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Intel Confirms It Will Ship 160GB Flash Drives
Lucas123 writes "Intel has confirmed plans to ship a new line of solid-state drives for laptop and notebook PCs with storage capacities of 80GB to 160GB. While it did not lock in a ship date, Intel told Computerworld that the drives would be available in the second quarter. From the story: 'An aggressive move into the laptop and PC notebook flash disk drive business would catapult Intel into direct competition with hard drive manufacturers such as Toshiba Corp. and Samsung Electronics Co. that are trying to spark demand before their SATA-based offerings are released in the coming months.'"
I call your mother the "160GB flash drive." That can't be just a co-incidence.
tell me I could have got a solid state one.
Oh well. I'll just have to wait until the moving parts on this one stop moving.
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More proof that competing companies are good for consumers. I just hope that toshiba and samsung have enough strength to come up with something that takes the lead from intel.
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The price needs to drop a lot for me to consider one above the tried-and-true magnetic hard drive.
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I thought this was an announcement for a 160 gig USB thumb drive. Not that I could afford it anyway.
It's very difficult to move into an established market, like disk drives. There's tons of technical expertise to acquire, and without your share of patents to negotiate a sharing deal, you're going to be paying through the nose in royalties. You just don't see new disk drive companies popping up. The only way to enter the market is to buy or partner with an existing player.
The shift to flash drives changes all this.
This is Intel's one chance to become a major player in a component that they haven't been involved in until now.
Yes Megnetic Media is cheaper then Solid state... But higher speeds and still its prices are falling fast too, battery power usage, less points of failure. It really seems like the way to go. I could see Magnetic Media go the way of the CRT in 10 years? I think it is possible. Unless Magnetic makes some Huge Improvement in capasity and also we get a hug increase in demmand in data. Because drive size has began starting to exceed our data storage needs (at least on a personal computer Level)
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
What filesystem (NTFS, ext3, etc) is best for solid-state drives anyways? All of our commom filesystems are written for spinning drives, and certain features (such as ext3 self-defragmentation) probably shorten a flash drives lifespan.
Why? A solid-state overlord is not much more than a geometric rock.
What niche of the computer world will these disks fill at their current price point?
First, you'd have to know who would want to buy them. Enthusiasts? I suppose... but I think most enthusiasts want the best bang/buck ratio for storage space, and why buy one of these when you can get a good ol' magnetic drive with a capacity of 1TB? People who require "rugged" notebooks? Solid state is definitely a plus here, but the main organizations I know that use them are mostly government (public safety, et al) and I don't see them affording it. What about servers? Obviously 160GB is overkill for a router-type box, and the smaller 4-8GB solid state drives would be a much better fit. Perhaps the price point would be right for a server that only serves web pages or simple file storage? Again, I think here that most people have some form of large magnetic storage (perhaps via SAN) and a web server would just pull from that.
This kind of thing is really slick... I just don't see it being accepted in the near future.
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But shouldn't these figures be some more convenient power of 2? Like 64GB (rounded) or 128GB?
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Disclaimer: I paid the extra $1,000 for a SSD with my MacBook Air, so I'm probably biased, but most notebooks I've owned has had disk drive issues. It seems part of the price to pay for portable computing. Maybe I'm just brutal with them. The HDDs used in iPods seem more robust but they're slower than normal notebook drives.
The main value of an SSD in a notebook is therefore that the notebook will last longer and there is much less chance of losing data due to disk failure.
Additionally, SSDs are a bit faster, and they're silent and use less power. They are also a little lighter, I assume.
On the down side, they're really expensive and writing files is slower so I guess you want to have lots of RAM and avoid swapping.
In 3 years they'll cost 10% of what they cost today, and they'll be in more than 50% of notebooks.
I don't see the advantage of SSDs in desktops, where it's trivial and normal to have full backups, and where power consumption, noise, weight, etc. are less important.
So it's a little inaccurate to see SSDs as direct competitors to HDDs, ultimately they address two distinct markets, high capacity vs. high reliability. SSDs are always going to be for secondary computers, and portable devices. Of course it's also true that these compete with desktops.
