The Joy of the Flash Drive

An anonymous reader writes "A post to the C|Net site covers the numerous benefits of flash drives, such as speed, temperature, and battery consumption. The perk author Michael Kanellos is most fond of? The distinct lack of noise. 'The notebook I'm testing--a Dell Latitude D830 with a 64GB flash hard drive from Samsung--hasn't emitted a sound in three days. Flash drives, which store data in NAND flash memory, don't require motors or spinning platters. Thus, there are no whirring mechanical noises. Compare that with my T42 ThinkPad. It sounds like a guinea pig got trapped inside, particularly during the start-up phase. Vzoooot. Cronk, cronk, cronk. Zip, zip. (Pause.) Gurlagurlagurla...zweeee. '"

Comments

I like it.

[Wellington Grey]

It sounds like a guinea pig got trapped inside, particularly during the start-up phase. Vzoooot. Cronk, cronk, cronk. Zip, zip. (Pause.) Gurlagurlagurla...zweeee

I like the hard drive noises. Lets be honest here, they are soft clicks and chirps, not chainsaw noises. It gives me a non-visual feel of what the computer's up to.

-Grey

Re:I like it.

[ChameleonDave]

like the hard drive noises. Me too. But we have to admit that the same function could be fulfilled by an LED or something else that could be activated or disabled, instead of constant noise pollution regardless of the user's wishes.

Re:I like it.

[CTalkobt]

>> I like the hard drive noises. Lets be honest here, they are soft clicks and chirps, not chainsaw noises. It gives me a non-visual feel of what the computer's up to.

I can see it now - someone will come out with a driver for people like yourselves that insist on having more noise in their environment. I'll then be tortured by sounds of car engines taking off, "That's my hard drive sound driver - cool huh?", birds tweating and for the joker in the crowd, a huge burp or fart sound as the drive spins up.

Joy.

The drive on this laptop is fairly quite but as with all things, I wouldn't mind it being better - speed would be my primary gain albeit I'd also appreciate the utter sound of silence.

Re:I like it.

[Aeternitas827]

You mean, it's not supposed to sound like a chainsaw? Might could be my problem... Either way, nothing compares to modem noise. It's the only reason I miss dialup.

Re:I like it.

[eyrieowl]

you have apparently forgotten the joys of the dot matrix printer.

Re:I like it.

[Wellington Grey]

I can see it now - someone will come out with a driver for people like yourselves that insist on having more noise in their environment. I'll then be tortured by sounds of car engines taking off, "That's my hard drive sound driver - cool huh?", birds tweating and for the joker in the crowd, a huge burp or fart sound as the drive spins up.

Calm down, dude. How did you jump from my appreciation of slight clicking noises on my computer to 'insisting' on noise to torture you?

-Grey

Re:I like it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Enough with the term 'noise pollution'. Talk about redundancy.

Compare it to 'air pollution' or 'water pollution', which makes sense. Noise pollution would mean peace and quiet.

Re:I like it.

[MrNaz]

Oh Slashdot, unfounded conclusions and ridiculous extrapolation of benign ideas into cultish plans to consume the still warm corpses of children get you a +5.

Re:I like it.

[MrNaz]

IMHO "peace and quiet pollution" doesn't have the same ring to it.

Re:I like it.

[Stormwatch]

Back on the "Classic MacOS" days, I recall that Norton Utilities had a little app that would do precisely that -- two tiny colored icons on the menubar to show disk reading or writing. Pretty much pointless, but somehow cute.

Re:I like it.

[faragon]

[fucking possible patent by prior act: on]

No problem, let's go program "hard disk comfort noise" as done in crystal-clear audio communications!!

Re:I like it.

[dattaway]

Hard drive clicks and whirring are always gentle. The only thing worse than noise pollution is light pollution. Leave it to companies like Western Digital to put BLINDINGLY bright blue or white LED's on their external hard drives. They don't flicker with activity, they have a steady blink as if there was a problem. And they stay ON when there is no activity. Completely counterintuitive and designed to annoy. Its worse than the epileptic television news graphics these days. Back in the old days, LEDs had a soft glow. Why do we need freakin laser beams filling up a room when the server is running? Are computer manufacturers in business to punish their users?

Re:I like it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Me too. But we have to admit that the same function could be fulfilled by an LED or something else that could be activated or disabled, instead of constant noise pollution regardless of the user's wishes.

Use the actual read/write line (heh, on a PATA interface, but you get my drift -- the Flash chips each have read/write lines, and an OR of those lines will work in the context of SATA) to activate the LED, and emphatically not something controllable by drivers or client-side software, and you've got my buy-in.

Funny story about blinkenlights... or crunchensoundz, as the case may be.

One of the things I initially disliked when migrating my gaming rig to XP (versus 98SE, yeah, I held out that long. The 98SE system listened on no ports, so I completely slept through the whole string of uPNP and DCOM/RPC exploits without so much as a scratch) was that the OS was always fucking around with the disk, even if not swapping. My rigs have always had enough RAM such that 9x would rarely, if ever, swap under normal usage, and I'd been used to years of total quiescence when reading long Slashdot threads. The machine's totally idle, right? Anyways, when I started migrating, it annoyed me that the XP box was always poking around WBEM\wherever, $MFT (by definition!), and so on. I'm looking at how much swap you're using, and it's not changing, so stop that. This box doesn't need to be writing anywhere. What if the power goes out at the exact moment that... journaling or not, this is just a silly design. (I'd never lost data on 9x/FAT32 due to power failures or crashes, but that's because the system was either quiescent on powerfailure, or I waited until the system reached quiescence before hard-booting, and I manually ran Scandisk from DOS mode to make sure I'd cleaned up the cruft... so with a track record like that, can you blame me for not trusting NTFS? Ironically, in the years since migration, I've lost data under XP/NTFS once, which is still one more time than I lost data under 9x.)

Which is a long way of saying that I like hearing the hard drive crunching away in the background. If my drive starts crunching when I'm browsing the web, and it's not about the same time of day that Windows Update typically phones home, the first thing I'm doing is sliding to the nearest open window and running Russinovich's old FILEMON.EXE to see WTF's going on this time. 99.99% of the time it's just been some other Windows process, or some phone-home crap from Adobe or Steam. But once, the 0.001% case paid off. I got bit by one of the "virus via ad banners on reputable sites" events (serves me right for not blocking the provider on sight) a couple of years ago, and the only reason I found out about it was because the hard drive makes a noise when it seeks.

Re:I like it.

[Keeper Of Keys]

My laptop has a little green light beside the keyboard which flashes when the disk is being accessed, there's even a small red LED on the back of my Archos 605 for the same purpose, in fact - gosh darn it - I think every device I've ever owned that includes a hard disk has had a disk activity light. It's one of the steps when you build a PC: heatsink on top of processor - check; graphics card in its slot - check; and, oh, don't forget to connect the little dangly lead coming from the disk activity light to the correct pins on the motherboard.

You're right they are rarely useful, but they are ubiquitous - why reproduce one in software? I suppose now that we have silent hard drives, you can get a program that makes whirring and clanking noises come out of your speaker whenever you're reading or writing to disk?

Re:I like it.

[Anonymous Coward]

> Why do we need freakin laser beams filling up a room when the server is running?

The water-cooled model features sharks which swim around according to the drive activity....

Re:I like it.

[WaltBusterkeys]

Blindingly bright blue lights are no match for the depths of black provided by a Sharpie (tm) brand fine-tip permanent marker. One swipe across and you go from "blindingly bright" to "pretty gosh darn dim." If you're not sure if you want a permanent solution, use a permanent marker on a piece of Scotch (tm) tape and slap that on the LED. Instant dark, but you can still tell when it's glowing.

Re:I like it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone's probably already made an audio plugin to one of the many, many resource monitor programs out there. I prefer to have my audio feedback with a volume control, thank you very much.

Re:I like it.

[TheScottishGuy]

I used to feel this way about the noise the floppy drive made on my old 486 during boot, and to a lesser extent the noise made by my old 56k modem during dial/authentication, I remember being weirded out for a while by the v.92 modems, now I'd happily take less noise, Initially I'd probably notice its absence, but I'm sure I could get used to it.

Re:I like it.

[ozmanjusri]

If you're not sure if you want a permanent solution, use a permanent marker on a piece of Scotch (tm) tape and slap that on the LED.

Duct tape.

Re:I like it.

[Anonymous Coward]

You sir, are a douchebag.

Re:I like it.

[Anonymous Coward]

do you also like a guinea pig shoved up your ass?

Re:I like it.

[Andrzej Sawicki]

Hard drive clicks and whirring are always gentle.

Ever tried building a PC that doesn't produce any sound? After a while, you'll find that the only noise you just can't seem to get rid of, is the humming of the hard drive (while idle). "Soft" as in "nearly silent". As in "driving you nuts".

Re:I like it.

[alexkoay88]

You know, they have something called "sound pollution" that makes sense, while grandparent post does not.

Re:I like it.

[jgrahn]

I like the hard drive noises. Lets be honest here, they are soft clicks and chirps, not chainsaw noises.

Older hard drives were often noisy, and probably some models still are. I had one where R/W sounded like someone trampling broken glass and metal. IIRC, the Seagate Barracuda was my first drive which I couldn't easily hear working.

Re:I like it.

[Peet42]

KOK, It was needed on the old Mac because they made a design choice to have no disk access lights anywhere, either for HDD or Floppy, and if you were sitting in a roomful of Macs you needed some way to know which one was "grinding"...

Re:I like it.

[Peet42]

What about the "unihammer" printer, such as the Seikosha GP80-A? It's the only printer I've owned where my downstairs neighbour knocked on the door and asked me to stop printing...

Re:I like it.

[jimmydevice]

Or drum and chain printers.

Re:I like it.

[Ma8thew]

I find this irritating too. I have a WD My Book, and when I sleep my computer, the My Book keeps pulsing its blue light every 10 seconds. It's not only irritating, but also a clear waste off electricity.

Re:I like it.

[arivanov]

Depends on your hard drive settings. While most laptops BIOS-es and OS-es in laptop mode enable APM and spindown, but they do not touch the acoustic management settings.

On some drives this makes a hell of a difference. For example my home server from sounding like a machine gun fight went to barely audible. OK, granted it also got much slower, but you can now work in its immediate vicinity. Before it was practically impossible. Too distracting. Similarly, the acoustic management settings made a considerable improvement on my company laptop and so on.

Re:I like it.

[thomthom]

My case's Power LED and HD activity LED are them ultra bright blue ones. When all other lights are out in the room, the LEDs light up well enough for me to reasonable navigate the room. I get this blue halo over me when I sit by the computer. I'm sure that it's the devious ploy of some disgruntled designers to torture people with light. I had to cover up the lights with some black electrical insulation tape.

Re:I like it.

[Poorcku]

I like them because they are the keepers of the sacred words "Ekke Ekke Ekke Ekke Ptang Zoo Boing".

Re:I like it.

[wfberg]

You really notice the lack of noises when you're logged on to some system remotely using a GUI. Double click something, and if there's no immediate reaction (or hourglass..) the system seems unresponsive. If you were sitting at the machine, you'd hear buzzing and whirring as *something* happens in the background. If I were marketing nifty thinnish-client solutions, I'd make sure there's always some sort of activity indicator (CPU, disk, ..) on the screen, so the system seems as responsive as a local client.

Re:I like it.

[mollymoo]

My last three Macs haven't had disk access lights, I don't think any of them do. I do find it mildly annoying not having them, particularly as they've all had virtually silent drives.

Re:I like it.

[OhMickey]

...until some clever chap writes an app that simulates these noises. Yeah, it's a flash drive but it sounds like an RLL drive churning FIDO mail.

Re:I like it.

[doti]

I also like the sound of the disk activity, but not the constant sound of the spinning.

Re:I like it.

[doti]

Not pointless at all. It's also good to have feedback of what the machine is doing.

For Linux, check wmhdplop.
(check the animation at the bottom right of the page)

Also available as a gkrellm plugin.

Re:I like it.

[DeltaQH]

Easy solution! Just implement a software that will produce (if the user demand it) a set of sounds that help the user to identify the activity taking place inside the hard drive. Being the sounds implemented in software rather than in hardware. It would give a greatly enhanced uses experience. For example: huuuummm.......hummmm..........hummm................ The Flash drive is running happily. Whiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii. Heavy activity. Rumble.....rumble......rumble..... Something is going wrong. Klonk....klonk........klonk........ Something is broken. Sharpness of sound can also adjusted as the drive ages. Sloooooower sound help to indicate... time for a new drive!!

Re:I like it.

[Fweeky]

You're right they are rarely useful, but they are ubiquitous - why reproduce one in software? It can tell the difference between multiple drives, and reading or writing. It can even give a good idea of the level of activity.

Re:I like it.

[Gordonjcp]

I've got a circa-1986 DEC PDP11/73 with a couple of 40M hard disks that are surprisingly quiet - in fact, thanks to the proliferation of tiny high-speed fans (as opposed to the 4" low-revving fans the PDP11 has) my PC is louder than the whole PDP11 rack. Except, of course, when you fire up the RL02s.

