How do you get around the fact that it would be illegal to have Windows installed on more than one of those flash cards? Buy a license for each?
I never advocate violating the terms of a license agreement in as much as the terms of the agreement are binding in your jurisdiction. Spending the time coming to an understanding the nuances of each license and the fees for consulting your attorney in this regard are just part of the cost of using commercial software. Yes, if you need more than one license for Windows you should buy the licenses you need. Or skip it and use free stuff as much as you can.
What if you want to work and play a game simultaneously? Work and music? Copy/move a file from one flash card to another?
I'm sure you're bright enough to figure this stuff out.
How do you quickly search and access a single file that may reside on any of those cards? Keep a file database on each card? Swap them out until you get the right one?
I did say I keep the data on the network, didn't I? (reviews) Yes, I did. If I need to take my files somewhere off the network I prepare in advance and know where I put them. Otherwise I would not know when one was lost.
Imagine for a moment that your boot media, OS and apps are on an SDHC card. Naturally these are made to pop out. For gaming you can pop in your gaming boot chip. For work you can swap in the work boot chip. You can fit a terabyte of these things in your pocket and they're really quite durable. Since they boot in just a couple seconds it's not a big deal to switch. I like keeping the functions separate, and I can use Clonezilla to take a waypoint image of a card and save it to a share as system backup or to try out risky things. They do sell a 32GB chip but they're spendy right now. By Christmas they should be more reasonable. Flash media right now is doubling at a faster pace than anything else, and it likely will continue to do so for some time so if your target image size is 64GB, you won't have an unbearable wait before they're more reasonably priced. I should warn you though, if your OS has a huge image and it has to process many times more data than another OS just to start, performance will lag.
I put colorful stickers on mine - it makes finding the right one really convenient.
For data I have an assortment of media, from more SDHC cards and pen drives to external USB 2.5" drives to a monster 1TB eSATA drive for big needs. Frankly though I do my best to keep my data in the server where it's better protected and reliably backed up. Most people aren't going to need all this stuff. It's all about what works for you.
I think before I tried to modulate a signal to carry data on a high tension wire carrying 50kV or more, I would rather wrap a fiber optic cable around it. Or just put it on the same towers. A couple hundred strands should do it.
It's time to call bullshit. You've objected to this like five times already and I've made all of your objections silly. Could you at least disclose for us which company you're defending here?
I'm not even going to justify this objection with an answer because it's "Change! Change is bad!"
We have fast machines now and pulling off human friendly UI effects like that on the iPhone ain't cheap.
Actually, the iPhone is a fairly low power device and its effects and then some are no problem. It does not have 32GB of storage. Compiz is far more capable even than Vista's desktop and lovely but if you're wedded to the Jobs & Gates platforms, you can't have it. Not yours. Sorry. Maybe next decade when Microsoft and their vassals have thoroughly embraced "compatibility".
At the silicon level we're talking about wires that are maybe 45nm wide by perhaps 500nm long. We can afford the space they take up and the time it takes a charge to traverse them relative to the alternative we're talking about, which is a spinning physical disk with magnetic pattern on it read by a physical head that must overcome inertia to move back and forth.
More wires means they need more space, which means the wires have to be longer. Longer wires use more power as plain resistance, and also being more susceptibe to noise they need more power for the same s/n ratio.
These "wires" are nanometers in width and length, and by careful design they can be avoided altogether. Are we even talking about the same level of engineering? I'm talking at the silicon level here.
Indeed -- though remember that the interface, too, costs money. So faster media will cost you more.
No, this is a myth. Production efficiencies make the engineering effectively free. Faster media costs more because you can charge more for faster media. That's all.
Problem is, of course, that the OS probably isn't ready for "all of it".
That's easy enough to fix. You just patch the OS. It shouldn't take more than a few days if you have the source. Not having the source makes the question more problematic. You would have to convince the vendor to support the change. Then again, releasing the tech and letting the market sort that out is a good strategy for every question in this realm.
There's no good reason for your SSD to come perfectly honest about that either.
