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.'"
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.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
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.
Tis women makes us love, Tis Love that makes us sad, Tis sadness makes us drink, And drinking makes us mad.
The price needs to drop a lot for me to consider one above the tried-and-true magnetic hard drive.
This author takes full ownership and responsibility for the unpopular opinions outlined above.
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.
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.
My blog
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
Well... yes... but it took a while for flat panels to catch on. This is my point now, as well. I think it will *eventually* be widely accepted... just not in the near future.
Proudly supporting the Libertarian Party.
business laptops like mine. I'm not sure I could convince the boss to let me buy one yet, but I run virtual machines on it for testing and do a fair bit of other development. If I were to have a very fast drive in it, swapping for all the virtual machines would be faster and I could give them less memory. I don't know, it all depends on what these things cost.
use your turn signal! you people act like it's divulging information to the enemy
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?
I can see that, depending on your individual definition of "near" as it relates to technology. I would bet in less than 5 years most all laptops will ship with these. I suppose that's "a long time" in the computer technology world, though.
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.
Define "near". Next week? Next couple of months? Right after Duke Nukem Forever is released?
If the Magnetic Vortex Core (http://www.mpg.de/english/illustrationsDocumentation/documentation/pressReleases/2006/pressRelease200611281) technology ever makes it into the hard-drive markets, it will considerably reduce the size of these drives. Densely packed cores would mean less movement, thus lesser power, and higher stability - and yes, less weight. SSDs would be quite expensive and slow when compared with drives built on Vortex Cores. Lets see what the future has in store.
Face your daemons!
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.
Here, too. Excluding media files, I don't see any use for more than 32GB on any of the systems that I use. But that's a big exclusion. My photos probably only take 10GB, but once you get into my music and my MythTV recordings, I'm pushing a TB, and I would have had to buy another drive if not for the writers' strike.
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.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Plus, anything called a "Magnetic Vortex Core Drive" is a damn cool piece of hardware to own.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
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.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Quite so. I daresay this capitalism business is catching on rather quickly.
Well sure, if all my MP3s were CD quality it would likely be full, let alone of I'd put my whole VHS and DVD library on it, even in compressed format.
But you're right, there certainly is a market for computers with sub-200gb drives. Especially laptops.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
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?
There's already plenty of demand. As you said, the laptop market is one of them, but not just the "rugged" laptop market. The "thin" laptop market is one of them. The MacBook Air has a solid state drive (optional?) and the Lenovo ThinkPad competitor has one standard. Any laptop would benefit greatly from an SSD. For laptops, the HD is the last moving part, with the exception of cooling fans. Reliability is a key benefit to these drives (when used with a proper file system) because they don't have moving parts that can break down. Hard drive failure is the #1 hardware problem for ANY type of computer. Just ask any support desk. If spending a little more up front on SSD means not having to replace the drive down the road, then I'm sure plenty of organizations will want to make the switch. Even on servers, there is demand. Why do we have all of these SAN's with RAID 5 and 10 arrays? Because hard drives fail so often. We might not be getting rid of the RAID, but we will have less downtime and be replacing less drives.
"It's not whether you win or lose, it's how drunk you get." -- H. J. Simpson
"What niche of the computer world will these disks fill at their current price point?"
Robust portable storage. Put one in a rugged USB enclosure and they would be dandy for carrying all my stuff and booting my OS of choice on different computers.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
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.
"goodbye and hello, as always" ~Prince Corwin, from Zelazny's Amber series
http://hackerkey.com/
From my perspective it was one of the fastest paradigm shifts ever. Shockingly fast, even.
I'm with you there. Though there was a bit of a lag between a select few users having them and regular consumers buying them, there was definitely very little time between some consumers buying them and "everyone" having one.
It ranks just behind DVD players in my (flawed?) memory as far as mass adoption goes. It only takes one government year end paired with a holiday season with new devices at "reasonable prices".
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?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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!
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
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. :-)
Only boring people are ever bored.
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.
My Journal
...my computer already has over a TB...
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.