With flash memory, an "erase" cycle is independent of a "write". In fact, one of the reason the TRIM command was implemented is because you can write in relatively small blocks, but you can only erase fairly large pages. So if you just want to write a block of 512 bytes to a page that is in use, you need to do a read-erase-modify-write cycle.
That's exactly why TRIM is there - to give wear-leveling controllers more knowledge of what is unused.
1) Spread wear more evenly 2) Pre-erase unused pages (You can individually write blocks, but you can only erase pages that consist of many blocks) to avoid read-erase-modify-write cycles
Are you sure that the flash drives are actually looking at NTFS datastructures? Due to the proprietary and complex nature of NTFS, this sounds like something drive manufacturers would avoid like the plague. It's highly dangerous, and I would personally avoid any drive that actually did such a thing. (What will it doe if a filesystem other than NTFS is present and it thinks it is NTFS? It's a recipe for epic data-loss firmware bugs on a grand scale that would instantly ruin a drive manufacturer's reputation if they made the slightest mistake in such firmware.)
Specifically, have you done NTFS delete activities from an OS that *does not support TRIM*. It MUST NOT support TRIM, otherwise you'll have a drive that has a pile of outstanding TRIM commands when you power down the drive and then run your tests on a write-blocked machine.
Why? Because most likely, a drive is not going to act on a TRIM command immediately if it is busy and a lot of TRIM commands are received (such as someone doing a mass-delete of files). However it will probably write to a datastructure somewhere that it had an outstanding TRIM command (takes far less time to record a list of pages to be erased than to actually erase the pages.) So if a drive receives a pile of TRIMs and is then powered down, when it wakes up it might begin acting on those TRIMs it hadn't taken care of before.
As others have said, in the case of SSDs, anyone competent is going to bypass the SSD controller and readout the contents of the flash chips directly.
"Actual erasing things would slow down your computer quite a bit." True for spinning magnetic hard drives. Not true for SSDs with some idle time to erase unused blocks in the background due to how flash memory works. Hence the creation of the ATA TRIM command, which lets the OS inform the SSD that a block is no longer being used.
I've seen references that this has been added to the latest standard, but I haven't found any concise details.
The TRIM command was added, which lets the OS signal that a previously used block is free and can be erased - if you TRIM everything the drive will probably erase all blocks (mapped and unmapped).
I haven't seen any details of the "sanitize" command I've seen a few references to.
It used to be the drive remapping meant that if you deleted something (or even overwrote it), there was no guarantee it would be gone - SSD controllers do wear leveling to avoid having part of the drive get used excessively. Forensic analysts could go pull the raw data from the NAND flash.
The problem was that the wear leveling algorithms need a "free block" pool to work well. Drives that have been used heavily deplete the free block pool, and the drive slows down. For a long time, SSDs would have no knowledge of whether a file had been deleted or not.
The ATA TRIM command was added for just this purpose - with TRIM, when the OS deletes a file that references a block, it can tell the SSD controller that those blocks are free. The SSD controller will then begin erasing those blocks in its free time. (SSDs can be written one block at a time, but must be erased one page at a time. A page consists of multiple blocks. Oh, and I may have page/block swapped here.) So you get a lot of performance improvement by having a bunch of pre-erased pages - these can just have individual blocks written without a read/erase/modify/write on a whole page.
Pre-TRIM, SSDs were probably great for forensic analysts. Post-TRIM, SSDs are not. Oh, and I think the latest ATA standard added a "sanitize" command to make life easier for information assurance types, for whom SSDs have always been a pain.
Friday was always where Sci-Fi put their best shows (SG-1, SG:A, etc. I'm fairly certain BSG aired on Fridays too.). That's where the whole "Sci-Fi Fridays" concept came from.
This was even in the pre-DVR era - nowadays timeslot matters even less. The only "death slot" is evenings after major sporting events, which seem to almost universally run late. Networks should just block in some sort of arbitrary padding, rather than pushing the whole damn schedule back and borking everyone (especially DVR users).