Is there a reason for it not to?
Yes. I'm going to leave the answer to this question as an exercise for the readers.
I just posted it and already I have to update it. You'll find that as the feature size shrinks the power requirement shrinks also. That means that you have ample room in the thermal specification for the improvements I have written about above. If you need help with this, you can always contact me via gmail.
You're neglecting the fact that more data lines take more power and add expense and difficultly in packaging (expense).
No, I'm not. To access the same amount of data in the same amount of time requires the same amount of power. My suggestion does increase the possible net power over time based on an increase in performance. Did you hear? Users expect that. It's... predictable and linear.
it's pretty presumptuous to think that every one has the same needs/preferences as you.
I've been called presumptuous before. It doesn't bother me. That's the price I have to pay to school people on how stuff works. The thing is, I didn't say this would suit everybody. I said it would suit most everybody. The difference is that the people whose needs exceed the usual should expect to pay more. In this case, they should expect to exit the sweet spot and pay a lot more for the bleeding edge. To them it's worth it. For most folks, the sweet spot is a nice place to be.
You can get a 320GB USB powered 2.5" drive for cheap. They'll be selling them in your 7/11 soon, but you can get them at your favorite department or office supply store now. If your data needs are high (and mine are - I capture server images on one of mine), it'll deliver your data as fast as a laptop drive can. On days when you don't need to access your media library or capture system images to get your job done, you can leave it in your pocket and experience the joys of low power usage. Ain't choice great?
So it boils down to folks that can't get their apps installed in 16GB. For those few they do offer a 32GB SDHC for $230 delivered. That's a lot more, but it's not out of the realm of reasonable if you have those special needs. 12 months from now that'll be $80, and three years from now it'll be offered in the MicroSD form factor for your phone.
This is actually the reason I did a whole lotta googlin' and a whole lotta reading on what others had gone through in doing a project such as this.
I do this on a regular basis. For home desktops on LAN I like low power units that PXE boot to LTSP for a Myth or Ubuntu desktop. I've given up on fan noise -- it ruins the computing experience for me these days. Notebooks I'm going with 30GB IDE drives this year because they came with them, but will probably bump that to 320GB before Christmas for magnetic media because my laptops are older. But if I was getting a new laptop it would be all SSD or SDHC even now, with external 2.5" USB drives for the bigger data. The dual core Atom Netbooks are looking sweet for Q4. I find myself booting Ubuntu from the pen drive more and more often, just because it's ready to rock in four seconds. USB 2.0 is fast enough for data. The lack of moving parts is a big win for flash media. The torque from a minor bump on a 2.5" centrifuge clipping 5000 RPM is pretty huge. 16GB is enough for OS&Apps. Any more than that and image storage is a bear. I keep system images of my machines using Clonezilla to make rebuilding easier, and I like a lot of waypoint snapshots.
It was looking for a while like CF was going to win here. Compact flash interface is perfectly compatible with IDE, so it makes a good intermediate step so I agree with you there. 1" hard drives did look for a while like they were the answer in the CF form factor. The thing is that MicroSDHC is about the size of four grains of rice and is available in 8GB sizes already. It's easy to see that the Compact flash form factor isn't going to be needed in the long term. Also, IDE is being deprecated in favor of SATA, which suits SD better. Still if you have a CF camera this is not a bad choice.
IDE media already lies to the controller about where the content is on the drive to compensate for densities beyond the original design and bad sectors. There's no good reason for your SSD to come perfectly honest about that either.
That handles bad sectors, wear levelling, bad block failover, and a number of other issues.
Now, about bandwidth. Solid State Drives are by definition, solid state. The way solid state devices work is that they are accessed and give up their data in real time. It takes a few nanoseconds to heat up the address lines and drag the data out of the hardware storage. If, for example, it takes too long to drag a sequence of bits out of the flash, there's no reason not to access many bits in parallel in the electronics on the device. So, given an infinite interface, how much data can you pull out of a properly designed SSD in a millisecond? All of it. And that should be fast enough for this decade, at least. The reason why many of these devices are bandwidth constrained is due to the limited thinking of the engineers who envisioned them as temporary storage for camera photos and external pen drives. No such limits are in fact present in the technology.
