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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[Rolo Tomasi]

man vmstat
man iostat

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.

64 gig

[sleeponthemic]

Ought to be enough for anybody

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.

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!

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."

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

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?

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.