Oh yes. Here we have a 10M removable disk pack about the size of a kitchen bin lid, driven by something the size of a washing machine motor, with the heads mounted on a pint glass-sized voice coil positioner. The drives aren't that noisy when spinning up (well, one is but that's because a motor bearing is a bit dry - some servicing needed). When you actually get them going, they make a satisfyingly chunky "gweep thock gweep gweep thock gweeeeeep ka-thunk" noise. If you don't have the sound-deadening rubber feet screwed down, but just leave the rack standing on its solid castors, the noise is conducted into the floor and is loud enough to upset the downstairs neighbours.

Re:I like it.

[CrackedButter]

Yeah but it makes you look cool and clearly that is what is most important here.

Re:I like it.

[ta bu shi da yu]

You know, Windows XP is far more reliable that Windows 98 SE. I'd be interested to see what process was causing the problems. Most likely something to do with WMI, which I agree is a bit silly on personal desktops.

Re:I like it.

[catwh0re]

I used to have a system with a hdd activity led. It was useful in the old days of DOS or Windows 3.1 when a sudden freeze could be attributed to either HD activity or a crash. Overtime I got used to not having that LED to diagnose if there was a system fault, but instead by hearing the noise of the HDD activity (which in a way is similar to how I change gears in a car.)

Not having either of these anymore doesn't really discourage me, because HDDs seem to be constantly buzzing these days between caching, pre-emptive multitaking and the ever referenced swap space.

Re:I like it.

[ronocdh]

I suppose now that we have silent hard drives, you can get a program that makes whirring and clanking noises come out of your speaker whenever you're reading or writing to disk?

This reminds me of the phenomenon of the "click" soundfile burped out of most consumer-grade digital cameras. I always find it horribly irritating and it's always the first thing I shut off. But really, it makes sense, as the public is used to that sound and has always used it as feedback.

Re:I like it.

[xoundmind]

I like the hard drive noises. Lets be honest here, they are soft clicks and chirps, not chainsaw noises. It gives me a non-visual feel of what the computer's up to.

My cable access was out for most of last night as a result of some pretty serious storms in the south eastern US....I dug out an 2000-era PII box running Debian on dialup. (The thing still chugs along nicely on what was last synced with Potato!) For old-times sake, I did an apt-get on something small enough and WHAM!...there was that sound again. The HD alway made a particular sound while doing anything taxing (like running dpkg.)

It was a nice bit of nostalgia.

Re:I like it.

[LinuxDon]

In my experience, the system actually feels more responsive when there isn't a rattling noise of a harddisk filling up to wait times.

Re:I like it.

[myriadmagus]

yeah have to agree with you

Re:I like it.

[lucid rinehead]

Disc are quiet *now*... The 10k rpm SCSI disc in my old Ultra 1 sounds like a gas turbine spooling up when I switch it on, and you can hear the heads working in the next room with the door shut!

Re:I like it.

[phoenix321]

HDD activity indicators are great when logging into a machine you're not directly in front of, be it a remote desktop or KVM switched. Especially swap trashing or scheduled virus scans can slow down the entire system with barely visible symptoms in cpu utilization in taskmgr or top. They leave a remote operator with only faint clues on why the machine is so damn slow right now, as the CPU load is negligible and caused only by processes that run all the time anyway.

It's a boon when you do support on a client machine of unknown horsepower, a rotting Windows installation or fragmented filesystem. You remotely started a program, say Outlook, a typical offender, five minutes ago and you don't see any operational window yet. System load for OUTLOOK.EXE is almost nil. How do you tell if it has crashed or is just starving for HD access without looing at the HDD light?

Re:I like it.

[Jeff DeMaagd]

I don't think you've actually done this. Your solution would not work because blue LEDs are generally that bright. You need to do two or three layers.

Re:I like it.

[Cheeze]

MCSE will tell you to open perfmon and go through a lengthy process selecting items to watch.

Of course then, you're running another program and just adding to the disk activity.

Re:I like it.

[PrescriptionWarning]

my eeePC has a nice little green LED that indicates activity on its flash drive, and fortunately its not blindingly bright!

Re:I like it.

[Jeff DeMaagd]

Amidst all this whining, I really don't see the problem. Most of the benefits of SSDs are hype.

Mechanical notebook hard drives are very quiet. My notebook is so quiet overall that I have to put my ear next to it to hear the fan and hard drive.

Regular hard drives don't actually consume that much power. For example, a 1.8" SSD consumes 0.5 Watts max, a 1.8" mechanical hard drive consumes 0.8 Watts max. ULV CPUs consume 10 watts max. Normal notebook CPUs consume around 30 watts. Idle mode gives a smaller difference in power savings. How is 0.3 Watts going to noticeably extend your battery life if your savings is less than 1% that of the max system draw?

Re:I like it.

[dotancohen]

You are 100% right, the term is misoverused. While a hard drive can be "distracting, irritating, or damaging" (see What is Noise Pollution? full disclosure: that's my site) it does not "disturb any natural process or cause human harm".

Re:I like it.

[owlstead]

"Why do we need freakin laser beams filling up a room when the server is running? Are computer manufacturers in business to punish their users?"

No they are trying to sell their stock through retail shops and consumer shows. It looks great to most people in the display, and nobody will return a hard drive because the "cool" blue LED light is too bright. It might also matter that people creating a product overstate the importance of the product to themselves. So they, unconsciously, use a bright light to state they're there.

They're not created to annoy, they're created to be noticed and to sell.

Re:I like it.

[TheRaven64]

As the other poster said, Macs tend not to have hard drive activity lights. They also put the num-lock and caps-lock lights on the corresponding keys so there is no panel of lights to add it to. My PowerBook and MacBook Pro have both had almost completely silent drives. I periodically have to put my ear against the MBP to tell if the disk is still being used. I used to have a 386 laptop with a two-colour LED that would turn green when the disk was being read and red when it was being written to. That was quite fun, since heavy swapping would make it turn orange.

Re:I like it.

[evanbd]

How do you tell if it has crashed or is just starving for HD access without looing at the HDD light?

I leave gkrellm open most of the time, with disk I/O as one of the tickers. If you don't do that routinely, and want something that won't take forever to load on a disk-starved system, or aren't logged in graphically, vmstat is handy. You'll likely care about the IO stats, and possibly the VM stats and context switches. If you want more details on the disk, vmstat -d will give you details including how many IOs got sent to the disk after grouping (likely the best indicator of a disk-starved system; moderate numbers of large reads won't hurt nearly as badly as lots of tiny ones). Adding -n 1 will give you an update every second, which can also be informative.

CPU time spent waiting for IO (the wa field in vmstat or top) is also a good indicator, though not as reliable.

I have no clue how to do the equivalent under Windows.

Re:I like it.

[1u3hr]

Ever tried building a PC that doesn't produce any sound? After a while, you'll find that the only noise you just can't seem to get rid of, is the humming of the hard drive (while idle). "Soft" as in "nearly silent". As in "driving you nuts".

Where are you setting up this PC? In the middle of Antarctica? I only wish the level of ambient noise was low enough that I could detect my hard disk access.

Anyway, I have my radio on a rock station beside me to drown out the noise from the loud conversations in the next room, the vehicles passing by, airplanes overhead, airconditioners....

Re:I like it.

[CAIMLAS]

The problem is that LEDs are visual, whereas the sound the disk makes is, well, auditory. This poses several problems:

1) Auditory sampling rate is hundreds of times faster than visual sampling rate in humans (if you could make such a comparison to recording mediums).
2) Auditory signals can be picked up imperceptibly/subconsciously, without conscious effort. A LED has to be actively looked at to be alerted to any possible problems.
3) Most disk activity LEDs do not appear to flicker at the same frequency as the disk is making noise. In order to accurately represent it, I think you would need, at least, two or three different colors being represented within a single LED. And said LED would need to blink substantially faster than it does currently.
4) A disk's noise is not just an auditory indicator; it is the actual sound the disk makes. Each disk is different and, once a person is familiar with the sound of a given disk, is able to predict exactly what the disk is doing at any point in time. That'd not be easy to do with a LED.

Hey, maybe I'm off my rocker and I'm the only one who will listen to a disk -carefully- (and with a stethoscope in a loud room) to help determine the physical health of a drive. It's saved me more than once - and the hard drive LEDs would've been a very poor substitution.

Re:I like it.

[SuiteSisterMary]

To a large extent, it's there so that other people know that you've just taken a picture; subway, change room, locker room, stuff like that.

Re:I like it.

[phoenix321]

What if I don't want to paint all my LED-bearing indicators with an ugly black stripe? That may be great at night but an abomination by nasty by daylight. And then again, even laptop manufacturers well-known for not following the abominable blue-lights-and-phony-silver design craze (Lenovo...) is going for blue lit power buttons right now. I can't tell you how disappointed I am, but the sharpie/masking tape solution obviously won't work on a power button.

And there are equipment manufactures out there that put a diode of epic blue-laser-proportions beneath every damn button. I certainly remember an offensive DVD player at a friend's house that severely distracted from watching the TV screen with no less than five bright blue lights, one of them strobing all the time. Each movie looked like the "Battling Seizure Robots" unless someone put a DVD case in front of it. And even then the whole cabinet was flashing wildly by scattered light from these diodes...

The design of this DVD player made me believe there are manufacturers in East Asia that really try to take over the West, literally, I swear. The design of this unit was hideously perfect, second only to a nuclear blast in underlying brainpower and evil beauty:

- all important buttons were glassy transparent with the laser diode beneath, shining directly into your eyes when the DVD player is placed below the TV
- the currently active function BLINKS incessantly. And yes, STOP is considered a function :)
- all function symbols were printed ON the button and the buttons were otherwise identical. The printing was done from behind and they were not arranged in a logical manner, so you would have no tactile or logical clue after covering them with a Sharpie.
- the front plate was recessed at each button's location with each button having a T-shaped cross section, making it next to impossible to paint all light emitting plastic.
- covering them with masking tape was prevented because these buttons were also sticking out a few millimetres from the unit, emitting light to their sides.
- putting a DVD case in front was prevented by knobs and design "features" sticking out from the front plate, so a gap one centimeter wide was always there, allowing the Seizure Robot's lasers to emanate from the sides. Even when placed *behind* the couch *and* blocked by a DVD case it was enough to light up the room in seizure-friendly blue strobes.

A thick dark woolen blanket finally put an end to the Blofeld's plans for world domination and his Seizure Robot when the unit thankfully died from a sudden case of severe overheating some months later.

Re:I like it.

[Monkeybaister]

Duct tape.

He said if you're not sure about a permanent solution. Duct tape leaves residue if left too long.

Re:I like it.

[X0563511]

Process Explorer can give you an I/O graph in the taskbar in addition to CPU usage. It's good for a whole bunch of other things too, but since it uses some of Windows' debug hooks, SecureROM barfs on it.

Re:I like it.

[dotancohen]

Concrete.

Re:I like it.

[MttJocy]

Human beings are invariably tactile beings, who rely very heavily on our senses so that when we take some action in our environment our brain relies on sensory data to mediate that action, something our technology also needs to replicate in order to suit the beings whom it is intended to be used by.

This is one of the reasons why a completely flat keyboard like some of those roll up models tend to be a pain to type on when using a normal keyboard you get both the physical sensation of the key depression itself and the click sound, both of which allow the brain to deduce that the key depression was successful sure you could look at the screen but there is also the learned behavior aspect the reinforcement mechanism we have learned is the physical sensation and the click change that behavior from the expected and many people are not going to like it very much. Sure people can learn new feedback mechanisms but for the most part people are generally averse to investing energy relearning things unless there is a very compelling reason.

Another example is why many digital cameras replicate the click sound of older cameras again it is a feedback mechanism yes I know some people don't like this one however that is why they have an option to turn it off if you prefer not to have it.

The beep sound of an ATM terminal keypad is probably another example (although I personally hate the tone) because those hard wearing don't give much in the way of physical feedback on their own their movement is far too small to be really noticeable.

One could go though examples all day but the end result is that some people are going to find it somewhat of a transition to loose a form of feedback by the design of these devices, no doubt someone will come up with a software method to appease these users exactly like they did with the digital camera basically (play a sound file to replicate the expected feedback). I think with computers it is also an issue to have a non-visual indicator because there is typically already enough visual information on the screen already, extra visual objects are a less desirable solution there is only a certain amount of visual indicators the mind can take in at one time but it is possible to take in data from other sensory sources at the same time more easily than relying on passing everything through one input channel.

Re:I like it.

[X0563511]

You're not completely crazy, or in any case you are not alone in being so...

The LED is quite fast - indeed they flash so fast they appear solid - all LEDs glow this way. The problem is that our eyes don't respond to changes as fast as our ears do, as our eyes rely on chemical processes where our ears rely on vibration and electricity.

Still, I don't care how accurate a LED indicator system is, it won't work for unusual situations, unless they use sound from inside the drive as input. I would like to see a LED indicator tell you when you have a damaged bearing in the drive... In situations where you are trying to identify a mechanical problem with machinery, you need all your senses available - and a flashing light doesn't cut it.

Re:I like it.

