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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. '"
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!
-- Cheers!
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?
Life is not for the lazy.
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.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
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?
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?
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.
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...
Never heard of people working or playing at night, have you?
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.