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

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.

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: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: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: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: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