Caprica died for a number of reasons, Friday night timeslotting and a long midseason break were not among them. Sci-Fi did the long midseason break for nearly all of their shows, I believe it is related to the cost-saving measure of international syndication - many other countries have much shorter seasons. 10-13 shows per season is common in Britain and Australia (they call each season a "series", often leading to freakouts about a show ending in the USA), as opposed to the usual 20-26 in the USA. I've noticed a lot of USA shows have started moving to shorter seasons, probably for this same reason. (Human Target's first season lasted only 10-13 episodes leading to lots of cancellation speculation.)
SG:A was a long running successful show. Sometimes there is only so long that you can run a show before it becomes formulaic and boring and plots get recycled.
SG:U had plenty of issues, again timeslotting wasn't one of them. It was much maligned for its content, although I think a lot of people feel that it improved over the season. I think it was just starting to hit its stride when it got cancelled.
The biggest problem is that in trying to appeal to a broader demographic, SyFy has alienated their traditional core audience (Caprica and SG:U). In doing so, they wound up competing against a lot of networks they used to not compete against. It is VERY difficult to try and broaden your demographic without alienating your core base. (I think one of the few attempts to do this that has been received well was the J.J. Abrams reboot of Star Trek.)
That's a big worry I have. In many of these countries, will we get democracy, or will we get "democracy" a la Romania or Iran?
Look at Iran - they have elections, but the election process is so controlled/corrupted that it is a meaningless sham.
Romania's democratic process was pretty clearly corrupted in its early days - the National Salvation Front was pretty much former lower-level members of the same Communist Party that Ceausescu led.
My home town used to have a fairly major teenage hangout - the Bridgewater Sports Arena.
Ice skating, laser tag, and a great arcade.
However, the place has been going downhill over the past decade. Almost no public skating sessions, and the arcade floor is half empty. The games that are there are old and the whole place is run down.
It's a negative feedback loop - if it's run down and uncool, people don't go there. If people don't go there, it becomes more run down and uncool.
It would probably be out of business if not for the laser tag (can't replicate that with consoles) and the ice rinks (hockey = $$$).
The article makes claims that Intel "Is delaying" USB 3.0 "until 2010" to help Light Peak get off the ground.
Problem 1: It's 2011. You can't be "delaying something until 2010" in 2011... Problem 2: USB 3.0 is deployed already. So they clearly can't be delaying it.
Which leads to my first thought as far as the "idea" presented above.
By cooling some of the magma, it would be solidified into rock, making the rock cap above the magma chamber thicker. However I don't think it would be possible to cool ALL of the magma, plus there is the question of what happens when magma with very high gas content gets cooled.
A possible outcome might be that an eruption is delayed, but when the cap finally gives way it will be MUCH worse because the pressures required to start an eruption might be much higher.
1) Dirt 2) Being highly reflective like that makes you vulnerable to other less sophisticated and frequently more effective things than high-power lasers, like radar-guided interceptor missiles. We have not seen very many examples of lasers used as direct "destroy it" weaponry because it's actually pretty hard to destroy something at a distance with a laser. ICBMs are a good candidate because they are frequently in operating conditions close to the limits of the structural materials - add a little heat and it behaves as the "straw that broke the camel's back". However, a super-shiny ICBM becomes easier to hit with stuff like Aegis BMD.
In this particular case, the development isn't really a defense against laser weapons - it appears to be a tuned perfect absorber with zero reflectivity.
1) Almost any of the SSDs currently on the market will smoke any of the above drives performance-wise, even the 10k RPM ones 2) This particular SSD is a fraction of the size of those drives. You just listed a whole bunch of 3.5" drives, these are significantly smaller than even 2.5" notebook drives.
The NEC is a much better situation than average, but it's still vastly inferior to the HSR approaches that have actually worked in other countries.
It has too many curves and too many narrow-clearance areas. Amtrak tried to work around this with tilting cars, but excessive safety paranoia caused the weight of the cars to skyrocket and the maximum tilt angle to get decreased significantly, resulting in very low speed limits over most of the NEC.
Go figure, the extra safety paranoia that caused the weight increase is probably what caused a major safety problem (the Acela brake fiasco).