[CastrTroy]

I would like a way to find out what application is making my hard disk spin. Sometimes, the computer just starts grinding the hard drive like crazy. It would be nice to see what program is monopolizing the hard disk so that perhaps something could be done about it. Similar to in the task bar when one program in hogging the processor, you can put it on low priority so it doesn't grind everything else to a halt, it would be nice if you could put something on low priority for HD IO, so that it wouldn't interfere with other programs that are more important.

Re:I like it.

[CastrTroy]

I can see a CRT monitor refresh if it's set to 60 Hz refresh rate. Same with the flickering of certain fluorescent light bulbs. If you turned a sound on and off 60 times a second, I'm not sure if I would hear it as a continuous sound, or if I would actually hear it click on and off. I guess one problem LEDs is that once you cut the power, they don't go dim instantly. They tend to slowly fade out. If incandescents were used, I think it would be much more obvious if it was blinking or not. My eyes are quite good at picking up whether a light is flickering, or if it's continuous. Also, once we have flash drives, we don't have to worry about damaged bearings and other mechanical problems.

Re:I like it.

[OSXCPA]

Apple sells a line of Western Digital external HDDs in their retail stores, and while they are pricier than roll your owns, they are really nice in their lighting scheme. They have a long LED on the front - imagine a 'Cylon style' white LED, but vertical. The light changes intensity, position, etc depending on what the HD is doing. File access - light cycles with access. HD noise itself is pretty minimal, and the fan is virtually silent. Best part, when Time Machine hoses my system and freezes the external HD (which it occasionally does), the light goes full-on and stays on, so I know there is a problem. I think this kind of feedback is great, and it eats up zero system resources.

Re:I like it.

[Rolo Tomasi]

man vmstat
man iostat

Re:I like it.

[thomasdn]

Especially swap trashing or scheduled virus scans can slow down the entire system with barely visible symptoms in cpu utilization in taskmgr or top. Actually, in top you can just look at the I/O wait. If that is high, and your mem and swap usage is also high, your system is probably busy swapping.

Re:I like it.

[springbox]

Anyone have an audio clip of a unihammer printer printing? I'm having a hard time imagining anything that's louder than a dot matrix printer.

Re:I like it.

[Hasmanean]

The response to hard drive noise depends on what you are doing at the time. If you are focused on something, HD noise will simply be distracting, or irritating. If you are trying to meditate or establish peace and quiet, then HD noise is an invasion in your space and is therefore pollution, although a better term would be "unwanted noise."

It's not just the amplitude of the noise, it's the irregular and dissonant pattern of it too. It cannot be predicted, therefore the brain automatically get's busy trying to find a pattern to it, and this lack of predictability in your environment puts people on edge.

If the noise was even louder--but more consistent, it would actually sound pleasant, like a waterfall. It's the fact that it has no large-scale structure in the pattern of clicks which makes it unpleasant for people to listen to.

Hasan

Re:I like it.

[Andrzej Sawicki]

Where are you setting up this PC? In the middle of Antarctica? I only wish the level of ambient noise was low enough that I could detect my hard disk access.

Very funny, but my point stands. At night, I do hear the hard drive, and it's pretty much the only sound in the room not made by me. And since I work at home, it can get annoying even during the day. I'd switch to an SSD right now, but the semi-affordable kind is too small for comfort. Looks like not much longer now. :)

Re:I like it.

[X0563511]

You would hear it, if only as a change in frequency. Details:

Frequency resolution of the ear is, in the middle range, about 2 Hz. That is, changes in pitch larger than 2 Hz can be perceived. However, even smaller pitch differences can be perceived through other means. For example, the interference of two pitches can often be heard as a (low-)frequency difference pitch. This effect of phase variance upon the resultant sound is known as 'beating'.

Re:I like it.

[freedom_india]

It looks great to most people in the display, which is exactly how i got hooked in BestBuy while buying my WD 250GB External Drive.
Now that the blue ring of light is cool at times, and annoying, i still can't return the same to BestBuy for this reason as i would be laughed out of the store.
And blast WD, the drive is as robust as can be, with no manufacturer faults, etc.

Re:I like it.

[Peet42]

Technically, a unihammer was a dot matrix, but it worked by having a spinning ridged drum behind the paper and a single vertical "bar" in the head that could be struck against the drum, making a single dot where the bar and ridges crossed. It ran at the same speed as a 9-pin dot matrix, but had to fire nine times as often in the same length of time in order to achieve this. My downstairs neighbour thought I was using a power saw.

It was one of those printers where there was little point in re-inking the ribbon, as by the time it had gone round once it was see-through.

Re:I like it.

[rvw]

What about the "unihammer" printer, such as the Seikosha GP80-A? It's the only printer I've owned where my downstairs neighbour knocked on the door and asked me to stop printing... I had a Brother daisywheel printer once. My desk started swinging when it printed something. The noise was incredible. I had a Intertec Superbrain (CP/M) back then, with Wordstar, and the only way to get a decent layout was by using bold and capital letters. (I refused to use underlines.) I used double and even triple bold to add extra effect. The result was that some head lines were printed eight times, and if you turned over de printed paper, you would have a 3-D landscape. I think it would be a good braille printer!

Re:I like it.

[rcw-home]

I can see it now - someone will come out with a driver for people like yourselves that insist on having more noise in their environment.

Well, if you're trying to fall asleep, pink noise isn't bad (it sounds just like a waterfall):

sox -t nul /dev/zero -t ossdsp /dev/dsp synth whitenoise lowpass 100

("-t alsa default" if you're using ALSA)

Re:I like it.

[CastrTroy]

The hard drive itself seems to generate quite a bit of heat. This requires extra fans for cooling. I'm convince my laptop could operate quite well without a fan, or at least with a much smaller more quiet one, if only the hard disk didn't get so hot. Changing to solid state would not only allow me to get rid of the sound of the actual hard disk, but the fans that are necessary because of it.

Re:I like it.

[Ephemeriis]

You're right they are rarely useful, but they are ubiquitous - why reproduce one in software? I suppose now that we have silent hard drives, you can get a program that makes whirring and clanking noises come out of your speaker whenever you're reading or writing to disk?

The problem that I have with most HDD activity lights is that they're seldom where I can actually see them during general use. Pretty much every PC I work on is stuffed under/into a desk, so if I want to see an activity light I have to look away from what I'm working on to check on it. I'm also frequently logged into machines remotely, so any activity lights they may have (and, to be fair, any noises they may make) are miles away. An on-screen indicator of HDD activity is frequently very handy.

Re:I like it.

[des09]

Why are your drives spinning at night? Turn the machine off. Better for your sleep, power bill, environment.

Re:I like it.

[MightyYar]

This laptop needs more cowbell.

Re:I like it.

[ZorinLynx]

It's up to me to decide whether to tell people I took a photo. I sometimes like to take photos discretely, because some people in public get agitated when there's a camera click. If I can do it silently and without being noticed, all the better.

This is also why I appreciate cameras with good light sensitivity. I can take loads of photos at parties without annoying everyone with bright flashes.

Re:I like it.

[Andrzej Sawicki]

Never heard of people working or playing at night, have you?

Re:I like it.

[shokk]

You must have loved that Iomega Zip drive. *rolls eyes*

Re:I like it.

[hairyfeet]

And for Win2K 2K3 and XP,hard drive indicator..It is Free,no installation needed,and has two five LED bars for read/writes and only 3Mb per indicator.If you don't mind an installation and want something more meaty,Anvir Task Manager Free makes a great tool that not only gives you CPU as well as disk load and temp monitor,but can monitor programs trying to install BHOs and startup entries and also makes a great replacement for task manager.I have been using it for quite a while and it performs like a champ and runs on everything from Win98 to 2K8 including the 64 bit versions of XP and Vista.

Re:I like it.

[hairyfeet]

Use either sysinternals filemon or a cool little tool I use called Anvir task manager free.It'll put a little icon in the tray which will monitor cpu,disk load and temp,as well as show you the top two programs hogging the hdd.And of course free is always nice.That should show you what is causing the chugging and then you can lower its priority in anvir or uninstall it.

Re:I like it.

[marcansoft]

You've got that backwards - LEDs turn on and off very fast. Much much faster than incandescents, since those has to physically cool down and heat up with each cycle.

Re:I like it.

[SCHecklerX]

Unless, like me, you like to keep your laptop handy near the sofa to look things up at random about what may be on tv or whatnot. The noise is irritating. Even more so that if I run the thing on battery, the drive will spin down and be quiet. I wish it would do the same thing while plugged in. Actually, I guess it would if I took the time to configure it, but I'm lazy :-)

Re:I like it.

[Don_dumb]

Wouldn't that be like the transmission system in some modern cars which use CVT - because there is no gear change experience, the manufacturers sometimes add in a sport mode that simulates a surge and then lull of power, so the drivers can "change gear".

Another case of technological advances being held back by a human comfort in the way things are.

Re:I like it.

[The End Of Days]

I sure hope you're not a privacy advocate, cause what you do is a bigtime invasion.

Re:I like it.

[Anonymous Coward]

% man iostat
No manual entry for iostat

Yes, I know you to add it, but it always annoys me those aren't in the default install.

Re:I like it.

[dotancohen]

The consistent noise you are referring to is called white noise. That's what the fan makes, which is why "the fan is loud" does not mean "the fan is distracting". There are those who deliberately turn on white noise devices as a sleep aid, in fact.

Re:I like it.

[Damocles the Elder]

If you're working or playing, then I'd think that even the click of the mouse or keys would drown out the sound of the hard drive. I think the GP's post would be better suited to be "Why not turn your computer off when you're sleeping".

Re:I like it.

[jacksonj04]

Can you link, or give a model number? I'm after a new external HDD (or two) and think that having useful lights on the front would be a big bonus.

Re:I like it.

[tux_deamon]

Most of the benefits of SSDs are hype.

Not in my experience. I replaced the 1.8" Hitachi Travelstar in my X40 with a 1.8" SSD. By the specs, the new SSD has an access time of 0.1 ms compared to > 20 ms for the mechanical drive. Additionally, sequential I/O speeds for the entire address space of the SSD are 2-3X that of the Travelstar's fastest zone. What has this meant in terms of real world performance? Boot time from 2.5 mins on the mechanical to less than 30 seconds on the SSD. Firefox launches in a second. I got this drive for the performance. The reduced heat, noise, and power consumption are the icing on the cake. My entire system went from sluggish to snappy. This single upgrade made my 3 year old laptop seem like a brand new machine. The drive wasn't cheap, but it has been worth every penny.

Re:I like it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Normandy was a big time invasion. Taking photos in public or at parties is a social norm.

Re:I like it.

[Peet42]

Do you want to know something really scary...?

Did you ever wonder why the full stop was made of brass on an otherwise plastic daisywheel? It's because somebody came up with a program that let you use microspacing mode to dump bitmap graphics on a Brother daisywheel using just the full stop.

Eek.

Re:I like it.

[navyjeff]

I like the hard drive noises too, for the same reason. Maybe vendors could do what car manufacturers did when they went to solid state relays for turn signals. The Ford Focus has a piezo electric speaker that clicks when the turn signal is on to mimic the old relays. I suppose PC manufacturers could play random clicks through the laptop's speakers when the drive is being read.

Re:I like it.

[rrohbeck]

Joy.
The 5400 rpm 5.25" DEC drives sound more like a F16 spooling up when they start. And as if the turbine is losing a few blades when the heads load :)

Re:I like it.

[porneL]

MenuMeters includes disk activity indicator. Solves the 'problem' for me.

Re:I like it.

[The End Of Days]

And doing your best to make sure you're not noticed taking the photos is rude, norm or not.

Re:I like it.

[xstonedogx]

If you've got a black case, use electrical tape. You can let exactly as much light through as you want or none at all, and it's easy to change or remove. With patience, you can even cut a design into the tape using an x-acto. On the cases I've used this on you can't even see it unless you're close and looking for it.

Re:I like it.

[Andrzej Sawicki]

Yeah, every sound I make is louder than the hard disk. Now, guess what happens, if I have to stop and think.

Re:I like it.

[Twinbee]

Why can't you just cover it, colour over it, or somehow filter it?

You can't do that so easily with noise, which is a much bigger problem, especially with the noisier hard drives.

Re:I like it.

[toddestan]

The big problem with harddrives is that we tend to bolt them directly to the case, so the vibrations transfer into the case and cause a humming noise. If you want them to make less noise, mount them with rubber grommets to prevent the vibrations from getting into the case. The drive will still hum a bit obviously, but it will be buried in the case where you won't hear it, atleast not over the fan(s) which are not buried inside the case.

Re:I like it.

[milsoRgen]

the same function could be fulfilled by an LED or something else that could be activated or disabled Yes as long as it is running at a low enough hardware level, I don't need windows hanging and taking my HDD indicator with it. That's the biggest benefit of being able to hear the drive in my opinion, having a computer lock up on you but hearing that it is just getting it's shit together. The audible feedback tends to come in handy most often when you are on someone else's PC and they have every god damn program on the internet starting up with windows.

Re:I like it.

[Anonymous Coward]

To a large extent, it's there so that other people know that you've just taken a picture;

If that were the case, then you couldn't turn it off.

The sound is there to provide the auditory feedback that people became accustomed to with film cameras. The fact that people other than the photographer can hear it is ancillary.

Re:I like it.