If you're an engineer and you're looking at these constraints, you need to ask: "Well, whose fault is that and what can be done to change it?"
My state is trying out regional broadband served by the power district. I think fiber options from all the major vendors will be coming shortly. After all, if they lose these customers they're probably gone forever.
It's not like bandwidth costs a lot of money. If I moved closer to work I could have 100Mbps for $50/mo. Get this - my wife won't move because the area where I can get that from the power district is "too rural". So much for that density argument, eh?
Anyway, kudos to the power districts that are willing to step up and say: "People need broadband. If you won't serve 'em, we will."
That was just the cheapest one today. There are dozens there and one will suit. I didn't have time to construct the capacity/price/performance grid and still get a first post. Sorry.
If you need more than 16GB of OS and apps, you don't need a laptop really. Or if you do you're a power user with unusual needs - you're not in the "most people" zone where the price/performance sweet spot is. About 4GB is an XP install with Office, for 8GB you can have Ubuntu and a few hundred of your favorite free apps. If your system image is >12GB, you have other issues and you should expect to pay more. 16GB for OS & apps, 16GB for data is plenty for almost anybody.
Not all SDHC->IDE or SDHC->PCMCIA or SDHC->SATA converters support booting, but most do and most SDHC adapters installed in laptops do support it. You can always try it. The ones that do are quite proud of the fact and so it won't be hard to tell which is which. The performance on these things can be quite fine. I don't know why they don't just put a socket for these things on a desktop motherboard. You have to buy the embedded motherboard for that.
You are of course right. The solar mass stuff was my imperfect recollection of the understanding from >30 years ago.
Only, the odds of this happening are quite spectacularly small.
Small is not nonexistent. I wasn't attempting to mislead - I was just wrong. Being wrong in this one case does take away from the message that I'm trying to keep in front of people: Astronomers and earth scientists believe that global cataclysm has occurred on Earth in the past, and will occur in the future. Although that outcome is unlikely today and tomorrow, even this century, in the fullness of time it's not just likely - it's certain. If we don't get humanity established on some other place in the mean time, it's game over for our species. There isn't any credible disagreement on this issue.
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I never advocate violating the terms of a license agreement in as much as the terms of the agreement are binding in your jurisdiction. Spending the time coming to an understanding the nuances of each license and the fees for consulting your attorney in this regard are just part of the cost of using commercial software. Yes, if you need more than one license for Windows you should buy the licenses you need. Or skip it and use free stuff as much as you can.
I'm sure you're bright enough to figure this stuff out.
I did say I keep the data on the network, didn't I? (reviews) Yes, I did. If I need to take my files somewhere off the network I prepare in advance and know where I put them. Otherwise I would not know when one was lost.
It seems IBM thought it was possible. And then they did it.
Maybe you'll get the next one. Good luck.
It seems IBM has figured this out. How timely, eh?
Imagine for a moment that your boot media, OS and apps are on an SDHC card. Naturally these are made to pop out. For gaming you can pop in your gaming boot chip. For work you can swap in the work boot chip. You can fit a terabyte of these things in your pocket and they're really quite durable. Since they boot in just a couple seconds it's not a big deal to switch. I like keeping the functions separate, and I can use Clonezilla to take a waypoint image of a card and save it to a share as system backup or to try out risky things. They do sell a 32GB chip but they're spendy right now. By Christmas they should be more reasonable. Flash media right now is doubling at a faster pace than anything else, and it likely will continue to do so for some time so if your target image size is 64GB, you won't have an unbearable wait before they're more reasonably priced. I should warn you though, if your OS has a huge image and it has to process many times more data than another OS just to start, performance will lag.
I put colorful stickers on mine - it makes finding the right one really convenient.
For data I have an assortment of media, from more SDHC cards and pen drives to external USB 2.5" drives to a monster 1TB eSATA drive for big needs. Frankly though I do my best to keep my data in the server where it's better protected and reliably backed up. Most people aren't going to need all this stuff. It's all about what works for you.
