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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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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.
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.
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160 = 10 x 2^4. So, probably 10 x 16GB chips
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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3x the sustained read/write at 3x the price of a winchester drive is too good to be true. Keep in mind the access time for SSD destroys a hard drive. When you consider the value of data on a drive, and what it costs to have a tech replace one, I'd think winchester drives will quickly be obsolete in PCs for business users.
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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You forgot the 10x increased chance of unrecoverable failure.
Quite so. I daresay this capitalism business is catching on rather quickly.
I think the technologies have advanced enough that the modern hard drive should not be called a "winchester drive". The name actually referenced a specific model of IBM hard drive manufactured in 1973... with a capacity of 35 MB.
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.
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.
"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.
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