[BulletMagnet]

I like it too - I like noise so much I decided to skip rather quiet SATA drives in my box for a pair of 15K U320 SCSI Cheetah's in RAID0. I always know what the box is doing....from 5 feet away :)

Re:I like it.

[thedeadswiss]

Back in the 80's I was an operator for ICL Mainframes. They had a volume control, which allowed us to listen to what was called the Hoot. This allowed us to diagnose problems by learning to recognise the sounds. For example, if the Hoot began to squeal, then a program was in a tight loop.

Re:I like it.

[Cyberax]

Simple.

Open "Task Manager", open "View"->"Select columns". Then choose the columns "Bytes written"/"Bytes read".

You'll be able to spot the offending process without any difficulties.

Re:I like it.

[X0563511]

That's what I said:
indeed they flash so fast they appear solid - all LEDs glow this way.

Re:I like it.

[waferbuster]

apt-get install gkrellm

Re:I like it.

[VoltageX]

There's a script around to allow you to light up the red TOSLink LED on the Macbooks as a hdd/net monitor. Unfortunately I don't have a link for you.

Re:I like it.

[OSXCPA]

The part number on the bottom of it is WD7500H1Q-00

The '5' might be an 'S' - the type is so small, I can't tell.

If it helps, it came in a red box and the enclosue was grey, rounded at the front with the LED looking like a tall, narrow '0' on the front. Edges are rounded. Vents ar in the top and back. There is a stylized 'WD' on the side in white.

Good luck!

Re:I like it.

[Damocles the Elder]

If you stop to think and your computer's constantly accessing your hard drive, I'd say you have bigger problems than how loud it is.

Re:I like it.

[tramp]

Our Philips P4500 did have the same 10M removable disk pack and you could really hear it when a heavy query was executed. Until one morning it sounded more like a Jumbo 747 and ended with a long squeek. I saved it for years but alas last time I moved there was really not enough room to store everything.

Re:I like it.

[Paolone]

There are those who deliberately turn on white noise devices as a sleep aid, in fact. I don't need it, my titinnus come free with years of puck rock music.

Re:I like it.

[VoltageX]

Gah, just bought a low end WD external. I'll look out for it next time. Would be great to have a row of them as eSATA in a NAS box.

Re:I like it.

[jacksonj04]

I've traced it down, It's the WD My Book series, with the exception of the "Essential". The "Pro", "Premium" and "World" editions all have a circular LED ring, though it still behaves similarly. These actually seem to be really nice external drives, a good range of IO options and a solid pedigree.

URL: http://www.wdmybook.com/

Re:I like it.

[real gumby]

Jeez, just open the case and unplug the light. Or, if you're afraid of someone coming by and "helping" you by repairing it (depends what kind of household you live in, I suppose), get out the trusty diagonal cutters. I keep a pair in my pen cup on my desk for just this kind of thing.

Looks better on the outside than an ugly black mark too.

(As for a historical note: the Interlip-D implementation for the Xerox D machines put a little bar in the mouse pointer when there was disk activity. Worked quite well, for those who liked that sort of thing. Symbolics workstations used a similar bar, but at the bottom of the CRT. Since we all have bitmapped displays these days, this is easy to do).

Re:I like it.

[aaronmarks]

You aren't fully understanding the point that your parent made. Humans can frequently hear the difference between audio that is digitally sampled at 24,000hz vs. 48,000hz and some can even tell a difference all the way up to 96khz (super high end audio equipment goes up to 192khz). You are not going to find many people that can notice the difference between a 75hz refreshing light and a 100hz or 200hz refreshing light, let alone a 24,000hz refreshing light. Humans are without question more capable of distinguishing differences in sampling rate of light vs. audio.

Re:I like it.

[shellbeach]

He said if you're not sure about a permanent solution. Duct tape leaves residue if left too long. Yeah, but Scotch Tape is transparent ...

Re:I like it.

[XchristX]

I too have an SCSI hard drive (Seagate Cheetah ST336607LW). Revved up like a harley while running binaries. I reduced the noise substantially by using this cooler:

http://www.quietpcusa.com/Zalman-Hard-Disk-Drive-Heatpipe-Cooler-ZM-2HC2-P27C45.aspx

The rubber washers help in damping out the noise. Plus, the primary reason why it's noisy is because the metal conducts and amplifies the vibrations through resonance. So I put some thermocol pads under the cooler to remove any metal-metal contact (except for a ground wire) and the noise reduced dramatically. Now I don't have to shut down my pc while sleeping.

I got a pic here:

http://img186.imageshack.us/my.php?image=1000564no7.jpg

(the hdd/cooler system is circled in red, ground wire in purple). IT works fine

Re:I like it.

[bughunter]

I swear by MenuMeters to monitor activity my OS X machines.

In addition to drive activity lights, you can choose from memory usage, up/down data rates, and CPU utilization displays for the right side of the menu bar. Each of the displays can be independently enabled/disabled and configured to your taste; I have all four enabled and they occupy only about 250 pixels' width on my menu bar.

Re:I like it.

[Arcane]

Wasn't there a startup sound file for the Macs, circa 199x, that mimicked the sound of a floppy spooling up and seeking? Whir, clik clik...
Speaking of noises, I really miss that old 56k modem handshake screech. Lets hear a DSL modem do that.


http://www.vorkt.com/

Re:I like it.

[Arcane]

Agreed with the XP constant activity. I keep a laptop on the floor next to the bed, and it is always crunching _something_ around and making a racket.

Fortunately, my wife's snoring drowns it out every so often.

Re:I like it.

[kylehase]

While you like it the fact is that you can't turn it off at will. Perhaps someone will come out with a SSD access "seek sound" application. Then you could choose to have sound or not. They'd also need to add a special grinding or clicking sound when the SSD begins to fail.

Re:I like it.

[cthulhu11]

RL02's. Feh. Nothing quite matches a set of RX01's for CLANGBANGCLANGCHOPDICECLANG sheer neighbor-annoying noise.

Re:I like it.

[ncc74656]

KOK, It was needed on the old Mac because they made a design choice to have no disk access lights anywhere

Something like that would be handy on newer Macs. My mini has exactly one idiot light on the front; it indicates whether it's on or off. Floppy drives for the Apple II had "in use" lights on them; who at Apple thought it'd be a good idea to eliminate that from the Mac, and what was he smoking at the time?

Re:I like it.

[dmsuperman]

I like it at night. My main PC sits inches from my head, and the nights that I don't have ambient music playing out of it the hard drives and fans spin. I hear them and they help me sleep.

I spose I'm just a geek like that, though what do you expect on /.?

Re:I like it.

[ncc74656]

It's up to me to decide whether to tell people I took a photo. I sometimes like to take photos discretely, because some people in public get agitated when there's a camera click.

<sarcasm>
Yeah...it's hard to get those upskirt pics when the "subjects" hear camera noises.
</sarcasm>

Re:I like it.

[adolf]

What if I don't want to paint all my LED-bearing indicators with an ugly black stripe?

If black does not suit you, then perhaps you might try red, blue, green, yellow, silver, gold, purple, brown, orange, turquoise, or burgundy.

Go ahead and try one. If you don't like it, just erase it and try again.

Sharpie marker is, generally, very easily erased from plastic. All you need is a bit of relatively hard vinyl, or relatively soft PVC, such as you'll find at the IEC end of your computer's power cord. Just rub the corner of the connector against the ink as if it were an eraser on a pencil mark, and it will simply disappear. (The insulated handle of a pair of diagonal cutters also works well, as does the black rubber ;handle of a Klein screw driver.)

Re:I like it.

[phoenix321]

Yep, that solved it. I'm ashamed that I missed this simple option, thanks a lot for pointing that out.

The other poster's solutions won't work on Windows and that's what my clients use, unfortunately.

Re:I like it.

[Andrzej Sawicki]

At night, I can hear the buzz of the idle hard disk. I have no problems with disk-access sounds, just any constant noise, even if it's not very loud.

Re:I like it.

[Gordonjcp]

I've got RX02s too. The cooling fan for the ferroresonant PSU (hasn't got a regulator, has got a special transformer that gets quite hot in use) is noticeably louder than the radiator fans on my car. And that's before the head load solenoids start up their kango hammer rattling. No, the RX02 doesn't get a lot of use.

Doing a sysgen from one RL02 to the hard disk is actually quite cool to listen to - it all sounds like a proper computer. Doing it from one RL02 to the other is cooler. Doing a sysgen from the RX02 (8" 512kB floppies, for the uninitiated) requires ear defenders and very understanding neighbours. When it gets to the busy bit near the end, writing out all the little driver files, it sounds like Einsturzende Neubauten.

Re:I like it.

[Askmum]

Well, I agree and I disagree.

I agree on the part that it is nice that you can hear what the computer is up to. At work I have to use Windows and I have to use MS Access, and Access just makes the harddrive go wild when doing large queries. Then it is nice to know that the computer is actually doing something other than showing CPU activity is virtually 0.
On the other hand: I just know these things will be much faster with a SSD drive. So maybe there will come some tool that will generate classic harddrive sounds from your speaker as your SSD HD searches its memory. Simple consecutive memoryreads will sound as the reassuring "trk-trk-trk", knowing that your HD is properly defragmented, full sweeps will give the worrying "rrrrrrk-rrrrrrk-rrrrrrrk-brrr-brrr" sounds when you just know that another hour will be lost because Windows does a horrible job of organizing its filesystem.
All the while knowing that if you shut off the speakers, yet another sound is eliminated.

Re:I like it.

[SoupIsGoodFood_42]

Not many Macs (if any) have such LEDs, and I'm glad. If I really need to know what the HDD is doing, I'll run a utility that gives me all sorts of info.

Re:I like it.

[tooth]

I like the gear noises in my Differential Engine No 2, it gives me a non-visual feel of what the computers up to. ;-)

Re:I like it.

[laejoh]

I did, and it used to bother me. But now I have a loud girlfriend too, and, an elliptical reflector dish!

Re:I like it.

[ILongForDarkness]

A single drive especially for a laptop isn't a big deal. But a big system say a sun workstation with a few mirrored drives starting up can be quite loud (though a lot of that is the fans going crazy to get the air circulating). I think where the noise reduction will be most felt is in data centres. Less noise to begin with, then less fans needed to cool everything, big power savings and it will sound less like a jet hanger.

Re:I like it.

[Bake]

Since you're probably using Task Manager to look at OUTLOOK.EXE, you can add a couple of columns to its view to see IO activity. Go to View -> Select Columns -> tick IO reads, IO writes and IO other.

Presto Chango, you now have a clear view of which processes are grinding the disk.

Re:I like it.

[ErroneousBee]

Not so much of a problem for me, either its working, as in playing a DVD or whatnot and your attention is focused on whatever you are doing/watching, or 'hdparm -S5 /dev/hdb' has been my friend and parked the thing (but beware, KDE likes to access the hd, so log off). I guess an in-bedroom system that comes alive at night with torrents and podcasts might be a problem.

Re:I like it.

[ACorvus]

So Cartier-Bresson was a pervert then?

Way to go with the generalisations.

Re:I like it.

[Drenaran]

An LED is not a bad idea, especially considering that it already exists... (i.e. the HDD activity led)

The problem with the LED is that it doesn't really catch your attention unless you are checking it because of a slow down, or happen to look at it incidentally. This doesn't exactly provide the ambient hdd status information that is described by the audible noise of a conventional drive. A small wafer speaker (appropriate for the higher pitch noises of a drive while simultaneously offering a small form factor) would provide the proper audio info if used as an activity indicator. This could be offered as a mod/accessory, receiving it's info from the HDD LED pins and using a cheap chip to appropriately convert that into HDD noises - many creative permutations on this concept present themselves, enjoy.

Re:I like it.

[treeves]

In situations where you are trying to identify a mechanical problem with machinery, you need all your senses available - and a flashing light doesn't cut it.

doesn't all of this discussion miss the point?...with a flash drive there can be no mechanical failure.

Re:I like it.

[petermgreen]

mmm, I have a macbook (which spends most of it's time running linux)and in may ways it is a nice machine but the combination of no hard drive light and a very quiet hard drive (I have a 200gb 4800rpm drive in there) means that sometimes I end up putting my ear to the machine just to try and tell whether there is disk activity or not.

Re:I like it.

[Laurence0]

That's exactly the wrong way round, with regard to LEDs and incandescents. LEDs turn off practically instantly when the power is cut, an incandescent bulb won't stop emitting light until the filament cools down far enough - hence if you hit the light switch it can take a second for the bulb to go out (although it will get dimmer during that second) wheras LEDs are used for fibre optics, where the light flicks on and off millions (billions!) of times a second.

Flourescent lights are something entirely different. They /do/ flicker with the supply frequency - I can see that myself, and compact flourescents (engery saving bulbs) suffer from the same sort of thing.

Flash drive longevity?

[mlts]

With this shift to Flash drives for data storage, I wonder if this is good or bad for data archival. With magnetic media, if there is a head crash, at least some data can be recovered. With flash, even though it has no moving parts, if something happens to make a large amount of blocks unreadable, there isn't any real way to recover the lost data.

Re:Flash drive longevity?