Also, most of the NEC IS shared - it just happens to be shared with other passenger services like NJTransit and Metro-North.
The NVidia problem was an issue with packaging reliability, extremely similar to the Xbox 360 RRoD problem. It also is a case where NVidia thought there were no problems and didn't realize there were problems until after lots of failure reports started rolling in. In the days of RoHS, reliable packaging and soldering of BGA chips is a VERY tough problem.
This is a whole other situation - Intel caught this in advance, and has identified the problem down to the specific transistor level. They know exactly what is likely to fail and what isn't.
Really, this is more similar to NVidia or ATI selling "defective" chips with a few bad pixel pipelines as lower-end chips with those pixel pipelines disabled.
Some manufacturers are likely to offer motherboards with a discrete controller on the motherboard to offer additional ports. Manufacturers have been doing this for ages. My file server from 2006 has two SATA ports from its NVidia chipset and 4 from an on-motherboard but off-chipset Silicon Image controller.
In fact even before the flaw was announced I believe a number were offering this simply so they could advertise more than two 6 Gbps SATA ports.
It's simple - The manufacturer needs to commit to a situation where there is NO way a user can connect anything to the affected ports. Which is what Intel is requiring them to do.
Most low to midrange laptops are in this category - They have only two SATA devices (one hard drive, one optical drive), and no physical provisions for adding another. These laptops could contain a defective chip and it would not make ANY difference because there is no way to connect to the affected SATA ports. (Higher-end laptops support dual hard drives or eSATA and we won't see this with SNB unless they fall into the next category...)
A manufacturer can also produce a motherboard that uses the chipset SATA for the first two ports and an offboard controller for any additional ones - Manufacturers were probably doing this already in order to offer six 6 Gbps SATA ports instead of 2 6 gig and 4 3 gig ports. Users with a configuration like this also will not ever be affected by the issue.
Also, if you read things in more detail, a single cube doesn't replace that cabinet. An array of cubes does.
One thing that is bothering me is their incredible power consumption reduction claims. The bulk of the power consumption of a cell tower is in the power amplifiers used to transmit - Due to the extreme linearity requirements and high peak-to-average ratios for CDMA and OFDM signals (Remember, UMTS uses a CDMA modulation scheme even though it isn't part of Qualcomm's CDMA2000 protocol/modulation suite), efficiencies in the high teens are considered pretty good (Although over the past five years I wouldn't be surprised if they've broken into the 20s). To reduce power consumption as much as they claim, they would have to achieve a significant advance in power amplifier efficiency.
Not counting the power consumption claims issue, the rest of it is quite interesting - someone finally deployed a fully distributed phased array antenna + software defined baseband solution outside of an academic research lab environment.
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Slight issue with your terminology:
With flash memory, an "erase" cycle is independent of a "write". In fact, one of the reason the TRIM command was implemented is because you can write in relatively small blocks, but you can only erase fairly large pages. So if you just want to write a block of 512 bytes to a page that is in use, you need to do a read-erase-modify-write cycle.
That's exactly why TRIM is there - to give wear-leveling controllers more knowledge of what is unused.
1) Spread wear more evenly
2) Pre-erase unused pages (You can individually write blocks, but you can only erase pages that consist of many blocks) to avoid read-erase-modify-write cycles
Wrong. Many SSD controllers contain extra flash storage to support error checking/correction and handle bad blocks.
Just like nearly all magnetic hard drives have slightly higher capacities than advertised/reported/usable - bad block mapping.
Note: TFA is Slashdotted, so I can't access it.
Are you sure that the flash drives are actually looking at NTFS datastructures? Due to the proprietary and complex nature of NTFS, this sounds like something drive manufacturers would avoid like the plague. It's highly dangerous, and I would personally avoid any drive that actually did such a thing. (What will it doe if a filesystem other than NTFS is present and it thinks it is NTFS? It's a recipe for epic data-loss firmware bugs on a grand scale that would instantly ruin a drive manufacturer's reputation if they made the slightest mistake in such firmware.)
Specifically, have you done NTFS delete activities from an OS that *does not support TRIM*. It MUST NOT support TRIM, otherwise you'll have a drive that has a pile of outstanding TRIM commands when you power down the drive and then run your tests on a write-blocked machine.
