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.'"

Comments

Logical move

[crow]

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.

Re:Logical move

[thrillseeker]

I'm curious at what point we will quit treating these hard drive replacements as that, and instead treat them as what they are - large arrays of addressable memory. Without doing the homework to be sure, I suspect that being able to remove the overhead of an OS building the needed protocol stream to address this memory as a hard drive, and instead treating it as memory, would save significant(?) code/time.

Re:Logical move

[nuzak]

Current hardware with simple wear leveling will give you about a solid year of continuous writes. That's writing 24/7, nonstop. I don't think a HDD could even survive that. For a consumer device, even under fairly heavy use, the hardware will be long obsolete before it runs out of write cycles.

Partition Filesystems

[calebt3]

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.

Re:Partition Filesystems

[von_rick]

Why would you need defragmentation when there's no read head to consider? The whole idea behind defragmenting programs is to gather a file at one place so that the head doesn't have to jump to different addresses on the cylinder.

Re:Partition Filesystems

[calebt3]

Exactly my point. Ext3 defragments itself automatically, which does more harm than good on a flash drive.

Re:Partition Filesystems

[calebt3]

Hmm...
I just found this:

Unlike DRAM, flash memory chips have a limited lifespan. Further, different flash chips have a different number of write cycles before errors start to occur. Flash chips with 300,000 write cycles are common, and currently the best flash chips are rated at 1,000,000 write cycles per block (with 8,000 blocks per chip). Now, just because a flash chip has a given write cycle rating, it doesn't mean that the chip will self-destruct as soon as that threshold is reached. It means that a flash chip with a 1 million Erase/Write endurance threshold limit will have only 0.02 percent of the sample population turn into a bad block when the write threshold is reached for that block. The better flash SSD manufacturers have two ways to increase the longevity of the drives: First, a "balancing" algorithm is used. This monitors how many times each disk block has been written. This will greatly extend the life of the drive. The better manufacturers have "wear-leveling" algorithms that balance the data intelligently, avoiding both exacerbating the wearing of the blocks and "thrashing" of the disk: When a given block has been written above a certain percentage threshold, the SSD will (in the background, avoiding performance decreases) swap the data in that block with the data in a block that has exhibited a "read-only-like" characteristic. Second, should bad blocks occur, they are mapped out as they would be on a rotating disk. With usage patterns of writing gigabytes per day, each flash-based SSD should last hundreds of years, depending on capacity. If it has a DRAM cache, it'll last even longer.

Re:Partition Filesystems

[Spoke]

Ext3 defragments itself automatically No it doesn't. While ext3 does try to keep files contiguous and inodes in directories close to one another, it definitely does NOT do any defragmentation. ext2/3 filesystems have a history of getting highly fragmented over time and it gets worse the less free space you have on the disk.

The ONLY way you can defragment a file is to copy the fragmented file to another partition, remove it and copy it back. If you want to defragment a complete ext2/3 filesystem, make a backup of the filesystem using tar, delete the original and restore the backup.

No, this is not something you want to do while other software may be looking for the file.

Of the common filesystems available for Linux (ext2/3, xfs, jfs, reiserfs) the only one that supports online defragmentation is xfs (using the xfs_fsr utility) and this has to be scheduled manually.

Fragmentation in ext2/3 files is a huge problem when appending to files over long periods of time. You can check the fragmentation of any file on ext2/3 using the filefrag utility. Make a copy of a highly fragmented file (even to the same partition) and you will see the number of fragments go down dramatically, unless you don't have much free space left on the partition and the space you have free is also highly fragmented.

Re:Partition Filesystems

[Spoke]

I call bullshit. Why is it that when someone things someone else is wrong and they reply, they must make some smart-ass comment like "I call BS?" or "You suck, I'm right you're wrong?". Come on, keep it civil. Or should I say "I call bullshit".

find / -exec (cp {} {}.defrag; rm {}; mv {}.defrag {}); Anyway, your defragmentation method is exactly the method I described. It won't defrag as well as backing it up completely, deleting all the original data and restoring because you are limited by the amount of (fragmented) free space you have. If your partition is close to empty, then it won't make much of a difference.

However, your defrag method IS NOT SAFE and WILL RESULT IN DATA LOSS on a live system (sorry to yell, but I don't want anyone trying it on a live system - it should be OK if you can guarantee that no-one else will modify the data on the partition)

There is a lot of opportunity in your script for data loss:

1. During the copy. If someone modifies part of the original that has already been copied, your .defrag file won't have those changes.
2. During the rm. Deleting files takes time, so there is more room for a file to try to write to the original. This step is actually completely unnecessary, just overwrite the original with your mv command.
3. After the mv. If a process has the original file open, it will continue writing to that original file, even after it's been deleted and "overwritten". It is very legal to continue file operations on an open file descriptor.

I suggest you actually try your defragmentation trick on a live filesystem which is actively in use. If you don't lose data, you're lucky.

So I'll say it again. The only filesystem which allows you do perform LIVE defragmentation is xfs using it's xfs_fsr utility.

Re:Could we see an end to Magnetic Media?

[brunes69]

Because drive size has began starting to exceed our data storage needs (at least on a personal computer Level)

Er.... I have several 30 GB HD rips that would tend to disagree with you.

Multimedia content is still huge. Your standard from-the-factory PC can only hold 3-4 high quality movies. I know people who have multi-TB RAID arrays to archive their media content and are already feeling storage crunches.

Re:But can I afford them yet?

[Pharmboy]

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.

Re:I'm an idiot

[slashgrim]

160 = 10 x 2^4. So, probably 10 x 16GB chips

Reason for using solid-state drives

[pieterh]

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.

Re:Will never be cheaper

[jellomizer]

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.

Re:Great. I buy a 160GB iPod and now they

[iamhassi]

"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!

I asked this same question on LKML 6 months ago

[rcb1974]

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.

XYZ-byte Solid-State inevitable

[davidwr]

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.

Re:XYZ-byte Solid-State inevitable

[Shinmizu]

He said terabyte, not yottabyte. You're jumping the gun a bit there.

Re:Great. I buy a 160GB iPod and now they

[__aaxwdb6741]

You forgot the 10x increased chance of unrecoverable failure.

Indeed

[SnoopJeDi]

More proof that competing companies are good for consumers

Quite so. I daresay this capitalism business is catching on rather quickly.

Re:Great. I buy a 160GB iPod and now they

[ATMD]

Could that be why music players tend to have flash storage, while most PCs still have hard drives?

Re:Great. I buy a 160GB iPod and now they

[jandrese]

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.