them shortly, but they are looking at it for cars. Likewise, MIT has an interesting idea that they are working on (using nanutubes to increase the surface area). In both cases, the SCs could be used not just for cars, but also computers (and perhaps garden tools).

Forget supply, did you?

[WindBourne]

Right now, flash is at an all time demand. Why? Cameras, Phones, and now this. So what is the issue? Look at the previous posting, where they speak of the speed and need for TOP QA. Flash does not need top QA (in fact, LOTS of holes in most). Flash, in general, uses some of the older manufacturing machines (that is changing due to the demand). Finally, San and others are trying to be as big as Intel so they are normally very competitive.

Mmmm, Karma

[Deliveranc3]

Summary.
Advantages of solid state - Lighter, low access time, lower power, no heat.
Disadvantage - Expensive.
Tweaktown solid state 16GB 2.5 HD Review

_retail_ value of memory $240

[llZENll]

they are making a killing on this thing

http://www.pricewatch.com/flash_card_memory/usb_fl ash_8gb.htm

Already Exists...

[ztynzo]

Granted, no pretty packaging... but for interested parties see:

CF to 2.5in HDD Adapters from the Mini-ITX Online Store...

So for those of you who can deal with lower end capacity, but want the energy efficiency, the performance increases, or reliability and don't want to buy a new Dell, you can adapt this to your situation.

A 32GB 1.8 flash drive? Flash iPod, anyone?

[jimicus]

I know it's been discussed to death, but right now these flash drives are very expensive. A years' time, they'll drop.

Who'd like to replace their old 20GB iPod Photo with a 32GB unit based on Flash with three times the battery life? Form an orderly queue...

Beginning of the end for the hard drive?

[BayaWeaver]

It seems inevitable that the old HDD will go the way of film in cameras. Maybe in another 5-10 years. Perhaps Seagate should start thinking of buying over Sandisk/Lexar.

Re:Requiem for Macintosh: 36% Growth

[Anonymous Coward]

I *do* know the difference between Claris and Clarus, thank you very much, and I still think that Macs suck.

FOAD.

The performance boost is likely to be negligable

[davecb]

Unless, of course, one is running windows (;-))

While Linux isn't quite there yet, my old Tadpole SPARC laptop yields sparkling performance despite having exactly the same unimpressive small-format disk as the departmental XP loaner.

The XP box spends all it's time with the disk queue full, while the Unix box sorts and coalesces its requsts and hardly shows any disk wait at all, as well as loading and starting the same release of Open Office in about 1/3 the time (by wristwatch).

Good algorythms yeild orders of magnitude improvements: good hardware yields small-integer-number improvement. Guess which is the most cost-effective!

--dave

GBA

[tepples]

What if I want to play Solitare? Get VisualBoyAdvance and Herg's Solitaire. Combined, they take less than 1 percent of a GB.

I am amazed

[WindBourne]

at the number of ppl who do not think. Tell me, what is the difference between a DELL, Leveno, toshiba, and a chinese generic laptop? Give up? Other than the label, BASICALLY NOTHING. NADA, ZIP, ZERO, ZILCH. They are all building with nearly the same parts and even the same employees. And they all love the same sony li-ion battery.

Now, if a company switches to a super capacitor for energy (i.e. does something new and interesting like the compaq portable or the apple ipod), It only holds a 1/2 hour worth of energy. But the battery will NEVER need to be changed. In addition, the charge time should be only a couple of minutes. Now, there are ppl who need longer than that. Of course, they can either buy one with batteries, or they could buy this one, but with an external battery. Since it is a clip-on to the bottom, it is pretty good size. That means, that instead of 1.5-2 hours, now, you have 4-6 hours. How many need this? I would guess more than a few.

Re:I am amazed

[diskis]

1: Please find a capacitor that can run a laptop for half an hour
2: Charge it
3: Short it with your fingers
4: Your lack of fingers will now clearly show you the reason why capacitors aren't used in laptops.

replying to signature.

[djshaffer]

> gas, clutch out, clutch in, brake...gas, clutch out, clutch in, brake... Still more satisfying than driving an auto.

Should be: on brake, clutch in, out of 3rd, clutch out, blip throttle, clutch in, in to 2nd, blip throttle, clutch out, off brake, gas, turn in, accelerate through apex. Still the fastest and smoothest way through a slow corner. :-)

Good news for Dell

[jswalter9]

Every Dell laptop my brother purchased has had its HD replaced. That's four out of four.

Re:Requiem for Macintosh: 36% Growth

[itchy92]

I know we're not supposed to acknowledge the trolls, but I've always been tempted to ask: What conceivable sense of fulfillment can it bring to your pathetic, lonely life to post a tired, lame troll to a web discussion forum? Is your world really so desperate and jaded that you copy and paste the same bullshit posts day after day, and then sit back and smile wryly at your own perceived wittiness? Or do you cackle and rub your hands with great fervor, mired in your own deluded daydreams about someone reading your post and actually giving even a quarter of a shit -- let alone two shits-- about your inane, incoherent babbling? I just don't get it, I really don't.

So yes, off-topic, and I apologize, but I just had to ask.

Let me know where the $10 1Gb drives are...

[heybiff]

...becasue I need 30 cheap flash drives ASAP. I see some on sale, or with rebates, but by and large, flash hasn' gotten dirt chep for retail consumers yet. I had trouble even finding olf 32mb or 64MB leftover drives for less than $10. But if you know where they are, let me know. My students can use as many as I can fine, but since I have to pony up the $$, they need to be as cheap as possible.

heybiff

Dell ... Flash ... Laptop ...

[IchBinEinPenguin]

Not really three words you want to see in the same sentence :-)

It's really not that expensive

[GWBasic]

The only hitch comes with the price tag, which is set at a rather expensive price of $549.

Back in the mid-90s I paid about $300 for a 700 megabyte drive. Considering inflation, this is a good price. I might make the jump when I can get an affordable 60-100 gig flash drive.