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.'"

Comments

Re:what does it do to load times?

[evol262]

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.

Great on Battery life

[Poppageorgio]

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!)

Can we let the old "write limits" go now?

[Overzeetop]

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.

Re:Can we let the old "write limits" go now?

[pslam]

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.

Strangely enough, modern flash is about 100k write cycles for high density SLC NAND and 10k writes for MLC NAND. Newer flash actually gets worse as the densities get better.

Even so, with proper wear leveling and sufficient redundancy you can achieve failure rates better than a spinning media. In fact, you can pick the numbers to achieve any arbitrary failure rate.

As for speed - you're correct, no single flash chip is 50MB/sec, but you can stack many of them in parallel and get that. That's a common way of doing it.

I think you're being overly harsh and pessimistic with your figures. There are some workloads you obviously shouldn't pair with a NAND flash, but quite frankly gaming isn't going to stress these things.