Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
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.
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.
At the show in December, another article said:
"In a short demonstration of an Intel solid-state drive at work in a laptop, Saleski showed that the drive could read and write 680MB of data and related storage in 24 seconds. The read and write speed of the solid state drive will be three to four times faster than that of most hard drives, and it will initially cost as much as three times as much as a hard drive, he said."
If in a year they are twice the price of a regular hard drive, that is a bargain for some of us, if for no other reason that to use it as a swap drive for the OS and scratch drive for Photoshop. It would also making loading game levels much faster, so an 80gb version could make an affordable addition to a regular drive that has the OS.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
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.
My blog
"The 160 GB SSD is probably 1-5x the size of your ipod..."
why do you say that? I can buy a 16gb flash drive for $60. Line 10 of those up and you have a 160gb flash drive for $600 that shouldn't be much bigger than a iPhone if you remove the unnecessary plastic and USB ports from the drives.
Imagine a RAID0 array of ten 16gb flash drives! 200+ mByte/sec (ten x 20mB/sec) transfers and access times in nanoseconds vs hard drive milliseconds! No more bottlenecks.
i for one welcome our new flash memory overlords!
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
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.
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
Would you like a slice of toast?
It can be if you're keeping the OS on the drive. Parts of the system that are constantly written over, like the page file, can go through write cycles quickly. This is why you don't want to put an OS on a flash drive, but it's okay for storing normal chunky files.
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
Could that be why music players tend to have flash storage, while most PCs still have hard drives?
Nobody else has this sig.
If you're on a workstation, plugging in a few 8 or 16 GB ram modules might be better than using a photoshop scratch disk.
/not affiliated with metaram btw.
In practice, this turns out not to be the case. Put your OS and swap file on there (swap will LOVE fast flash) and enjoy. A friend of mine once designed an embedded system which used a FAT32 formatted CompactFlash card for storing its firmware and a log file, the idea being that a service technician sent out to update firmware could just yank the CF card, slap in a fresh one, and have collected the last two years' logs and updated the firmware in one swell foop. The CF cards they used were made by a major, reputable manufacturer (SanDisk) and were supposed to implement wear leveling.
During firmware development they found that the lifespan of the cards was about a week. The system's firmware wrote tiny updates to the logs at a relatively high frequency. Besides the number of writes required to support actually writing the log data, every time you append a new block onto the end of a file in FAT32 you must rewrite the FAT, its shadow copy, and some other structures, meaning that one logical write might often turn into ten or more at the disk (and then wear leveling will usually have to move blocks around in order to do its thing, blowing up the number of actual writes even more). Most SSDs just have a fixed pool of substitute blocks for leveling wear -- they cannot remap an arbitrarily large number of blocks since that's too complex for the simple controller in the device. Thus, the logfile writes rapidly exhausted the wear leveling pool in the CF card, and soon the device could no longer protect itself and would develop bad sectors.
Are the current generation of SSD disk replacements better than the CF cards my friend was using a few years ago? Probably. Just don't take it as gospel that wear leveling is automatically the perfect solution. I used to see people making the EXACT SAME ARGUMENT you're making now about CF cards of that vintage.
The real solution isn't better wear leveling, either, it's filesystems which are aware of the problem and can do their own wear leveling.
P.S. No, flash isn't good for swap. Most flash SSDs to date have horrible write performance, especially for random writes. They're usually worse than hard disks. Flash is slow at writes to begin with, and on top of that it suffers from having a block size much larger than the typical allocation block used in a computer filesystem or swap partition. The minimum block which can be erased (flash must be erased before being written) in NAND flash (the kind used in SSDs) is often 128KB or more. Writing a single 4KB block (a typical filesystem / swap allocation unit since it's 1 page in most current operating systems) in a random location requires the flash disk to read the enclosing 128KB+ erase block into an internal buffer, erase the whole block, then write back the buffered data with the new data. This extreme penalty means that while flash disks can do OK (not great) at streaming writes, they usually suck bad at random writes.
SSDs are getting better. Who knows, they may have gotten good enough for even me to trust them by now. But I'll be taking a wait and see approach, to be honest.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.