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Seagate to Offer Solid State Drives in 2008
Lucas123 writes "Seagate will introduce drives based on flash memory in various storage capacities across its range of products including desktop and notebook PCs, according to Sumner Lemon at IDG News Service. The drives are expected to consume less power (longer battery life), offer faster data transfer rates and be more rugged than spinning disk, which has moving parts that can be damaged from an impact."
I think the 160 GB refers to the hybrid disks Seagate also has in their lineup (which are also mentioned in TFA). Would be more logical too because even with todays cheap flash prices, a 160 GB flash drive would still be relatively pricey.
Flash memory can die?
THen Why not ordinary RAM on top of a normal drive?
When I first bought a hard drive it had less capacity than all the RAM on this computer, and it was a big drive. The salesperson laughed at me thinking there was no way to fill it. And I paid more for the drive than I paid for this RAM by a factor of 2 or 3.
UPS + RAM + disk drive - cache all the stuff you use a lot in RAM, and it's all good. I suppose even Flash can be used for the Program Files and Windows folders.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
I suspect that the levelling off of consumer drives is due to there being not enough demand by average consumers. I myself am a bit of a file hog, but a 500GB drive would still hold all my dvd rips and music. Now I'm sure that's average or less for folks around here, but I bet most people are satisfied with the wimpy 80-160GB drives that come with their computer.
On the other hand, flash storage is at that point where it's almost enough for a lot of people but not quite, so the companies are probably working even harder now to get it past the tipping point. I read somewhere that Samsung has stated they will double flash sizes every year for the foreseeable future.
Free the Quark 3 from asymptotic confinement! Bring your charm! Don't get down! All colours and flavours welcome!
Am I safe in assuming SATA transfer rates are sufficient to handle a SSD?
Will it move choke points elsewhere on the system?
I'd like to know what other practical benefits such would have other than lower power consumption and durability.
Someone hates these cans.
I'm not sure flash drives need to meet and exceed conventional drives in capacity (maybe that's why conventional drives have slowed in growth)? I like to use virtual machines for development, but never had the right medium to work on them, exchange them between developers, etc. They're just to big to swap easily by network, external hard drives are too big and fragile, etc. But now I see 16 GB usb flash drives are available, and only $130 to boot! I'm going to try installing a VM on one and buy a few more if it works well. 16 GB is PLENTY for installing a linux development environment, and I think for XP, too. Vista, I don't know.
I wonder to what extent current high capacity HDs owe their high power consumption to the needs of high performance (low access time and high bandwidth). But if a large flash cache (say 4-16 GB) buffers the HD, then the HD mechanism could be redesigned to a much lower spec. I'd bet that a ultraslow 300 RPM platter with a stepper-motor head (versus the 4200 to 7500 rpm platter + voice coil technology currently used) would provide adequate performance (and low power consumption) if flash handled the vast majority of accesses and high speed read-writes. The physical disk mechanism would only need to support a bandwidth of about 2-3 Mbytes/sec (for a sustained read of an HD video stream) and flash would provide the 80-150 MBytes/sec burst bandwidth to compete with current laptop drives. (Hardcore video editors wouldn't use this device, but then they wouldn't use most of the low-power laptops on the market anyway).
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
The problem with Flash (~$12:GB) drives as replacements for rotating magnetic hard drives (~$0.18:GB) is that Flash is a lot more expensive, and Flash wears out after relatively few rewrites. RAM (~$35:GB) is even more expensive, but it doesn't wear out and has much faster performance.
For smaller storage (<10GB, for mobiles), what about a Flash drive with a RAM cache? That gets flushed to Flash once every hour or day or so. For that matter, how come we never saw magnetic drives with builtin RAM caches in the GB scale, occasionally written (in parallel) back to the magnetic disc for reliability? We can set up RAMdisks in SW, but that eats main memory and takes extra configuration. Magnetic or Flash drives with big RAM caches would have much higher performance, and HD vendors could diversify in their extremely competitive market.
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make install -not war
ZFS will. Traditional RAID may suffer though: all the drives will have the same write pattern. Make sure your flash drives aren't all the same age!
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
How do you know that the drive will evenly distribute writes per cell? Its more likely that some cells may remain untouched, which other cells may get written or changed much more frequently.
In America we are imprisoned by our fear of them.
No. Why would it? If you're using a RAM-based medium, any block is read with essentially identical speed. So if you're using a mechanism that's optimized for mechanical storage, or using one that just allocates blocks sequentially, or one that allocates them completely randomly, or one that tries as hard as possible to *slow down* reads from hard disks, it all makes no difference. From a RAM-based system, they'll all work equally well.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
Given your comment... what does this do to data recovery, when one DOES fail?
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
If we go back about 20 years, hard drives were for non-volatile fast-access storage, and tape drives were for backup, bulk data storage, archiving and sometimes data transfer (when there was too much for floppies.)
Now that flash is reaching the point where we can contemplate using it for the primary non-volatile storage niche, we may see hard drives being displaced into the backup/bulk storage/archiving niches. If so, expect to see increasing emphasis on ways to hot-plug hard drives into your computer, and increasing emphasis on price/GB and decreasing emphasis on performance and possibly per-drive capacity.