This works well for me. Your mileage may vary.
I guess I can agree with that. :-)
Urkki,
Sorry. I was responding to a different poster and messed up the context. You I agree with here. My mistake.
I think before I tried to modulate a signal to carry data on a high tension wire carrying 50kV or more, I would rather wrap a fiber optic cable around it. Or just put it on the same towers. A couple hundred strands should do it.
Very nice. Want.
It's time to call bullshit. You've objected to this like five times already and I've made all of your objections silly. Could you at least disclose for us which company you're defending here?
I'm not even going to justify this objection with an answer because it's "Change! Change is bad!"
Actually, the iPhone is a fairly low power device and its effects and then some are no problem. It does not have 32GB of storage. Compiz is far more capable even than Vista's desktop and lovely but if you're wedded to the Jobs & Gates platforms, you can't have it. Not yours. Sorry. Maybe next decade when Microsoft and their vassals have thoroughly embraced "compatibility".
Yes, I do. Do you?
At the silicon level we're talking about wires that are maybe 45nm wide by perhaps 500nm long. We can afford the space they take up and the time it takes a charge to traverse them relative to the alternative we're talking about, which is a spinning physical disk with magnetic pattern on it read by a physical head that must overcome inertia to move back and forth.
These "wires" are nanometers in width and length, and by careful design they can be avoided altogether. Are we even talking about the same level of engineering? I'm talking at the silicon level here.
No, this is a myth. Production efficiencies make the engineering effectively free. Faster media costs more because you can charge more for faster media. That's all.
That's easy enough to fix. You just patch the OS. It shouldn't take more than a few days if you have the source. Not having the source makes the question more problematic. You would have to convince the vendor to support the change. Then again, releasing the tech and letting the market sort that out is a good strategy for every question in this realm.
Yes. I'm going to leave the answer to this question as an exercise for the readers.
I just posted it and already I have to update it. You'll find that as the feature size shrinks the power requirement shrinks also. That means that you have ample room in the thermal specification for the improvements I have written about above. If you need help with this, you can always contact me via gmail.
No, I'm not. To access the same amount of data in the same amount of time requires the same amount of power. My suggestion does increase the possible net power over time based on an increase in performance. Did you hear? Users expect that. It's... predictable and linear.
I've been called presumptuous before. It doesn't bother me. That's the price I have to pay to school people on how stuff works. The thing is, I didn't say this would suit everybody. I said it would suit most everybody. The difference is that the people whose needs exceed the usual should expect to pay more. In this case, they should expect to exit the sweet spot and pay a lot more for the bleeding edge. To them it's worth it. For most folks, the sweet spot is a nice place to be.
You can get a 320GB USB powered 2.5" drive for cheap. They'll be selling them in your 7/11 soon, but you can get them at your favorite department or office supply store now. If your data needs are high (and mine are - I capture server images on one of mine), it'll deliver your data as fast as a laptop drive can. On days when you don't need to access your media library or capture system images to get your job done, you can leave it in your pocket and experience the joys of low power usage. Ain't choice great?
So it boils down to folks that can't get their apps installed in 16GB. For those few they do offer a 32GB SDHC for $230 delivered. That's a lot more, but it's not out of the realm of reasonable if you have those special needs. 12 months from now that'll be $80, and three years from now it'll be offered in the MicroSD form factor for your phone.
I do this on a regular basis. For home desktops on LAN I like low power units that PXE boot to LTSP for a Myth or Ubuntu desktop. I've given up on fan noise -- it ruins the computing experience for me these days. Notebooks I'm going with 30GB IDE drives this year because they came with them, but will probably bump that to 320GB before Christmas for magnetic media because my laptops are older. But if I was getting a new laptop it would be all SSD or SDHC even now, with external 2.5" USB drives for the bigger data. The dual core Atom Netbooks are looking sweet for Q4. I find myself booting Ubuntu from the pen drive more and more often, just because it's ready to rock in four seconds. USB 2.0 is fast enough for data. The lack of moving parts is a big win for flash media. The torque from a minor bump on a 2.5" centrifuge clipping 5000 RPM is pretty huge. 16GB is enough for OS&Apps. Any more than that and image storage is a bear. I keep system images of my machines using Clonezilla to make rebuilding easier, and I like a lot of waypoint snapshots.
