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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. '"
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.
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.