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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.'"
can s/o comment on the durability of these (presumabily flash-based) devices? What if the OS decides to write stuff to certain sectors all the time?
how long are solid state drives suppose to last? Compared to the hard drive?
Damn this is going to make crash recovery a nightmare. When my hard drive crashed I was able to read the data off by opening it up and using a magnifying glass, pen and paper. Using my notes and a typewriter I soon had my old drive data mirrored onto my new drive.
Is it possible to do this with a solid state drive?
Open source, flash charts
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'Solid state pretty much puts hybrid in an obsolete class right now.'
Yes, well, as a graduate of Solid State, I'm really getting a kick out of his reply.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
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
Yeah, but as the first adopters and the die hard gamers looking for every advantage they can get buy more of these, we'll see the price drop eventually.
It also means that the extra speed and reliability really isn't worth the high price for most business folks who would be, I guess, the ones to really drive the market in the beginning stages after the first adopters.
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
Again, for the majority of computer users, swapping to the disk is more of a problem than the ultimate speed of their HD. They'd get more bang for their buck by buying another GB of RAM... which is why I don't really see solid state prices coming down anytime soon.
There isn't a significant need for it in the general consumer market.
Maybe laptops will create enough demand for lower prices... but that remains to be see.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Now there's a misleading quote if I ever heard one. Magnetic drives currently allow for storage of 250GB and up for a cost of $0.50/GB or less. In comparison, Flash Drives are are still measured in dollars per GB. The hybrid drive allows a bit of a tradeoff. A fast storage cache combined with massive space in exchange for a slight increase in price. Thus it's possible to have 1TB or more of storage, but with the performance characteristics of Flash memory under most circumstances.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
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.
Okay, for some $1,700+ you get two 64GB SSD drives.
...and:
And what do you get for that ridiculous amount of cash? According to Alienware's best PR spin:
"speed up operating system boot and application launch/runtime by up to 2 times."
"consume up to 50 percent less power than rotating HDDs."
Those specs aren't exactly thrilling, particularly since "up to" tends to mean you'll never get close to either spec.
Seems like a complete joke to me, which oddly fits in quite well with the rest of the Alienware line-up.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
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.
Flash costs seem to be halving each year at the moment, while hard drive capacity is going up by a smaller amount.
Flash may eventually max out, still more expensive than hard drive space, or it may eventually overtake it. I'm not convinced that there's anything inherently more expensive about flash construction techniques in the long term.
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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!
You have a flaw in your theory though; a portion of the drive won't be changing much, because OS and program files don't change too much. So there's a part of the disk that is only written to rarely, and other parts of the disk that will be written to more often, because a chunk of the drive won't change.
So while the drive would still last a long, long time, you do need to keep in mind the above.
and what are you trying to prove now ? That the ss drive built 6 years ago were crap ? I agree, but in 6 years, the industry has changed. So did the ss drives. It would be interesting that you redo this experiment and post your results in 3 months.
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.
Single lane PCIe is 1.25Gbps.
After you move to bytes and remove overhead you get 150 MBps.
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
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?
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.
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.
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.
You could run Windows well on flash without too much trouble, use a ramdrive and redirect TMP and TEMP to that and disable swap, set your browser to use TMP for cache or disable it altogether. Turn off timestamping on file access and it's even better. By that point if your flash has 500K writes before average failure then you have a drive that will last many years, probably longer than your average HDD.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Interesting datapoint --- however, how full were the 512 MB cards?
Did you compare their lifetime w/ 1 GB cards w/ the same data (but much more empty space)?
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
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.
How often were you writing the MBR? That's a very strange place to get a failure like this.
We at slashdot are scientists, specialists and kernel hackers. Your FUD will be found out.
Remains to be seen? laptops already represent significant consumer demand for solid state for almost 2 years and that would indeed be on a consumer level. Hybrid has ways of long term potential but solid state has far more long term potential (less moving parts as well).