Why? Because most likely, a drive is not going to act on a TRIM command immediately if it is busy and a lot of TRIM commands are received (such as someone doing a mass-delete of files). However it will probably write to a datastructure somewhere that it had an outstanding TRIM command (takes far less time to record a list of pages to be erased than to actually erase the pages.) So if a drive receives a pile of TRIMs and is then powered down, when it wakes up it might begin acting on those TRIMs it hadn't taken care of before.
As others have said, in the case of SSDs, anyone competent is going to bypass the SSD controller and readout the contents of the flash chips directly.
"Actual erasing things would slow down your computer quite a bit."
True for spinning magnetic hard drives. Not true for SSDs with some idle time to erase unused blocks in the background due to how flash memory works. Hence the creation of the ATA TRIM command, which lets the OS inform the SSD that a block is no longer being used.
I've seen references that this has been added to the latest standard, but I haven't found any concise details.
The TRIM command was added, which lets the OS signal that a previously used block is free and can be erased - if you TRIM everything the drive will probably erase all blocks (mapped and unmapped).
I haven't seen any details of the "sanitize" command I've seen a few references to.
It used to be the drive remapping meant that if you deleted something (or even overwrote it), there was no guarantee it would be gone - SSD controllers do wear leveling to avoid having part of the drive get used excessively. Forensic analysts could go pull the raw data from the NAND flash.
The problem was that the wear leveling algorithms need a "free block" pool to work well. Drives that have been used heavily deplete the free block pool, and the drive slows down. For a long time, SSDs would have no knowledge of whether a file had been deleted or not.
The ATA TRIM command was added for just this purpose - with TRIM, when the OS deletes a file that references a block, it can tell the SSD controller that those blocks are free. The SSD controller will then begin erasing those blocks in its free time. (SSDs can be written one block at a time, but must be erased one page at a time. A page consists of multiple blocks. Oh, and I may have page/block swapped here.) So you get a lot of performance improvement by having a bunch of pre-erased pages - these can just have individual blocks written without a read/erase/modify/write on a whole page.
Pre-TRIM, SSDs were probably great for forensic analysts. Post-TRIM, SSDs are not. Oh, and I think the latest ATA standard added a "sanitize" command to make life easier for information assurance types, for whom SSDs have always been a pain.
I don't anyone with a sin level of over 9000 could win.
Friday was always where Sci-Fi put their best shows (SG-1, SG:A, etc. I'm fairly certain BSG aired on Fridays too.). That's where the whole "Sci-Fi Fridays" concept came from.
This was even in the pre-DVR era - nowadays timeslot matters even less. The only "death slot" is evenings after major sporting events, which seem to almost universally run late. Networks should just block in some sort of arbitrary padding, rather than pushing the whole damn schedule back and borking everyone (especially DVR users).
Caprica died for a number of reasons, Friday night timeslotting and a long midseason break were not among them. Sci-Fi did the long midseason break for nearly all of their shows, I believe it is related to the cost-saving measure of international syndication - many other countries have much shorter seasons. 10-13 shows per season is common in Britain and Australia (they call each season a "series", often leading to freakouts about a show ending in the USA), as opposed to the usual 20-26 in the USA. I've noticed a lot of USA shows have started moving to shorter seasons, probably for this same reason. (Human Target's first season lasted only 10-13 episodes leading to lots of cancellation speculation.)
SG:A was a long running successful show. Sometimes there is only so long that you can run a show before it becomes formulaic and boring and plots get recycled.
SG:U had plenty of issues, again timeslotting wasn't one of them. It was much maligned for its content, although I think a lot of people feel that it improved over the season. I think it was just starting to hit its stride when it got cancelled.
The biggest problem is that in trying to appeal to a broader demographic, SyFy has alienated their traditional core audience (Caprica and SG:U). In doing so, they wound up competing against a lot of networks they used to not compete against. It is VERY difficult to try and broaden your demographic without alienating your core base. (I think one of the few attempts to do this that has been received well was the J.J. Abrams reboot of Star Trek.)