[gradedcheese]

Technically, they don't really become unreadable, there's just an uncorrectable bit flip or two (out of say, 128KB) and that block gets marked "bad" and then it's not used anymore. Whatever data it contained is still there though, and you could read it if you wanted to. That said, on an SSD there is an onboard controller that abstracts away the Flash itself, so I suppose that it might not provide any interface to reading "bad" blocks, other than that there's really nothing stopping you.

Re:Flash drive longevity?

[cortana]

Hm, just like hard drives!

I wonder if flash drives comply with the SMART spec, that allows you to find out how many remapped blocks there are:

# smartctl -A /dev/hdb ...
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE ...
    5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 253 253 063 Pre-fail Always - 0 ...

So, when VALUE drops below THRESH then the drive is junk and should be replaced ASAP.

Re:Flash drive longevity?

[TheRaven64]

With a hard disk, a lot of bad sectors typically means that a bit of dust or similar has got inside, or the disk head is slightly damaged. Both of these will cause the rest of the drive to fail quite quickly, so once you get a few bad sectors it's worth replacing. With a flash drive, the cells are basically independent. With perfect wear levelling (which doesn't exist), then one cell failing means that the rest will all fail soon (assuming all were manufactured to exactly the same tolerances, which is also not true). In real-world usage, a flash drive will wear out quite gradually (over a period of a hundred years for half-decent modern flash). The only user-visible change will be that the capacity gradually diminishes.

Re:Flash drive longevity?

[monkeyfork]

At a seminar I attended recently, a rep from a Japanese flash manufacturer was all giddy at the prospects (and official rumor) that M$ was going to do for the flash drive what was done for the winmodem, ie extract the intelligence out of the peripheral and make the OS do it. M$ doing the wear leveling algorithm, what a comforting thought. And I'm sure it will be accomplished in a way that make dual boot even easier.

Re:Flash drive longevity?

[Vexorian]

Flash drives got the potential to be a lot more durable, I am not too worried about the hard drive sound itself, but what the sound means, the sound means it is a mechanical device and it is dying an slow death... With flash drives, that's not an issue and thus I think we only need more development to be made and they will get very durable.

Re:Flash drive longevity?

[TClevenger]

Depending on how the drive is used. If you have a flash drive 95% full and unchanging, won't the other 1% get killed pretty quickly, even with wear levelling?

Re:Flash drive longevity?

[TheRaven64]

No. Good wear levelling will copy some infrequently modified data to the frequently modified cells and change the mapping. If you have 100 cells and modify logical address 99 frequently then after, say, 10 modifications of cell 99 it will swap logical addresses 1 (for example) and 99 around. You will then be repeatedly updating physical cell 1. After a bit, it will swap this with physical cell 2 and so on.

Expert on Trapped Guinea Pigs?

[az1324]

I wonder what sound he makes...

Re:Expert on Trapped Guinea Pigs?

[gardyloo]

"Cronk! Sqwee... richardgererichardgererichardgere...."

Re:Expert on Trapped Guinea Pigs?

[that this is not und]

I thought it was a toothless gerbil with Richard Gere.

Then again, with the company he keeps, there's probably been a supersizing...

Umm....

[d474]

"Vzoooot. Cronk, cronk, cronk. Zip, zip. (Pause.) Gurlagurlagurla...zweeee."

That's the pr0n your watching, not your hard drive dude.

Re:Umm....

[Anonymous Coward]

"Vzoooot. Cronk, cronk, cronk. Zip, zip. (Pause.) Gurlagurlagurla...zweeee"

In my native country of Kazhakistan, this offend my mother and my sister. Please to not refer to their private parts with disrespect. I do not disrespect your Cmdr Taco parts. It is golden rule for information technology.

Re:Umm....

[LordVader717]

Brainstorm - Show pr0n while computer boots up to pass the time.

Re:Umm....

[kvezach]

That's the pr0n your watching, not your hard drive dude.

Sounds like this article should be called The Joy of the Flesh Drive.

Re:Umm....

[Constantine XVI]

What, and reverse the years of progress we've made on fast boot times? Now noone will ever want their computers to finish starting!

Re:Umm....

[LordVader717]

Sure they will - just keep showing goatse's in ever more frequent intervals.

Re:Umm....

[sjwest]

Zonk so thats where my guinea pig went (he went missing one day), can i have him back.

One Major Disadvantage, however...

[MBC1977]

However, unless I'm wrong a distinctive disadvantage of a solid state drive (i.e. flash drives are slower (at least currently) than their magnetic disk counterparts). Granted for some that won't be a big deal, but if your working with audio / video applications or playing games, it defintely will suck big time.

Re:One Major Disadvantage, however...

[MrNaz]

SSDs are *not* slower than mag platter drives. Get one and try it before firing your mouth off, private!

Re:One Major Disadvantage, however...

[Daniel Phillips]

There are only two advantages spinning disks have over flash drives at the moment:

    1) Density (disk about 4 times more capacity in same form factor)
    2) Cost (disk more than 10 times cheaper for same capacity)

I expect flash to close the gap on density, but not necessarily on cost. However the cost of flash will ramp down low enough that if capacity is not your main objective then goodbye rotating media. In about 3 years more flash drives than disks will ship in laptops. For bulk storage, expect disk to stay cheaper per gig than flash for the next long time.

Re:One Major Disadvantage, however...

[etymxris]

Well, they can be. I tried to do SSD in a laptop by plugging a CF card into a mini-ide adapter a few years ago. The 40x or even 80x CF cards are definitely slower than hard drives. Hard drives sold as "SSD" and already shaped into a hard drive form factor do seem to be faster than regular flash media. That speed comes at a very high premium though. On newegg, a 8GB CF card costs $25-$35 at the low range. A 8GB SSD drive costs $175-$250 at the low range (for the laptop drive form factor).

Re:One Major Disadvantage, however...

[Keeper]

You do realize that the speed of the drive isn't limited to the speed of a single chip, right? You know, they can wire the things up in parallel...

Re:One Major Disadvantage, however...

[catch23]

Well new tech is always paid at premium. When LCD monitors first came out, even the largest 22" CRT monitors were cheaper than the smallest sized LCDs. I'm sure when SSD manufacturing scales to the level of platter-based HDDs, the cost won't be prohibitively expensive. BTW, typical "fast" CF cards are now 266x, which is around 20Mb/s. SSDs are around 70Mb/s.

Re:One Major Disadvantage, however...

[asuffield]

Flash media is considerably slower than hard drive media at the same price point. This is mainly due to economies of scale: there is a huge demand for low cost, moderately high performance desktop and laptop hard drives, while the demand for flash is for dirt cheap, low performance usb fobs. This is likely to change over time, but it will take years. Production methods for low unit-cost, high performance flash chips have to be developed, fab plants have to be built, all the usual problems.

Flash media (NAND-gate type) is fundamentally slower than hard drives for sustained serial write behaviour, where the seek penalty does not apply. This is not likely to change, since performance for both technologies should increase at roughly the same rate; so long as NAND-gate technology is the best we have, hard drives are still going to be around for those workloads that need that kind of thing (various forms of audio/video work, some database stuff, scientific applications). It's faster for the other major operating modes (all read modes, random-access-write, latency, etcetera), so is likely to give overall better performance for desktop computing workloads. There are experimental technologies in the labs that can outperform hard drives in the sustained serial write mode, but those aren't on the market yet, and may never be. They've been promising us MRAM for twenty years now, and still haven't come up with a product.

Limitations in current flash products mean that everything on the market is also slower than hard drives in the random-access-write mode. That's a problem with a known solution, there just isn't anything on the market that does it yet. This should change in the next generation or two.

Re:One Major Disadvantage, however...

[jamesh]

Maybe he meant overall performance (read and write)? Or does an SSD have better write times than a mag disk these days (assuming an equivalently priced disk eg 15K)?

The thing I'll miss when mag drives are obsolete is being able to listen to the head movement pattern and being able to tell people that their computer is running slow because the disk is failing...

Re:One Major Disadvantage, however...

[anglete]

There are specific SSD's that are not slower than mag platter drives, but the cheap SSD's are slow in their transfer times.

Take an older slower seagate 160gb (taken from hdtune)ST3160827AS at 56.8 MB/sec and a 12.8 ms seek. Even the advertised maximum of a transcend SATA ssd is a read up to 30 MB / sec and a write up to 28 MB / s. The solid state drive is approximately half the speed of the mag platter drive and realistically, less.

It is true that the latency and seek times are incredibly fast on solid state, but it really depends on what your using the drive for whether solid state will work faster for you or not.

Re:One Major Disadvantage, however...

[Ma8thew]

Mac developer Wil Shipley found that despite the Macbook AIr being significantly slower than his Macbook Pro, it was able to compile a large piece of software slightly quicker, due to the SSD. Additionally, he found application switching quicker, due to swap space all being extremely low latency.

Re:One Major Disadvantage, however...

[Fweeky]

Flash media (NAND-gate type) is fundamentally slower than hard drives for sustained serial write behaviour And, er, random writes. You're lucky to get 20/sec because every little write ends up in a read-modify-write of a 4MB block or so.

The upcoming solution to this seems to be to turn random writes into serial ones; presumably buffering up writes in battery backed up memory.

Re:One Major Disadvantage, however...

[itsdapead]

However, unless I'm wrong a distinctive disadvantage of a solid state drive (i.e. flash drives are slower (at least currently) than their magnetic disk counterparts).

As I understand it - flash drives (esp. the HDD replacement ones rather than key fobs) suck at sustained reading/writing but win on random-access (no physical heads to move around). You also get an advantage at boot-up (or c.f. coming out of power-save mode on a laptop).

I think that, for the momenmt, the killer apps are going to be for sneakernet (key fobs) and non-performance laptops (EEPC, MacBook Air) where silence/low power trumps speed.

There's also the possibility of "hybrid" storage devices - which intelligently juggle data between Flash, volatile cache and HDD. ISTR that some hard drives with big flash "caches" appeared a while back, and there's the "readyboost" (or whatever) feature in The OS That Dare Not Speak Its Name. Maybe future generations of RAID (which is currently designed around the foibles of spinning platters) will include modes designed to efficiently team up Flash and HDD?

Or maybe magnetic bubble memory (which was going to Change The World back in the 80s) will make a comeback :-)

Re:One Major Disadvantage, however...

[TheRaven64]

It depends on the workload. With a 512-byte block size and a 9ms seek time then a hard drive will get 56KB/s for a seek-intensive workload. A good drive with a 4.5ms seek time will get a whooping 112KB/s, or around 222 I/O operations per second. Even a cheap flash drive can get significantly more than this. In terms of sustained linear read speed, expensive flash drives are now around the same speed as cheap hard drives (better than the cheapest ones, but not much). Most workloads consist of a mixture of linear and random reads. Exactly where on this spectrum you lie depends on whether flash or magnetic storage is better for you.

Re:One Major Disadvantage, however...

[timeOday]

They certainly should do that, it seems obvious. But unfortunately I have yet to see the solid state drive with kick-butt sustained read/write speed. I noticed Intel's announcement of their entry to the market promised drives with several times the sustained read/write of hard drives, so maybe they'll be the ones to finally do it right.

Re:One Major Disadvantage, however...

[asuffield]

The problem is actually erase time - writing data to an erased block is fast (although not as fast as writing to a hard drive sector that is already under the write head), but erasing it ready for writing is extremely slow. The upcoming solution is to maintain a buffer of pre-erased blocks ahead of time; this is somewhat tricky to implement because it means data has to keep moving around the chip (a series of random writes to the same logical address has to be remapped so that it actually writes to a different physical block each time). There is no difficulty with erasing blocks in parallel, so it is merely a problem of managing all this, not a performance limitation of the underlying technology.

Also, the block sizes in the current generation of technology are too large. This is merely a production problem, which should go away in a generation or two.

Simply put: writing to a hard drive sector is faster than writing to a flash block, which is much faster than seeking to a hard drive sector, which is much faster than erasing a flash block. This part is unlikely to change. The other flaws in current flash products are likely to change.

Re:One Major Disadvantage, however...

[vidarh]

Performance on SSD's can be scaled more or less linearly by building the SSD with more chips and writing in parallel. Of course you want each individual chip to be fast too, but expect SSD read/write speeds to go up fast as the volume manufactured keeps growing. As someone else said, the performance on current SSD's is a result of what the market wants. The more SSDs are used as harddisk replacements rather than compact removable storage the more you'll see market pressure growing for higher performing units.

Re:One Major Disadvantage, however...

[Twinbee]

How does flash compare to standard RAM in terms of the stats below:

1: Random access write
2: Random access read
3: Serial write
4: Serial read

(I'm guessing those are the important metrics - please add if appropriate).

Re:One Major Disadvantage, however...

[LWATCDR]

Very badly.
RAM is really fast for all of the above.
The ideal system for speed at any cost would be a hybrid drive. It would be a ramdisk with a flash backing store and a really power backup. When the drive powered down it would write the ram to the flash.
It would be very expensive and you could get the same perofrmance with a good 64-bit OS, a lot of RAM and a good RAID system.

Re:One Major Disadvantage, however...

[Twinbee]

Do you have any actual benchmarks, so I can look back at this thread, and see flash speeds gradually creep up to the speeds of RAM over the coming decades?

Re:One Major Disadvantage, however...