It was looking for a while like CF was going to win here. Compact flash interface is perfectly compatible with IDE, so it makes a good intermediate step so I agree with you there. 1" hard drives did look for a while like they were the answer in the CF form factor. The thing is that MicroSDHC is about the size of four grains of rice and is available in 8GB sizes already. It's easy to see that the Compact flash form factor isn't going to be needed in the long term. Also, IDE is being deprecated in favor of SATA, which suits SD better. Still if you have a CF camera this is not a bad choice.
IDE media already lies to the controller about where the content is on the drive to compensate for densities beyond the original design and bad sectors. There's no good reason for your SSD to come perfectly honest about that either.
That handles bad sectors, wear levelling, bad block failover, and a number of other issues.
Now, about bandwidth. Solid State Drives are by definition, solid state. The way solid state devices work is that they are accessed and give up their data in real time. It takes a few nanoseconds to heat up the address lines and drag the data out of the hardware storage. If, for example, it takes too long to drag a sequence of bits out of the flash, there's no reason not to access many bits in parallel in the electronics on the device. So, given an infinite interface, how much data can you pull out of a properly designed SSD in a millisecond? All of it. And that should be fast enough for this decade, at least. The reason why many of these devices are bandwidth constrained is due to the limited thinking of the engineers who envisioned them as temporary storage for camera photos and external pen drives. No such limits are in fact present in the technology.
If you're an engineer and you're looking at these constraints, you need to ask: "Well, whose fault is that and what can be done to change it?"
Ok, that's Hitachi. Is Fujitsu in the house?
My state is trying out regional broadband served by the power district. I think fiber options from all the major vendors will be coming shortly. After all, if they lose these customers they're probably gone forever.
It's not like bandwidth costs a lot of money. If I moved closer to work I could have 100Mbps for $50/mo. Get this - my wife won't move because the area where I can get that from the power district is "too rural". So much for that density argument, eh?
Anyway, kudos to the power districts that are willing to step up and say: "People need broadband. If you won't serve 'em, we will."
That was just the cheapest one today. There are dozens there and one will suit. I didn't have time to construct the capacity/price/performance grid and still get a first post. Sorry.
If you need more than 16GB of OS and apps, you don't need a laptop really. Or if you do you're a power user with unusual needs - you're not in the "most people" zone where the price/performance sweet spot is. About 4GB is an XP install with Office, for 8GB you can have Ubuntu and a few hundred of your favorite free apps. If your system image is >12GB, you have other issues and you should expect to pay more. 16GB for OS & apps, 16GB for data is plenty for almost anybody.
Not all SDHC->IDE or SDHC->PCMCIA or SDHC->SATA converters support booting, but most do and most SDHC adapters installed in laptops do support it. You can always try it. The ones that do are quite proud of the fact and so it won't be hard to tell which is which. The performance on these things can be quite fine. I don't know why they don't just put a socket for these things on a desktop motherboard. You have to buy the embedded motherboard for that.
Try 16GB SDHC, available now for $50, delivered.
One for the OS and apps, one for the data. Need more? Put the other ones in your pocket.
Pray they don't alter it further.
You are of course right. The solar mass stuff was my imperfect recollection of the understanding from >30 years ago.
Small is not nonexistent. I wasn't attempting to mislead - I was just wrong. Being wrong in this one case does take away from the message that I'm trying to keep in front of people: Astronomers and earth scientists believe that global cataclysm has occurred on Earth in the past, and will occur in the future. Although that outcome is unlikely today and tomorrow, even this century, in the fullness of time it's not just likely - it's certain. If we don't get humanity established on some other place in the mean time, it's game over for our species. There isn't any credible disagreement on this issue.