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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.'"
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.
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.
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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?
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?)
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
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.
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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.
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
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.
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."