[LWATCDR]

Not off the top of my head. I kind of doubt that you will see flash becoming as fast as ram but if you do then it will become system and we will start wishing for those 128 bit CPUs to come out.

64 gig

[sleeponthemic]

Ought to be enough for anybody

Re:64 gig

[Aeternitas827]

Evidently not.

160GB anyone?

Maybe...

[Perseid]

"Vzoooot. Cronk, cronk, cronk. Zip, zip. (Pause.) Gurlagurlagurla...zweeee."

Maybe some gangsta rap MP3s got on his computer...

Re:Maybe...

[tuxicle]

Either that, or it's a hip-hop guinea pig. On crack.

Flash drives sure have come a long way

[tsa]

I remember when I had a Commodore 64, about 24 years ago, and solid state drives were 'just around the corner'. They have been lurking there for a VERY long time, but finally they arrived! I can't wait to get my hands on one. The next thing to emerge is Linux for the masses, which has been around the corner for about 12 years, if not longer. I'm very optimistic about that since the Eee PC turned out to be such a huge success last year. The future looks bright!

Re:Flash drives sure have come a long way

[MichaelSmith]

I remember when I had a Commodore 64, about 24 years ago, and solid state drives were 'just around the corner'. They have been lurking there for a VERY long time, but finally they arrived! I can't wait to get my hands on one. The next thing to emerge is Linux for the masses, which has been around the corner for about 12 years, if not longer. I'm very optimistic about that since the Eee PC turned out to be such a huge success last year. The future looks bright!

Because it is quiet, my eee feels like a return to my very first 6502 basic-in-rom system. Until I started using an SSD I didn't realise how much time I spent waiting for my application to get a turn at the disk. The lack of a bottleneck is amazing.

Re:Flash drives sure have come a long way

[Gazzonyx]

Just wondering, are you using the SSD for swap space?

I imagine that's where it really starts to shine; when you're already in trouble and start paging (or swapping - I never know which is correct anymore. I always thought you paged out to swap, but everyone seems to be calling it swapping now) out to swap, you don't incur the extra several ms delay for rotational latency and perhaps a seek, as well. My only concern would be the number of write cycles if you start thrashing fairly hard.

I just realized you said eepc, do you know which disk scheduler you're using with it? I'd be curious to see the difference in CFQ and noop when the mechanical disk is out of the equation.

Re:Flash drives sure have come a long way

[Keeper Of Keys]

My concern about these drives is that they will die a very premature death under Windows where, as someone pointed out somewhere higher up the page, even with enough RAM to run all your apps, some paging (or swapping) is always occurring. (And don't tell me you can disable Virtual Memory: yes you can but the OS will very soon start to complain, and eventually turn it on again itself.)

Re:Flash drives sure have come a long way

[Cannelloni]

I hope you are right, but it seems a lot of people buy the ASUS Eee PC and in stall Windows on it. I guess they have this strange idea Windows is a requirement in today's world. As a Mac user, I don't know what they are talking about. I have ZERO use for Windows. The Mac has all the apps I need and more, and the system is super solid. I did use Linux for several years and it was a trouble-free experience too. Let's hope Linux REALLY catches on with the kids out there, but for that to happen I think it needs a few (commercial) killer apps that kids MUST HAVE.

Re:Flash drives sure have come a long way

[MichaelSmith]

Just wondering, are you using the SSD for swap space?

No idea. For once in my life I am running a 100% stock linux system, totally out of the box (which I still have). Everybody I show it to wants one.

I don't know about the disk scheduler. If you can tell me how to check I will take a look when I am back home later in the week and post the results.

Re:Flash drives sure have come a long way

[Gazzonyx]

If you know which drive it is (sda or sdb most likely... fill in for X below) you can find out from the command line:

cat /sys/block/sdX/queue/scheduler

Re:Flash drives sure have come a long way

[oojimaflib]

If you know which drive it is (sda or sdb most likely... fill in for X below) you can find out from the command line:

cat /sys/block/sdX/queue/scheduler

not GP, but my Eee at least is using noop (deadline). What effect would you expect this to have exactly?

Re:Flash drives sure have come a long way

[Fred_A]

I remember when I had a Commodore 64, about 24 years ago, and solid state drives were 'just around the corner'. I also seem to remember they were supposed to use "bubble memory", whatever that was supposed to be. And for just a few thousands of dollars you could have your very own 10 meg solid state disk drive "real soon now"...
Those who started saving back then must have amassed a fortune by now.

Re:Flash drives sure have come a long way

[Peet42]

IIRC Clive Sinclair (He of the ZX80) was developing "Bubble Memory".

Re:Flash drives sure have come a long way

[Sheepy]

dK'Tronics released a silicon disc for the Amstrad CPC which could be used as either a memory expansion or as a solid state drive.

Re:Flash drives sure have come a long way

[Gazzonyx]

Well, I think that the noop scheduler/elevator should yield the best performance. It has the least overhead, and the scheduling overhead for deadline and cfq are trade offs for optimizing a read head. The anticipatory scheduler adds a 1ms delay, but very little in the way of processing overhead. I'm just wondering how much performance could be yielded if all the various disk scheduling (read ahead, write behind, delays for queues, read and write starving, etc.) code is going to go the way of the... erm, really dead thing...

Re:Flash drives sure have come a long way

[TheRaven64]

I had a Psion Series 3 in around 1994/5. It had 256KB of RAM, and used a RAM disk for storage (if anyone still has a working one, please could you send it to the Maemo developers so they can see what a pocket computing environment that doesn't suck looks like?). It had two solid state disk slots, one on each side. These came in three categories. ROM disks were used for distributing software. RAM disks had a little 3V lithium battery in them to keep their contents safe while they were out of the machine, and Flash disks which didn't need the battery. The Flash disks were all single-cell, so you could write files but deleting them did not free any space. In order to reclaim the unused space, you needed to copy your files off, format the disk, and then write them back. In around 1995, I bought a 128KB flash disk for £30. I just had a look at flash prices, and for £40 I can buy a 16GB USB flash drive. Assuming my brain is working, that means that the capacity for the same approximate price has doubled 17 times in the last 13 years, or roughly once every 8.5 months. This is roughly born out by the fact that last time I checked prices was last summer and the 16GB drives were £90.

Flash has been available in consumer devices for a long time and it's been improving at a greater rate than hard disks for all of that time. It's only now that it's starting to be close enough that it's a real competitor in anything other than the ultra-mobile market.

Re:Flash drives sure have come a long way

[PieceofLavalamp]

Rrright and next your gonna try to tell DNF will actually be released too.

Re:Flash drives sure have come a long way

[Anonymous Coward]

Wear leveling has existed for ages.

Re:Flash drives sure have come a long way

[xZgf6xHx2uhoAj9D]

As has been debunked I'm sure hundreds of times before on Slashdot, I will debunk this falsehood once again. The number of writes is not a limiting factor in the life cycle of a modern flash drive. It was a limiting factor 10-ish years ago, but it is not now. Even if you swapped to a modern flash drive constantly at maximum throughput and the drive was completely full except for one block (the worst possible scenario for a flash drive), it would conservatively last for at least 60 years (if I remember right). Maybe modern drives are now into the hundreds of years.

I'm not saying a flash drive will last 60 years. I'm saying the number of writes is not the limiting factor. Wear levelling and block moving (the nice thing about flash is you can relocate a rather static block of memory somewhere else, since it's all random-access) algorithms are to the point where the number of writes is not a limiting factor. Once again, write and swap and rewrite as much as you like to a modern flash drive. The number of writes is not a limiting factor.

I'm starting to think early flash drives will have the same effect of rechargeable batteries. When people think of rechargeable batteries, they too often think of the ones from yesteryear with a limited number of recharges and that awful "charge memory". So too it seems with flash drives. Even otherwise informed people seem to think that writing to a flash drive some billions of times will somehow have a deleterious effect. It won't.

Re:Flash drives sure have come a long way

[Scoth]

Hey hey hey now. Calm down there. Next thing you'll be claiming is that Duke Nukem Forever will be out soon. I don't know if the universe could handle DNF running under Linux on a SSD at the same time without tearing down the middle.

Re:Flash drives sure have come a long way

[Keeper Of Keys]

Thanks for this - it's actually reassuring. The last discussion I saw about this *was* on Slashdot, but I don't remember seeing this important factoid - it was all about spreading the wear (which, I presume now, is no longer necessary?)

Re:Flash drives sure have come a long way

[vidarh]

I do think the GP overstated the case quite a bit, but even cheap flash units have an expected number of erase cycles (NOT writes - it's NEVER been writes that's the issue, but the number of ERASES of each erase unit) in the 1 million+ range. One thing worth noting is that in a typical flash system you will not erase ANY units until the disk is near full - you can do incremental writes to the same erase unit until it's full, and you'll remap blocks so subsequent writes to the "same block" will be written to a free block.

On a unit of a few GB you'll have at least thousands of erase units, so even pretty basic wear leveling on low end flash units will mean you'll never experience any problems. Add to that that flash rarely dramatically fails (you'll usually start seeing problems with bits that don't get erased on individual erase units that are getting close to failure, so if your system checks for that and keeps a reserve it can quietly take the offending block out of use before any read/write errors occur), and you can rely on flash, probably more so than a normal harddisk. Flash failure modes are essentially trivial to avoid and far less of a problem than with normal harddisks.

I've had many harddrives fail on me, but I've used various embedded systems using flash and never managed to wear out a flash chip. Properly designed flash based SSD's can/will be a big step up in terms of reliability.

Who cares about the HD noise

[AmigaHeretic]

When you have that Intel chip that needs a fan that sounds like the Swamp Boat from the WaterBoy movie with Adam Sandler.


Every time I turn on my laptop and I hear the fan spin to life I think of that swamp boat and I can hear,

"My Mama says that alligators are ornery because they got all them teeth and no toothbrush."

"Wrong! Alligators are aggressive because of an enlarged medulla oblongata."

"No, Colonel Sanders, you're wrong. You're all wrong. Mama's right. Mama's right!"

"Somethin' wrong with his medulla oblongata."

Re:Who cares about the HD noise

[daddyrief]

And I just had mod points 30 mins ago :/...

Re:Who cares about the HD noise

[DigitAl56K]

I agree to an extent, but Intel does have to be given some credit for the Core 2 Duo's. Until my most recent custom-build PC all of my boxes have been powerful but noisy. Then the Core 2 Duo came along and promised up to 40% better performance than comparably clocked chips from AMD/Intel's older lines, and they also ran much cooler. I snapped up one of the cheapest models and stuck a Thermaltake Big Tyhoon on it (the original model, not the one with the speed control dial which spins up intermittently, making it completely useless for noise control), and it's so quiet that I can barely hear a whisper from the system. Granted, a big typhoon is not going to fit inside a laptop, but if you want a quiet laptop the lower clocked Core 2's should make that possible without sacrificing performance.

Of course, cases that are poorly designed such that when you sit with the laptop in your lap/on a bed cover the vents get covered are always going to be a problem.

Re:Who cares about the HD noise

[megaditto]

Lapton in one's bed? That's a joke, right?

Re:Who cares about the HD noise

[AmigaHeretic]

Well, in all seriousness, I have bought 2 Core 2 Duo laptops with in the last month. One an HP and one a Gateway (ok a so maybe you could call the Gateway a "Craptop" ) :) The "normal" fan noise is not that noticable, but when you do most anything (these both have Vista on them) of that starts to take "some" processing power, then the fan kicks to it's high speed mode and DANG!! they are loud. They're is just no other way to put it. I mean it's not "I need ear plugs" loud or anything, but if your in a quiet place like a library, people mike glance. No big deal, but I would say I have no such complaints about any modern HDs I've heard in laptops.

Re:Who cares about the HD noise

[CCFreak2K]

Not exactly an objective comparison, but my Dell Inspiron with a Celeron-M under the hood emits less heat and fan noise than my Averatec with an Athlon XP-M.

Re:Who cares about the HD noise

[networkzombie]

You got a +3 insightful for quoting Adam Sandler in the WaterBoy. It should be +5 funny. Something is seriously busted.

Re:Who cares about the HD noise

[JamesTRexx]

Something is seriously busted.

"You must be new here."

(Somebody had to say it...)

Re:Who cares about the HD noise

[RAMMS EIN]

``When you have that Intel chip that needs a fan that sounds like the Swamp Boat from the WaterBoy movie with Adam Sandler. ''

I have an idea! Maybe the people who care about hd noise _don't_ have Intel chips that need a fan that sounds like the Swamp Boat from the WaterBoy movie with Adam Sandler!

Re:Who cares about the HD noise

[Dogtanian]

I agree to an extent, but Intel does have to be given some credit for the Core 2 Duo's. Until my most recent custom-build PC all of my boxes have been powerful but noisy. Then the Core 2 Duo came along and promised up to 40% better performance than comparably clocked chips from AMD/Intel's older lines, and they also ran much cooler. This is because the "Core" architecture (*) is derived from the energy-efficient Pentium M (i.e. mobile) design, rather than the power-guzzling P4 "Netburst" architecture.

I remember reading articles (before the Core-based chips came out) suggesting that the "mobile" Pentium M was actually a good choice for a low-power, low-noise *desktop* PC. In fact, I seriously considered building my next PC around one. I guess Intel figured the same thing.

