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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.
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.
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.
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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