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My PC at home has a combined total of 100 gb hard drive space, including HDa, C:, and D: and I'm nowhere near filling it up yet!
I could have a computer without a hard drive and it would actually work!
I wonder what these puppies are going to cost, anyway?
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
which is totally what she said
But what about a beowolf cluster of geometric rocks?
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
The difficulty of fabricating flash memory are in the orders of magnitute more diffuclt compared to covering a metal disk with some magnetic material. So there will always be a market for magnetic media, unless that is replaced by some similarly cheap technology.
Does your rock run Linux?
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them.
what SPEED are they? Anything higher than 150x?
There is a difference between a solid-state overlord and an overlord with solid-state storage. My non-solid-state overlord does run Linux, though.
what will they think of next?
fuck karma, I like saying the truth better
Check our my post to the Linux Kernel Mailing List: http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/8/23/5 It drew a lot of responses from kernel developers.
I'm here today to announce the future availability of 10TB solid-state drives.
Pricing, manufacturing, and delivery date will be announced at a later date.
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In my slightly buzzed state I just noticed your sig and initially started trying to translate it from leetspeek... *slaps forehead*
It's quite possible that by 2015, most consumer PC's will not have hard drives. Hard drives will be relegated to servers that have over a terabyte.
... where I can store my decryption key.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
You can write continuously to a modern SSD for 12 years before wear is a factor.
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Quite so. I daresay this capitalism business is catching on rather quickly.
Damn, but I could do with a nice
OK, look, I'll try and say something worth reading: it has annoyed me quite a bit lately that, as SSD-driven audio players have mostly dominated over HDD ones in the last few years, the high-end of the capacity spectrum has become quite sparse; a few iPods that don't play
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I'm in the middle of speccing 2 10TB fileservers for the research group I work for, and that's a pittance compared to some data storage needs in science and certainly in enterprise. Magnetic disc for large-scale storage isn't going anywhere for a while unless they can *really* push up SSD storage capacity cheaply.
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The only reason I didn't go with 100 is some smart-ass would suggestion a future technology would replace solid-state tech by then.
Let me be that smart-ass.
At 160GB, we are about 6 "doublings" away from 10GB, but a bit over 9 doublings away from 100GB.
Assuming we double every 18 months or so, 6 doublings is about 9 years. In 9 years solid-state may very well be on its way out. By 2021 we should be using biological-state or something else rather than anything that resembles today's solid-state drives.
Hopefully intel puts as much technical talent and care into the design of their Flash drives as they do into their totally kick ass intel graphics chips!
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
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Whilst I can see the reason why laptops would be the primary beneficiary of this tech, where's my desktop flash-memory hard drive? I want one, damnit!
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I doubt that. Do you really think that in 7 years our internet bandwidth will be able to support that? Most US ISPs can't even handle a few bittorrent users, do you think they will be able to handle every used storing all their photos and videos somewhere else? ...that's not even taking into account things like the increasingly large size of computer games, etc. I have a hard time believing that we will move back towards a "server with many terminals" type type system any time soon. The cost of a personal computer doing everything locally is just too low.
Would a 160gb flash drive use more, or less, power than a 160gb SATA drive? Or, is it a matter of how much you use it? A drive like that would be awsome for portable devices, if the power consumption is much lower.
Nowadays SSDs are more reliable than HDDs. I just checked the specifications for a Samsung SSD and a Toshiba HDD and they have, respectively, an MTBF of 2 000 000 hours and a MTTF of 300 000.
The first "large" RAM drive I ever saw was a 1GB shoebox that cost $300,000 that sat at the heart of one of Telecom New Zealand's number look-up services. A decade later we have 160GB flash drives that cost a tiny fraction of that. Good. I want one. :-)
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The HD in my Tivo was constantly writing for four years before I sold it (barring the odd power-down to move the box).
The HD in my cable box is currently doing likewise.
HDs can happily write constantly for extremely long periods of time.
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...my computer already has over a TB...
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