The most surprising thing is that the Pentium M itself (and hence its derivative, the Core architecture) was actually based upon the older Pentium-II/III core, and not the (then-current) P4-Netburst. Essentially, this means that the much-hyped P4/Netburst was a dead-end, designwise.

I believe that Intel were facing problems with power consumption when trying to scale up Netburst, and this (combined, I assume, with the surprisingly impressive performance of the Pentium-M) was what led to them abandoning it.

(*) Found in the "Core 2" family onwards but, perversely, not the original "Core" chips (i.e. Core 1)

Re:Who cares about the HD noise

[32771]

No. You need something warm beside you in bed.

Re:Who cares about the HD noise

[vidarh]

What are you doing on Slashdot? Seriously.

Re:Who cares about the HD noise

[AmigaHeretic]

>>I have an idea! Maybe the people who care about hd noise _don't_ have Intel chips that need a fan that sounds like the Swamp Boat from the WaterBoy movie with Adam Sandler!

Uhh... I didn't even RTFA and I can cleary see it says he bought a >>Dell Latitude D830 that has a flash HD in it. All Dell laptops have Intel chips. And yes the D830 has a Core 2 Duo. Firgured it would pretty unlikely they were going to offer a something higher end with a "new" 64gb flash HD and a "celeron" based CPU.

Re:Who cares about the HD noise

[joeyteel]

You should tell that to my Dell Inspiron 1521 that all Dell laptops have Intel chips. It would laugh at you since it has an AMD Turion64 x2 in it.

Re:Who cares about the HD noise

[AmigaHeretic]

I would open the laptop up and check. It's probably just a celeron. We all know Dell is in bed with Intel!!

Ok ok, point taken, but still clearly the article summery gives the model and it's a Core 2 Duo. The guy was asking why I was assuming the people that would get a laptop with this Flash drive would get it with a Intel chip. And that exactly what the article is about.

Hard disk sounds are useful

[rubenerd]

I equate the audible sounds of hard disks to pain in us mere humans: it's not pleasant, but it's damned reliable indicator of when something is wrong.

Re:Hard disk sounds are useful

[Peet42]

Fifteen years ago, when I was a computer engineer, I could switch on a laptop with a dead screen and from the noises the hard drive made I could tell if the machine was otherwise healthy, what the OS was and whether or not it had an anti-virus installed. When you can't see the screen it becomes important to know at what point it's safe to power down the machine...

Re:Hard disk sounds are useful

[Culture20]

It's a reliable indicator of when something is wrong in a way that flash drives can't have something wrong...
pinging of seeking track 0: platter HDD only
scraping sound of misaligned read-heads: platter HDD only
unmistakable sounds of 10k SCSI drive spin up/down: platter HDD only
It's kind of like saying the reason you like a gasoline car versus an electric car is because the bad sounds a gasoline engine will make when it starts failing. (of course, as a pedestrian, I happen to like gas engines for the noise they make in normal usage. HDDs don't tend to run me over though, so I can live without the sounds.)

You can make quiet laptops with conventional HDs

[93 Escort Wagon]

My old Dell Inspiron was pretty noisy - mainly the cooling fan - but so far the Macs I've owned have been very quiet. My Powerbook's fan didn't come on all that often; when it did the sound was rather high-pitched, but not loud. This Macbook Pro, though, is extremely quiet. I have to really be pushing it to hear the fans come on at all - that doesn't happen more than once every couple of days.

In any case it's hard to understand how anyone could be put out by hard drive noise on a laptop. Certainly I've heard a few older desktop machines where the HD sounded like gravel in a tin can; but I can't recall ever hearing a laptop - Mac or PC - where the HD noise level was anything noticeable. On this computer I have to strain to hear it at all, even in a quiet room.

Building your own Solid State Drive

[badzilla]

I saw this link via The Inquirer - how to build your own from a bunch of RAIDed CF cards.

Assemble a SSD disk for less than 75 Euro
http://www.guru3d.com/article/memory/506

noise

[xushi]

Eventually it'll get dusty in there from the cpu and/or laptop fans, to the extent that they'll always be running at a certain speed which creates constant noise, or starts/stops/starts/stops/... every minute or two. I wouldn't base any of my decisions on noise at all..

Love my Sandisk Cruzer Ti

[DigiShaman]

I've got a Sandisk Cruzer Titanium 4GB flashdrive. I've been using it since the day they were available in stores. As such, I've always kept it with me in my pocket. This wouldn't be a problem, except it's always exposed to heat and sweat. To make matters worse, I've thrown my pants in the washer and dryer *with* the drive about five times now.

It still works. I write and erase on the flashdrive almost daily. I easily copy 100MB files to it. No problems detected yet.

Dare I wash it for the sixth time?

DIY Compact flash in RAID good for 133MB/s

[distantbody]

...There is a pci card available that will take four CF cards and RAID-0 'em into a single drive. I was going to get it myself, but I slightly resented the poky pci bus at 133MB/s. In the future if they made one with 8 CF slots and put it onto a pci-e bus, I could then use 8 40MB/s CF cards in RAID-0 to make a single flash drive with 320MB/s on tap. That's a sweet-sweet prospect, but as yet they haven't made such a product.

As a T42 owner...

[c.r.o.c.o]

I agree that the 40Gb 5400rpm Hitachi hdd it came with is LOUD. It clicks and grinds whenever there is any disk activity. However I upgraded to a Seagate 80Gb 5400rpm Seagate drive, and it's absolutely silent. I've also had Toshiba hdds in my other laptops, and they were silent as well.

I don't completely disagree with the reviewer. Solid state drives are faster, consume less battery, etc. But they are a LOT more expensive and are not necessarily less noisy. It's just a matter of buying a decent hdd.

Uppety Up

[newr00tic]

+5 isn't enough for this one; - re-code the slashdot sourcecode ASAP to allow further up-moddage(!)

Re:Uppety Up

[i.of.the.storm]

Actually, that's a pretty good idea, although I think the limit keeps people from wasting modpoints on obviously good posts and spreads the mod point love around.

FYI

[v(*_*)vvvv]

I've been looking for Flash drives for a while now, and it seems the best option at the moment perfomance wise is the Mtron Pro series at 120Mb/sec. But 32 gigs will cost you 1129.

Which is why I wonder how Dell and Apple and everyone else can provide 64 gig SSD options for their notebooks for less than 1000 dollars. None of the brands had any info on the specs of the drives easily locatable, and I am worried these are the low end SSDs that are much much slower... which is a shame, because performance driven users would probably prefer better drives even for an extra 500 to 1000 dollars.

Later this year Intel is suppose to release 200Mb/sec 80G drives, which is really the only reason I haven't gotten one yet, but I have yet to find any info on pricing.

Re:FYI

[Mike1024]

I wonder how Dell and Apple and everyone else can provide 64 gig SSD options for their notebooks for less than 1000 dollars. None of the brands had any info on the specs of the drives easily locatable, and I am worried these are the low end SSDs that are much much slower Well, one option is economies of scale - Apple could get 1,000 SSDs at $1,000 (total $1,000,000) but it's unlikely 'Rocketdisk' has that much spare cash to spend. Rocketdisk might keep 5 in stock at $2,000 (total $10,000). Also, if SSD supplies are limited Apple and Dell and IBM might be buying up the entire supply - big contracts tend to get preferential treatment compared to small contracts, for obvious reasons.

Fortunately, you don't have to worry about not knowing the performance of these SSDs because there are reviews aplenty comparing the macbook with and without the SSD. Here is one such review. Here's the summary: a bunch of benchmark bars showing the macbook air SSD outperform the macbook air sans-SSD; but being outperformed by the macbook and macbook pro without SSDs.

The Good:

        * No more entire machine slowdowns! (well, most of the time...)
        * Speedy boot, disk read, and build times

The Bad:

        * The moderate gains in everyday use aren't worth $1,300 And now you know!

Re:FYI

[v(*_*)vvvv]

Rocketdisk is a retailer, so they get their supply from Mtron at wholesale. At this time though it doesn't look like any of the big brands are sporting Mtron drives (even the non-Pro series which are cheaper). You are correct though in that the big brands are buying up Samsungs entire supply. Samsung has yet to release a retail line of their SSDs.

SSD outperform the macbook air sans-SSD; but being outperformed by the macbook and macbook pro without SSDs. I never looked into macs, but this Mac review confirms my suspicion that the Air has a lower-end SSD drive. It isn't a surprise though. I mean, a 64Gig high end SSD would buy you the notebook, so that is expecting too much. It is suprising though how slow the standard hard drive is.

In anycase, I am sure I am not alone in wanting a 120mb/sec drive even if it means half the capacity, and the big brands don't seem to mind misinforming their consumers a little to sell what they got (business as usual).

Bullshit... Modern Laptop drives are...

[Hymer]

...almost 100% silent (at least Hitachi's Travelstar drives), most of the noise is generated by the fan(s).

First off...

[Talgrath]

How the fuck is this news? Second off: Yeah, the clicking can be annoying; but I'm pretty sure they didn't put that in there just to tell your drive is working. It's a part of accessing the drive memory.

Bad Experiences with Flash

[RAMMS EIN]

I don't have experiences with actual flash drives, but I tried running my Linux system off flash cards. It was horrible. The system used an USB flash card reader (or two, probably), a 1 GB card for the root partition, and an 8 GB card for /home. Both of these were pretty high speed MMC cards.

I had expected the system to be snappy, because I mostly perform many reads on small files. Flash memory has low seek times, right? Well, the system was noticeably slower running from flash than it had been running from harddisk.

But that wasn't the worst. It was usable. The real problem is that the system would lock up after about two to three days. More flash card usage means it locked up sooner. Apparently, there is a limit on the number of writes (or maybe reads, too) you can do in one of the subsystems (USB, mass storage, maybe somewhere else). After that limit is reached, every flash card access failed with an I/O error, and the system would be dead soon enough.

I asked around for help, but didn't find any pointers, much less a solution to the problem. I reverted back to using harddisks.

Re:Bad Experiences with Flash

[pembo13]

There are several optimizations that would should do when running Linux, esp. a full non slimmed down distro, on a Flash card. The easiest thing to do would be to do just check out what the OLPC guys have done.

Re:Bad Experiences with Flash

[flux]

I've personally had good experience with a flash-based root file system, but I implemented it with a ide-CF adapter. I picked a bit too slow card for the root, though, but the point of the device is to provide the contents of 4 hard drivers software-raid5'd over the network, so it isn't such a big deal. I don't have swap in the machine.

I've earlier set up a box to boot from a ide-flash device, while the actual root file system was on LVM. It worked nicely too.

Re:Bad Experiences with Flash

[RAMMS EIN]

``I've personally had good experience with a flash-based root file system, but I implemented it with a ide-CF adapter.''

I am thinking of trying that, too. It works reliably, right?

Re:Bad Experiences with Flash

[KokorHekkus]

The number of limited write cycles is not a problem on flash SSD because they've been designed to use wear levelling. There are several ways to implement this but one example would be to just keep track of the number of writes to each physical block on the drive. When a certain number of writes is reached on a block the drive swaps the that block gets swapped with one of the least used ones. This of course occurs on a drive level so the user never notices it. So you get pretty much an uniform amount of wear to all physical blocks.

So the number of writes to a flash drive with good wear levelling is approximatly writecycle-limit*the-number-of-physical-blocks

Re:Bad Experiences with Flash

[RAMMS EIN]

This is not about wear, as far as I know. The flash cards work fine. It's just that Linux starts giving I/O errors after some time. Reboot the system and all is fine again. I think there is a software limit somewhere.

Re:Bad Experiences with Flash

[flux]

Uptime 29 days, no crashes ever. The device is not much older than 1.5 months old, though..

Re:Bad Experiences with Flash

[DGolden]

Perhaps it's (gasp) a kernel bug. If it's reproducible, consider reporting it (including all hardware you use, even seemingly irrelevant stuff - in my experience, most usb problems, apart from being hardware-specific, are actually caused by buggy mobos). Mentioning it in /. comment is unlikely to get it fixed.

love the noises

[rice_burners_suck]

I don't know how I'll ever use Windows again. I'm so accustomed to the way the hard drive grinds until the platter is most likely covered in scratches. When it finally settles down, you move the mouse and it starts again. It's almost as if the software is designed to scrape any magnetic material off the platters of your hard drive. A hard drive that takes away these sounds and makes things faster is a real bummer. When using Windows, you're supposed to "please wait while this," "please wait while that," "please wait," "please wait," "please wait," all while listening to the beautiful music of your hard drive crunching away. This is one of the biggest benefits of Windows, and one that inferior systems like a Mac running Mac OS X, definitely lack. On a Mac, you push a button and it just happens. Where's the joy of waiting for it to happen? Where's the suspense?! Faster hard drives without all the crunching noise will take something very beautiful away from mankind.

"...hasn't emitted a sound in three days..."

[Peet42]

Now if only we could say the same about most Flash animations...

Bee bop bap

[Sobieski]

Vzoooot. Cronk, cronk, cronk. Zip, zip. Im the Scatman!

Gurlagurlagurla...zweeee.

