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Alienware Puts 64GB Solid-State Drives In Desktops
Lucas123 writes "In the face of Seagate's announcement this week of a new hybrid drive, Dell subsidiary Alienware just upped the ante by doubling the capacity of its desktop solid-state disk drives to 64 GB. Dell has remained silent on the solid-state disk front since announcing a 32-GB solid-state option for its Latitude D420 and D629 ATG notebook computers earlier this year. Now, Alienware seems to be telling users to bypass hybrid drives altogether. 'Hybrid we consider to be a Band-Aid approach to solid state,' said Marc Diana, Alienware's product marketing manager 'Solid state pretty much puts hybrid in an obsolete class right now.'"
No idea who modded this 'underrated,' but those buses have nothing to do with this. The AGP bus never had any effect on storage performance (isolated), the PCIe bus is much faster than storage, etc. The IDE controller is on the Southbridge, and it's not bottlenecking. Storage is the bottleneck more often than not (seek times and raw speed). Will this cut down on seek times? Yes. Solid-state storage has nigh-instantaneous seek times, since there aren't any heads seeking.
"The more corrupt a society, the more numerous are its laws." -Tacticus
Most flash controllers remap the sectors on the fly to ensure that the memory is not worn down prematurely. So if you rewrite the same logical sector 5 times over, a chance exists that you'll get 5 different physical sectors.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
- Flash used to have a limit of about 500,000 read/writes. That limit has since been surpassed. I gather it can exceed 1 million now, though Wikipedia still says the former.
- Although it wasn't addressed in the article (dammit), it has often been suggested that some on-disk monitoring and allocation mechanism will prevent areas from burning-out, or from being used if they do burn out. (This will be a particular issue for page/swap/scratch-files)
- Given that hard drives usually have a MTBF of something like 3-5 years, the technology only has to be good enough to meet that standard before it becomes as technically viable as HDDs.
- Given its other advantages over existing HDDs (even hybrids), I imagine that it will be considered viable - especially in laptops - long before it reaches that level of robustness.
Can I just say, it's about time they brought out a version that could compare with existing low-end laptop drives in terms of capacity. If you ask me, that's what was really holding back the big-spenders from buying into this tech.Meta will eat itself
The PCI bus isn't a bottleneck until you start getting over 120 megs a second down from a hard disk. Basic parallel PCI transfers up to 133 megs per second, theoretical, and even a single lane of PCI-e is quicker than that.
The term is "Wear Leveling", and it's built into standards like SD Cards. Doing a quick Google search produces white papers like this one:
http://www.stec-inc.com/downloads/AN-0702_STEC_SMALL_CARDS_WEAR_LEVELING_LIFETIME_CALCULATOR.pdf
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Given that hard drives usually have a MTBF of something like 3-5 years
Pet peeve: MTBF is not life expectancy, it's the average time between failures if you replace the drives before they are expected to die. Common MTBF are currently anywhere between 50 and 150 years (mostly made up numbers), whereas life expectancy is in the 3-5 years range (at best).
sic transit gloria mundi
I have a Latitude D430 for work with a 32GB SSD, and while it isn't noticeably faster than the guy next to me that has a standard HDD in the same machine, my battery life is WAY better. I'm getting 10+ hours with the extended battery out of the thing. And, I'm not as scared about losing data due to a dropped laptop. (Networking = frequently dropped laptops!)
Me fail English? That's unpossible!
I don't get it. Modern flash has 1M+ write cycles, and we might presume that there is some rudimentary write balancing in these drives. If you work 1GB of cache (not unlikely, and probably on the low side for Vista), I get 8Gb x 1M writes = 8x10^15 write operations before your 1GB area fails completely. Using load balancing, and dynamic reallocation of a 64GB disc, but taking the "limit" of useability at 50% of the write cycles before you are might start to worry, how long does it take to write 256x10^15 bits (8x10^15 x 64GB x 50%)? Well, TFA didn't give write speeds, so I'm going to presume a ludicrous write speed of 50MB/s (I'm not aware of any consumer-grade flash that writes that fast). 50x8=400Mb/s or 4x10^8 b/s. So if I've got my exponents correct, that put the 50% threshold at an even 64x10^7 seconds, or about 177,777 hours of continuous writes, or only about 20 years. That presumes you actually have your machine (a) never reading the cache, and (b) never writing anything else to the disk, since the entire bandwidth taken up by the cache writing and (c) it's doing this 24/7 (as I presume Vista attempts to do).
And at this point, your drive will be through 50% of it's theoretical write-cycle life. And about 1/1000 the capacity of the drive you would be able to buy for $100 to replace it.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
These days (well, since YEARS ago now) we have this thing called Wear Leveling which means you can't wear out NAND flash by simply writing over the same portion over and over again. The writes get spread around other areas instead.
It hasn't been possible to kill a (decent) solid state drive like this in a very long time now. Please don't misinform people.