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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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: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.

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

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.