Audio Feed

[aero2600-5]

I've just tried Slashdot's Feedburner Audio (the robotic overlord voice) for the first time, and it made my morning. Listening to the robots trying to say "Vzoooot. Cronk, cronk, cronk. Zip, zip. (Pause.) Gurlagurlagurla...zweeee." was just too funny.

Re:Audio Feed

[spandex_panda]

hey I just had to try it, and you're right its pretty damn funny! especially the "Gurlagurlagurla..zweee." but. The robotic overlord sounds rather bored of his job. A bit more like a robotic depressed sociopath.

So you like the HDD noises, eh?

[FoolsGold]

Well I assume you're not using Vista (and to a lesser extent, older versions of Windows). All that prefetching/superfetching/indexing and undocumented accesses that Windows enjoys doing is something that I could certainly do without hearing. A SSD would achieve this quite nicely.

Re:So you like the HDD noises, eh?

[waterbear]

Yes: I've always wondered what Windows 2000 and upwards is doing when it grinds the disk so much on startup.

On or two linux distros also seem to have much more disk access than others:

What's all this for, besides prematurely wearing out the disk?

-wb-

Didn't catch that.

[stimpleton]

"Vzoooot. Cronk, cronk, cronk. Zip, zip. (Pause.) Gurlagurlagurla...zweeee.

How's that go again?

Tag this article

[Anonymous Coward]

cronk gurlagurlagurla vzoooot zip zweeee

Some tips...

[woolio]

Did you put your swap partition, /tmp, /var/log, or /var/tmp areas on the flash disk? That would be a good way to kill it quickly...

Also installing/running something like Gentoo on flash wouldn't be pretty...

There is also a "noatime" option to filesystem mounts that prevents the filesystem from being modified on every *read*.

Re:Some tips...

[fast turtle]

Also installing/running something like Gentoo on flash wouldn't be pretty... Sorry to disappoint you but a properly configured Gentoo setup works even better on a flash drive then you'd expect. The main issue is how much disk thrashing goes on when compiling and for that aspect, you simply use a normal HD.

Using Gentoo, what I've found works nicely is a 2GB flash drive that holds only the /boot / partitions as both are rarely written to. What this does is improve the boot times of the system by anywheres from 2-4x making my system boot into run level 5 in less then 15 seconds (cheap stop watch timing). As to Gentoo thrashing a drive when installing/compiling, you don't use a flash drive for that, instead use a standard HD because it offers better performance and longevity. The other reason is that unless you're installing, gentoo doesn't thrash a drive anymore then any other OS except Vista.

Re:Some tips...

[Wonko the Sane]

As to Gentoo thrashing a drive when installing/compiling, you don't use a flash drive for that, instead use a standard HD because it offers better performance and longevity.

Unless you're short on ram, mount /var/tmp/portage as tmpfs. It doesn't get any faster than that.

Re:Some tips...

[Workaphobia]

That's interesting, I didn't consider the possibility of going hybrid, leaving all non-essential stuff on hard disk and putting the system partitions in flash. Maybe I should give that a shot next time I upgrade. What do you think is the performance difference between using an expensive SSD and a normal CF card and IDE adapter?

Congratulations!

[Anonymous Coward]

You've just won a FREE iPod nano!

No real comparison ?!

[Nicolas Pillot]

I cannot understand why so many people write articles comparing things, items and so on, without measures, and compare it using non-identical environmental data (different laptops, etc.). What's the real thing behind this ? Give an overall idea ? Well, at least it gives information in some sort of way. Rant of the day.

Re:No real comparison ?!

[ColdWetDog]

I cannot understand why so many people write articles comparing things, items and so on, without measures, and compare it using non-identical environmental data (different laptops, etc.). What's the real thing behind this ? Give an overall idea ? Well, at least it gives information in some sort of way. Rant of the day.

Weekends.

Vzoooot. Cronk, cronk, cronk. Zip, zip.

[bromodrosis]

Sounds like you have Don Martin's old HDD.

Re:DIY Compact flash in RAID good for 133MB/s

[Shemmie]

A friend and I were discussing this at work the other day. On Amazon I can get 1 GB USB mem stick for 1 penny. So we thought "OK, now what - we'll need to daisy-chain USB hubs". So we went looking, and lo, a number of 1 penny USB hubs. 127's the maximum number of USB devices per port if I remember rightly, so all in for under £2. Sure, there'd be a bit of cable - so we decided if each USB Flash Drive had an LED, we could use the wiring as year-round Christmas tree lighting.

It's on the to-do list.

@ parent 'perk'

[Lucid_Loki]

/obligatory spelling daemon/ 'Perk' here is a mis-spelling used commonly enough to be accurately understood, yet incorrect nonetheless. 'Perq' is short for 'perquisite' roughly 'for the person' from Latin to mean that which benefits someone, usually used to refer to employee benefits. Shortening it to a 'k' makes absolutely no sense unless you assume that most people only ever hear the shortened version and then write it phonetically. Disclaimer: Not intended as flamebait or unnecessary spelling Nazism.

Not me

[WindBourne]

I converted the root on my home server (4G) as well as one of my client systems (32G) to Flash. The server not only is faster, but 5 degrees lower in temp. The reason is that I did some adjustments and now the other 4 drives sleep. As to the client system, it is a bit slower (had a fast drive, but now has a 1x flash), but it is quiet and also about 2 degrees cooler. I like that a lot.

What about maximum cycles?

[JamesTKirk]

The author failed to mention the biggest drawback of flash memory: there is a maximum number of times that any area of flash memory can be written to. I haven't seen any analysis on this, but I suspect that you will reach the maximum cycles on the flash memory long before the mean failure time of a hard drive.

Re:What about maximum cycles?

[vidarh]

You assume incorrectly. Back in the 80's there might've been some truth to it. The typical limit today is 1m+ erase cycles (not writes) per erase unit, and a typical large flash units will have many thousand erase units. With a reasonably sized modern unit with proper wear leveling you can write tens of MB/s sustained for more than a decade and still not start seeing failures due to wear. That's without the system keeping a reserve to remap failing units.

Gurlagurlagurla...

[Dystopian Rebel]

is the sound made by a /.er who looks up from his Zaurus for a moment and notices there are girls in the room.

The joy of money

[nurb432]

When you choose a 60gb flash over a 60gb HD, you lose quite a bit of it.

Don't turn down the fans!

[Spazmania]

I just hope the folks making laptops don't take the noise reduction too far, like what happened with the server manufacturers. They turned down the fan speed to reduce the server noise but in doing so they increased the internal server temperatures. This reduced the reliability. I don't particularly mind the noise but I dislike having my stuff break.

Fantastic Onomatopoeias!

[malevolentjelly]

The onomatopoeias in this article would make even the likes of Crazy Frog jealous.

I've been using an eeepc with a flash drive for a while and it is indeed eerily silent. I generally have to check the LED's to see what state the system is in.

If you're into loud drives, though- might I recommend magnetic tape, a Chobit, Robbie the Robot, or Seagate.

Moron

[Ancient_Hacker]

Those zoot-zoot noises are not the hard disk, moron. They're the CD drive. Getting a flash disk is not going to make any difference in those noises.

How about Parallelism

[MrSteveSD]

With flash, surely you can just make use of parallelism to increase write speeds. e.g. Writing to 5 flash chips at once etc.

Obviously

[Thumper_SVX]

This guy is comparing SSD's with hard drives that are several generations old at this point. If you try a more modern hard drive then you'd be surprised at how little noise comes from it. My first gen Macbook Pro came with a 100Mb drive that you could barely tell was doing anything unless you stuck your ear up to it. I recently upgraded it to a 320Gb Western Digital and it's quieter still... not to mention faster. It has slightly reduced my battery life, though.

SSD's are better though, that's true. However, since my hard drive is quieter than the fans in my laptop is that really going to be a compelling reason for me to upgrade? There's been a lot of work on quiet hard drive technology in the last couple of years that's really impressive. Audio is not my reason to upgrade.

Reviving old laptop? CF card+adapter.

[David Gerard]

A 32GB CF card costs around £75. A CF-IDE adapter costs about £1. Combine them for your old laptop (which is slow anyway) and you'll have a slow-but-cheap SSD.

Re:DIY Compact flash in RAID good for 133MB/s

[mariushm]

The shipping and handling kills your idea. Sorry...

Please consult a dictionary

[Foerstner]

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/perk

It's not a "misspelling," it's a recognized and widely accepted shortened form and has been around (so the Merriam-Webster people say) since at least 1824.

And frankly, the word "perk" is what most people would see or hear; I see "perk" (meaning a boon) in all sorts of formal (legal, business) and journalistic writing, far more often than even "perquisite." Perhaps the most obvious being The Perks of Being a Wallflower.

Welcome to English, where word origins are not necessarily reflected in spelling.

Flash drives break easily

[Simonetta]

I've had four flash drives in the past year. Every one lasts only a couple of months with light use before they stop being seen by different PCs. I have no idea why this happens. I can upload files from my home PC onto the flash drive OK but the PC at the library can't see these files or even acknowledge the presence of the flash disk (after working fine the day before).

  Another problem with using flash drives as a form of virtual memory is that the ICs inside are basically EEPROMS and they can only be written to 10,000-50,000 times before they fail. A program that does a lot of memory swapping can 'wear out' a flash disk in a few months.

Good Vibrations

[thatblackguy]

I too like the sound and the vibration that you can feel from outside the case. I can tell which drive it's accessing, if there's something wrong or it's not doing anything at all by just placing my hand on the case. Plus the expresson on people's when I touch the case and say something like "it's accessing d: drive" is priceless. It also sounds like the dude's drive is on its last legs.

Don't use USB

[Stephen Ma]

The USB card reader is your bottleneck; those things are notoriously slow. If you want speed, connect some Compact Flash cards to your ATA or SATA controller with a cheap adapter. Another advantage of using your ATA/SATA controller is that you can enable DMA.

from the title

[justleavealonemmmkay]

from the title, I thought this was about a pervert's exhibitionism spree

Re:Silence is normal with Macs

[toddestan]

You've obviously never used a G4 "Windtunnel" Mac.

Throughput is a trivial problem

[Pinky's Brain]

For large drives you have to put quite a few chips on anyway, put them on in parallel ... and hey presto there you have the throughput you want. No amount of drives however will lower the access times of hard drives to 0.1 ms.

Re:DIY Compact flash in RAID good for 133MB/s

[vidarh]

You do realize those "1 penny" offers are pure scams with extortionate delivery charges, right? When it looks too good to be true it usually is, and all that.

Please consult a real dictionary

[Lucid_Loki]

From a real dictionary (oed): 'The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology perk(s) sl. abbr. of PERQUISITE(S)). XIX.' Where sl. means slang. Sure a slang word can be used in this context and I even pointed out that it was an widely used spelling. I stand by the assertion that 'perq' is the correct abbreviation. From your own link: Main Entry: 3perk Function: noun Date: 1824 : perquisite --usually used in plural Welcome to the world, where the American is not always correct simply because it is the most popular.

Re:Please consult a real dictionary

[Anonymous Coward]

I stand by the assertion that 'perq' is the correct abbreviation.
Your own "real dictionary" spells it as "perk"... How Lucid?

Re:You can make quiet laptops with conventional HD

[Anonymous Coward]

You're neglecting to think about the higher percentage of aspies/near-aspies here due to the geek-genes. ;-)

Re:DIY Compact flash in RAID good for 133MB/s

[Culture20]

Software RAID over USB saturates the bus very quickly. I'd keep to two or three 8 or 16 GB sticks if I were you.

My wierd setup - mp3 player attached to laptop

[saigon_from_europe]

My old laptop had quite typical HD, but still quite noisy if you work at night while all background house noises are gone. So if I wanted to listen mp3, instead to listen if from the HD, I would attach my mp3 player to an USB slot, and then plugged headphones to the laptop. I could use the mp3 player directly, but this way I did not have to worry about batteries. (And Winamp is a better mechanism to control your playlists than player's internal software.)

So why aren't U buying?

[heroine]

Obviously consumers aren't doing their duty since Micron is still a house of pain.

T42 !quiet ... period

[binaryspiral]

Comparing a new laptop with a six model old laptop isn't very sporting.

The T61p that I use on a daily basis only makes noise if I playing a modern 3D game... and then it's just the fan making a barely audible sound.

I've frankly never heard the 100GB 7200RPM Sata drive... ever.

Reliability?

[Moe1975]

That is what I want to know fellows . . . how do these compare to what we currently have in terms of failures?

pure genius

[Jarik C-Bol]

only a true /. article is going to have the last line be " Vzoooot. Cronk, cronk, cronk. Zip, zip. (Pause.) Gurlagurlagurla...zweeee. "

Hard Drives vs Flash Drives

[ozogg]

Flash drives sound - well, flash. 'cept has anyone done their homework on the lifetime number of writes, reads and rewrites achievable on each of these NAND species. Now do a little arithmetic, Value = Storage BYTES * life-writes-reads / $$$ / access speed and see what you really get !!

non visual?

[HunkirDowne]

.wav file: record your favorite hard disk chirping and thrashing then play back on light and heavy "disk" activity (respectively).

and is it 'noise' if you like the sound?

if a married man is alone in the forest and he says something, is he still wrong?