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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.'"
... welcome our 32GB SanDisk Flash hard drive in our laptop overlords. Dammmit. That sucked so bad.
We figured out a long time ago that it's easier to elect seven judges than to elect 132 legislators.
... aren't made by their battery division. ;-)
How would I know if the HDD failed if it no longer has the "click of death"?
Is it true that more people vote for the winner of American Idol, than vote for the president? -Ali G.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
Test your net with Netalyzr
It'd be very handy if the flash could be removed and carried in pocket.
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."
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.
...that's essentially why flash is cheaper.
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.
Q: "Why do sound techs say 'check 1, 2'?"
A: "Cause if they could count any higher they'd be lighting techs."
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."
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
"WebTV: bringing the Internet into the shallow end of the gene pool since 1995" - Martin Bishop
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.
Please help metamoderate.