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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.'"
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The OS has no power to decide which sectors are written to. The drive contains it's own map of the sectors, and does the write-leveling itself. The OS may think it's writing to sector X, but it's really only a logical sector. It could actually be writing to sector A,B, or C. At least that's how I understand it. Of course this only makes sense with solid state drives, because they don't have variable seek times depending on which sector you put the data at.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
I have an old mac laptop, a Powerbook 1400, which was sadly limited to 64MB RAM from the factory. Combined with a slow internal HD, the use of VM to get more use out of it slows it down like a dog. The solution to its limited RAM? Add a flashram PC card, make the VM page to it, and you have a pretty quick workaround.
It's a reasonably well-known hack, and I used this powerbook with flash-based VM storage from 2001 to 2003 as one of my main internet machines, browsing and image editing, and it had a real workout in that time. It's been resting for a few years, but still fires up OK. I've seen perhaps a dozen other people who've done this, and NEVER known of a flash VM card to die.
In short, the longevity issue doesn't need solving, as it isn't an issue for anything but running something like eBay's database server on.
funny, I was checking out the Dell choices the other day since finding out my company has a discount.
They offer a 128GB solid state drive option on their XPS M1730 notebook.
I don't know how long they've offered that but it seems that Dell does have that option.
Earth to Lumpy:
:-D
Flash drives have had wear-leveling as standard for several years.
Now, back to your utra-scuzzy crap kickers.
A couple years ago (Fall 2005) I did my senior engineering project in college using embedded Linux devices which utilized 512MB flash drives (CF) as the only storage mechanism. The devices were basically Soekris boards with Debian and some highly custom WiFi drivers/software designed for mesh networking research. After my project, I was hired on by the research institute which funded the project, so I got to play with these things for a while. Nearly every mesh node that used flash ran into "hard drive" issues within a year (we suspected the failure frequency was directly related to how often we used the devices). Most of the time it was simply the MBR becoming corrupt which you could fix by mounting the card on a Linux computer, chroot'ing and re-running LILO; but in a few cases we had to replace the entire card due to corruption. These devices had fairly typical usage patterns of a normal desktop/laptop (booted daily), and we were no where near the 3-5 year estimates most people give flash drives.
Sadly, PS/2 was yet another victim of USB, which doesn't care what you plug into it, the electrical slut.
I recently switched my home servers to using a sandisk 4G flash for / (with variable directories moved to disk; /home, /opt, and parts of /var such as /var/logs). The system now loads in about a 1/3 of the time. I have also seen that it is quieter (the regular disks sleep when not in use and the fan that ran all the time now runs infrequently ), and the temp dropped 5 degrees. I would expect that my electricity usage has dropped (as evidenced by lower heat).
All in all, I have no doubt that within a year, flash will be the rage.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Unfortunately I didn't have the opportunity to investigate it much further (and I no longer work for that research institute). From what I recall, we partition the cards into two volumes. The first volume was set to read-only and contained static OS files (eg. /etc, /lib, /[s]bin...) and we had a second partition for logging (which obviously could and did fill up). I believe the read-only volume was larger than the space actually used so we never filled the cards completely; it's probably fair to estimate we hovered around 60-85% most of the time. All the CF cards were off-the-shelf components bought in one big purchase (so it may have been related to that batch); they were typical cards you'd throw into a camera and I'm unsure what speed they were.
When I was hired on, I was actually developing embedded devices which would work over the mesh network provided by the mesh nodes mentioned above, so I didn't get to try larger cards, etc. (but that's an interesting theory and would have been good to test). I would also have been curious to just leave one node on for the whole time (not rebooted like the other nodes) and see if it failed around the same time.
Sadly, PS/2 was yet another victim of USB, which doesn't care what you plug into it, the electrical slut.
Now think about this. You saved some electricity by switching to flash, as well as heat output. What happens when Google does a cost benefit and sees how much power they could save across their entire cluster farm in both energy usage and heat, and swaps everything out. It's going to be a great energy conservation benefit, as well as help bring down the cost of flash (economy of scale).
Not quite. If you don't experience any failures, then you can't calculate the MTBF because there are no failures to calculate the mean time between. That does not imply infinite reliability, just that not enough data has been collected.
From Wikipedia:
People often use MTBF to mean life expectancy, and even within engineering disciplines this is a common misconception. The concept of MTBF is only relevant to certain theoretical models of wear-out anyway, and even though it is quoted for a lot of products it is often a meaningless quantity. The numbers and testing conditions can (as your example shows) be modified to produce just about any MTBF that the tester wants to prove. For most products with a wear-out failure mechanism, Weibull analysis provides a much more accurate estimation of the life span of the product.
Reliability engineering and analysis is hard. It is decidedly counterintuitive sometimes, and most engineers have never been trained in it. It is a massive subject and anyone who has worked in warranty analysis or design for reliability will agree with me, it creates a hell of a lot of work for everyone involved. A lot of it only makes sense when you start looking at large volume production (I design electronics for household appliances - BIG volume - reliability is extremely important). I have been on several training courses about this stuff, and I use it all the time in my daily job, and I still barely understand half of it. That's not because I'm dumb (although this is
my sig could kick your sig's arse...
Yes, Windows memory requirements basically quadruple with virtual memory turned off(which is rally what it is - no different than using system ram for video, for instance, and just as much of a speed killer).
Windows is a frighteningly bloated beast. But I'm pretty much preaching to the choir here I suspect.
The way to deal with the swap file is a ramdisk. 3 gigs for Windows(assuming you're NOT stupid enough to be running Vista) and the remaining 1 gig windows doesn't usually access is the swap file. Problem solved. You just tricked Windows into using real ram instead of the hard drive.(as it should have been)
It nearly quadruples speed in XP, btw.