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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.'"
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.
The 160 GB SSD is probably 1-5x the size of your ipod...
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.
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Um sorry I was a sleep for 40 years and I just woke up... This Internet thing is pritty cool...
But the Difficulty of fabricating Magnetic Memory is magnitutes more diffucly compared to punching holes in some cardstock. So there will always a need for Punchcards.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
"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!
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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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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.
You forgot the 10x increased chance of unrecoverable failure.
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
Would you like a slice of toast?
Could that be why music players tend to have flash storage, while most PCs still have hard drives?
Nobody else has this sig.
As far as random access on a drive is concerned, a 5MB music file is gigantic. The seek time (1 seek every 3-4 minutes) is a non-issue. If you were playing 20 snippits of different songs every second then it might matter, but for MP3 playing it is not an issue at all. Even if your file gets fragmented for some reason you're only going to be talking about a few dozen seeks at most.
That said, flash does have a bunch of advantages for music players. It's far more shock resistant (for running!), requires less power, and doesn't have to constantly be put to sleep and woken up like spinning magnetic media.
I read the internet for the articles.
"The average seek time for a hard disk is measured in milliseconds, but for continued transfers, they can have a much higher data throughput than a flash based device."
True, but PCs don't store data in consecutive order. Data is just placed haphazardly around, and it's up to the file allocation table to keep track of it all. So that 5 gigabyte game you're installing isn't all in one giant line of bits, it's shoved everywhere all over the drive, and it's constantly seeking to find where the rest of the files are to load the next level. That's why people periodically defragmenting their hard drives, to put the files all next to each other and save those precious milliseconds, which quickly turn into seconds when the PC's loading a ton of files into RAM.
Because of fragmentation it's rare to have 60 megabytes of data for one application all next to each other, so that's why hard drives rarely read at there top speeds, they read a couple hundred kilobytes, seek 10ms, read some more, seek, etc.
That's why people spend big $$$ to go from 7200rpm hard drives to 10k or 15k rpm SCSI drives, because just going from 8ms down to 3ms makes a very noticeable difference. So the jump from milliseconds down to nanoseconds would make a tremendous difference. RAM is measured in nanoseconds, so to have a 160gb drive only 5-10x slower than ram would be much better than the 1,000,000 times slower speed of hard drives accessing in milliseconds.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
Good points, bad maths.
... SanDisk SSD achieves an average file access rate of 0.11 milliseconds
Skipping that, the sustained transfer rate on SSD's has been going up A LOT recently. From SanDisk:
SanDisk SSD SATA 5000 2.5" achieves a sustained read rate of 67-megabyte (MB)*/sec and a random read rate of over 7000 inputs/outputs per second (IOPS) for a 512-byte transfer3
Sustained read might be less than the top end desktop hard drives but the extremely low avg file access time you will see a VERY significant increase in performance in virtually all applications.
And the best part about a SS:, is it's multiple parallel chips. There's a finite number of parallel data streams you can combine but it sill easily compensates for the lower individual data rate per chip. It's more a function of the controller chip and chip-to-chip wiring complexity. If you custom designed it, you could easily get a flash drive an order (or two) of magnitude faster in sustained read/write than a mechanical one.
Keeping in mind that SSD's have been main-stream (though in the far upper tier) for what, about a year? I'm predicting (magic ball) that performance on SSD's will soon be able to greatly exceed classic hard drive technology. Mfgs will then use that advantage to offer other features that were impossible previously.
Oh, and immagine if swap file wasn't a curse word?
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