I agree ram does more for performance for the time being, if and only if you don't meet a minimum level of said performance, but at this point if you are a gamer/programmer/autocad user/etc you're going to want to look at a solid state drive in the next 3 years anyway. Since 30 or 60 gigs of ram isn't *THAT* cheap yet, although that day will probably come as well but be at a relatively similar percentage of storage as it is now (since all data will likely increase in size/complexity). Unless we all get 500GB ram drives anytime soon, which I'd estimate to be an easy 5 years + away.
Examples: Autocad - Want to load a 3GB design/drawing/etc? I'm pretty sure solid state would be a lot nicer for things that big. Working on many big drawings/designs/etc? I'm pretty sure that'll save more than a few minutes almost instantly.
Gaming - Played Fury lately, or Team Fortress 2? Newer games are starting to have significant load times even with Sata2. Fury even on fast computers take 30+secs to load between maps, minimum. And that represents the new Unreal engine 3.
Not to mention the real problem lies with the RAM. We really need to get MRAM on the way to enable faster reboot and faster transfer of information through the motherboard. Sure increasing HDD efficiency will help run a system faster but as far as productivity RAM needs some serious advances.
OK, don't kill this BEFORE you read it....
Since it's so easy to get "old" data off of a hard drive once it's written, have the ultra-security experts looked at RAM based drives for storing data that should never be recovered at a later time? If you just used a regular disk to boot your OS fully configured into a RAM-based drive, then run the machine from there you could theoretically have a non-recoverable data storage unit. Long-term files would be written to a USB FLASH drive. No "ghost image" to be read back off a magnetic device and looked at, just pull the plug and BAM, your "history" IS really history (inside the computer, anyway).
Does flash technology leave a phantom image after it's erased like magnetic storage does?
That may be true with a homebrew SSD, but when you are controlling each chip directly without having to go through a RAID or USB interface, you can simply multiplex the reads and writes over 10s or 100s of memory chips, increasing throughput speeds to whatever you want, 1MB/s to 1GB/s, you name it.
Our company manufactures embedded devices that run off CF cards (typically the cheapest 512M we can source). In five years the only failures have been attributed to bad CF cards themselves. Now, each time we receive a difference batch of cards, we scrutinize them under many days of stress testing.
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).
You forgot notebooks!
Anyone who's trying to breath new life into a notebook that already has as much RAM as possible will get an awesome collection of performance boosts by switching to solid state:
- a speed upgrade that in some ways is more noticeable than a CPU upgrade
- savings in battery life
- cooler temperatures
- lighter weight
- less likely loss of data when dropped
- faster boot/resume times
- quieter operation
These are all features that pretty much every notebook out there can benefit from. The only remaining obstacle is cost.I'm a writer, a poet, a genius, I know it. I don't buy software, I grow it.
enable faster reboot
you must be running windows...
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.
Since wear leveling has been addressed (repeatedly) in reply i'll skip it.
Instead let's talk about how your 3 year old U320 drive will kick the crap out of bla bla bla.
In raw transfer speed probably. SSDD do fall behind by varying degrees in raw transfer. However, raw transfer is rarely the most important aspect of a hard drive.
Far more important is seek time. That's why your fancy SCSI drives spin at 10k or 15k RPM. The 4mS average seek gives them a bid advantage over the 7-10mS in standard desktop hard drives. What's the seek time on SSDDs? Generally around 100uS or 0.1mS. So if you sacrifice 2/3 of your drive capacity (1TB vs 150-300GB for 15k) to halve your seek time what would you sacrifice to improve it by at least an order of magnitude?
Random seek is critically important for most servers and also for many home uses. In testing with SSDDs windows boot time improved by about 20-30% depending on the situation. App load times also showed substantial improvements. Try throwing a sizable DB on a SSDD and you'll be amazed at the performance even without caching.
So yes. For raw backup, very high data rate streaming, etc. Your SCSI drives might win out. For the majority of applications SSDD > U320 15K SCSI.
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.