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

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: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'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.

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: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.