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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.'"
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.
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.
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.
Lalala
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.
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It'd be very handy if the flash could be removed and carried in pocket.
Isn't the keyboard the bottleneck in how small a laptop can be?
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...
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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