We'll really know we've reached this point when hard drives are used as a medium for delivering software.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
Flash drives are basically goodness by most measures -- more reliable, quiet, less power use, and faster (or at least, the potential to be far faster than mechanical drives).
... POP!". The motherboard was fried, and as it turned out so was the hard drive, probably due to a voltage spike. But a data recovery service was still able to recover the data from the physical platters. I guess with flash drives, those days will be history -- when a flash drive is gone, it's probably gone for good.
But a friend's recent experience with liquid spilled on a laptop illustrates an interesting point about recoverability. The laptop went, and I quote, "bzzzt
Guys, hate to break it to you, but anyone who wants to be running on solid state, is.
3 IDE-CF adapters cost me 8$ including shipment on ebay last week. My game box runs of a 16GB CF card (200$ - new - on ebay, available for months now) with vista (yes, vista on a 22MB/sec CF, though I've gotten it there via ghosting rather than via a regular install), and my living room PC runs XP off a 2GB CF card that cost about 25$ new (again, ebay price, store prices typically a tad higher).
Yes, 20MB/sec is less than the 50-70MB/sec read speed an average harddrive gives, but that is offset by near-zero seek times.
If under windows, make sure you turn off:
* SWAP
* ntfs Access time writes (fs tuning utility, one command from shell, or a reg key)
And if you want to be even more thorough and flash-friendly:
* 8_3 filename writes (in ntfs every file has two filenames one that is backwards-compatible to 8_3 naming. No need to waste CF writes on that)
* Any software that routinely writes stuff to disk.
If you're fanatic, do:
* Event logger
* Indexing
If you want >16GB, you can buy several, then use LVM/dynamic disk/multiple partitions depending on your OS to use that.
I just have the core 16GB (about 8GB occupied) on the game box, and do the rest of the storage (aka keep the Program Files directory) on the RAID5 fileserver over Gigabit LAN, which gives me about 40MB/sec read and write, which is IMHO sufficient. Were I not to rely on that, I'd get another two 16GB cards on a CF-IDE adapter, plonk a RAID0 on them and voilla (assuming you can get windows to make dynamic disks of removable storage, which the CF cards are still recognized as, even when on the IDE bus), which I am by no means certain.
If you're on Linux, no problem there. anything and verything can be raided and LVM'd at will.
A RAID0 of these would cost 400$, give 32GB and give about 40MB/sec performance.
So no need to get overly excited with SSD. They're just an overpriced nicely bundled version of what is already cheaply available, kinda like external harddrives. And they'll keep on being that for a while yet.
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Yeh sure, and 640K ought to be enough for anybody.
Come on, in a perfect world where people backup once a day a million rewrites would be fine, however when people start running apps on these things there can easily be a million rewrites in a few minutes.
And what about the OS updating the time last accessed date for the file?
It would take one sneaky program (malicious or just bad design) to wipe out a flash drive in no time.
You are correct, flash memory capacity is growing faster than hard drive capacity. My guess is that this is due to the fact that flash technology is still relatively new where as hard drives have been around since the 50s. Hard drive technology is "old tech" where as flash memory (specifically NAND flash) has just recently come into the spotlight.
I did some quick google searching and found articles dated 2005 announcing that flash storage had reached the 2GB mark and hard drives had reached the 500GB mark. Two years later, flash drives are now at the 64GB mark (32x increase from 2005) and hard drives are now at the 1TB mark (2x increase from 2005). I doubt flash drives will be able to stick to that large of a growth in capacity for very long though, they will probably slow down to hard drive growth levels within a couple of years (unless some ground breaking technology comes along).
I'm no where near an expert on the subject though, so I could be wrong.
Form factor and driver loading is the problem.
You can easilly buy wiring/form factor adaptors that take a CF card and fit into a laptop drive bay (though admittedly laptops moving to sata will make this harder). You can then install any OS you like (space permitting but you can easilly buy 16 gigabyte CF cards which should be enough for XP and I suspect if you look arround you can buy ones big enough for vista) with no driver issues at all since as far as the motherboard is concerned it is a standard IDE drive.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Good reply from AC, just to add to that.
1. In my experience, flash memory can sometimes fail totally. This may be due to it being often removable, and accessed in rather non-robust ways, (USB ports, card readers). Hence (presumably) gets nuked by static etc. My attempts at recovering such 'dead' flash devices have not been great, so far. When it's dead, it's dead...even re-format does not work sometimes.
Presumably, internal flash 'disk drive replacements' would be rather more robust.
2. When flash drives first came out, 'classical' data-recovery tools seem to have difficulty recovering from acidental deletes and formats etc., since they seemed (I'm not an expert) to be looking for HDD-like behaviour. I remember reading an interesting paper long ago about the consequences of 'random walk' data storage for recovery... Since then, things have improved, and a lot of tools claim to be/are able to recover data from flash. Of course, I never need these, since I have good backups, ahem.
BTW, I was recently at a client site (for once without my PC and DVDs, CDs, flash drives etc. stuffed with tools) when the sales manager wiped his hard disk. Their in-house IT support was - as usual - no help. I download one of my fav. simple tools,
http://www.snapfiles.com/get/restoration.html
ran it from a USB, copied the undeleted files to a USB HDD and bingo! Another happy customer.
Check it out - if the PC boots (into windoz) it does the job...