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

obsolete?

[orionop]

'Solid state pretty much puts hybrid in an obsolete class right now.' Call me when either the capacity or price of solid state drives comes close with those obsolete drives, then we will compare...

Re:obsolete?

[morgan_greywolf]

And it won't. 'Economies of scale' don't happen here. Flash memory production already outstrips HDDs. The fact is that the process of manufacturing memory, including flash memory, is expensive.

Why does your computer have a relatively small amount of RAM and huge storage? It's the same economic question we've been facing since the introduction of computing. You need some fast, temporary storage and some slower permanent storage. And the reason has nothing to do with technological barriers -- it boils down to economics. Memory is expensive, hard drives are cheap. That's it. No matter what happens, nothing is going to change that equation anytime soon. SSDs will remain a niche technology for gamers with deep pockets and maybe a few other high-end uses like scientific computing. It will take at least a decade or more before this filters down to the point that the average PC is using SSDs.

Re:obsolete?

[vagabond_gr]

Memory is expensive, hard drives are cheap. That's it. No matter what happens, nothing is going to change that equation anytime soon. You mean *per gigabyte* and that's true. But tape drives are even cheaper, yet few people are using them because 1) access is ridiculously slow 2) nobody needs so much space. Hard drives are taking the same path. I don't need more than 64GB on my laptop, and soon I'll have much more than that. What I do need is to replace my 4200 rpm slug with something faster, without draining my battery. If I can get a 64gb flash disk at the price of a 500gb hdd, I'll do it today.

Crash recovery

[monk.e.boy]

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?

The School of Hard Knocks

[User 956]

'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.

Re:The School of Hard Knocks

[TubeSteak]

Yes, well, as a graduate of Solid State, I'm really getting a kick out of his reply. As a graduate of Quantum State, I may or may not be getting a kick out of your reply.

Re:The School of Hard Knocks

[thegnu]

Yes, well, as a graduate of Solid State, I'm really getting a kick out of his reply.

As a graduate of Quantum State, I may or may not be getting a kick out of your reply.

And I, as a graduate of String State, am inventing 7 new dimensions to account for humor.

Re:The School of Hard Knocks

[Hoi Polloi]

As a current student at Drunken State I have no idea what any of you are talking about but PARTY ON!

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.

Re:many write cycles?

[AKAImBatman]

What if the OS decides to write stuff to certain sectors all the time?

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.

Hybrid is a band-aid?

[AKAImBatman]

'Hybrid we consider to be a Band-Aid approach to solid state,' said Marc Diana

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.

Re:what does it do to load times?

[skulgnome]

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.

Not too impressive...

[evilviper]

Okay, for some $1,700+ you get two 64GB SSD drives.

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." ...and:

"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.

Re:many write cycles?

[AKAImBatman]

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

Re:Have they solved the longevity issue?

[Amiga Lover]

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.

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.

Re:No problem! -- It was in my experience

[SlashdotOgre]

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.

Re:what does it do to load times?

[pslam]

What nobody is pointing out is that a standard windows install will thrash the hell out of a Solid state drive. There is a reason you need to balance your writes and not treat a SS disk like a hard drive. I destroyed a Solid state IDE drive back 6 years ago (you have been able to buy them for over 15 years now) by installing windows on it. the swap space died within weeks.

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.

Re:what does it do to load times?

[WindBourne]

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.