That's a big worry I have. In many of these countries, will we get democracy, or will we get "democracy" a la Romania or Iran?
Look at Iran - they have elections, but the election process is so controlled/corrupted that it is a meaningless sham.
Romania's democratic process was pretty clearly corrupted in its early days - the National Salvation Front was pretty much former lower-level members of the same Communist Party that Ceausescu led.
I forget who to attribute it to, but the quote "There is no patch for human stupidity" remains as appropriate as it ever did.
My home town used to have a fairly major teenage hangout - the Bridgewater Sports Arena.
Ice skating, laser tag, and a great arcade.
However, the place has been going downhill over the past decade. Almost no public skating sessions, and the arcade floor is half empty. The games that are there are old and the whole place is run down.
It's a negative feedback loop - if it's run down and uncool, people don't go there. If people don't go there, it becomes more run down and uncool.
It would probably be out of business if not for the laser tag (can't replicate that with consoles) and the ice rinks (hockey = $$$).
The article makes claims that Intel "Is delaying" USB 3.0 "until 2010" to help Light Peak get off the ground.
Problem 1: It's 2011. You can't be "delaying something until 2010" in 2011...
Problem 2: USB 3.0 is deployed already. So they clearly can't be delaying it.
Which leads to my first thought as far as the "idea" presented above.
By cooling some of the magma, it would be solidified into rock, making the rock cap above the magma chamber thicker. However I don't think it would be possible to cool ALL of the magma, plus there is the question of what happens when magma with very high gas content gets cooled.
A possible outcome might be that an eruption is delayed, but when the cap finally gives way it will be MUCH worse because the pressures required to start an eruption might be much higher.
1) Dirt
2) Being highly reflective like that makes you vulnerable to other less sophisticated and frequently more effective things than high-power lasers, like radar-guided interceptor missiles. We have not seen very many examples of lasers used as direct "destroy it" weaponry because it's actually pretty hard to destroy something at a distance with a laser. ICBMs are a good candidate because they are frequently in operating conditions close to the limits of the structural materials - add a little heat and it behaves as the "straw that broke the camel's back". However, a super-shiny ICBM becomes easier to hit with stuff like Aegis BMD.
In this particular case, the development isn't really a defense against laser weapons - it appears to be a tuned perfect absorber with zero reflectivity.
The impression I get is that they have managed to achieve an ideal absorber for a specific frequency.
That's what a classic black body is, but there is nothing in the real world that behaves this way.
1) Almost any of the SSDs currently on the market will smoke any of the above drives performance-wise, even the 10k RPM ones
2) This particular SSD is a fraction of the size of those drives. You just listed a whole bunch of 3.5" drives, these are significantly smaller than even 2.5" notebook drives.
The NEC is a much better situation than average, but it's still vastly inferior to the HSR approaches that have actually worked in other countries.
It has too many curves and too many narrow-clearance areas. Amtrak tried to work around this with tilting cars, but excessive safety paranoia caused the weight of the cars to skyrocket and the maximum tilt angle to get decreased significantly, resulting in very low speed limits over most of the NEC.
Go figure, the extra safety paranoia that caused the weight increase is probably what caused a major safety problem (the Acela brake fiasco).
Also, most of the NEC IS shared - it just happens to be shared with other passenger services like NJTransit and Metro-North.
Intel caught it before any end users saw a failure to my knowledge.
NVidia (8600M fiasco) and Microsoft (Xbox 360 RROD) didn't catch theirs until customers started raising a stink about abnormally high failure rates.
So yes, Intel caught it well in advance of users actually seeing any failures.
The NVidia problem was an issue with packaging reliability, extremely similar to the Xbox 360 RRoD problem. It also is a case where NVidia thought there were no problems and didn't realize there were problems until after lots of failure reports started rolling in. In the days of RoHS, reliable packaging and soldering of BGA chips is a VERY tough problem.
This is a whole other situation - Intel caught this in advance, and has identified the problem down to the specific transistor level. They know exactly what is likely to fail and what isn't.
Really, this is more similar to NVidia or ATI selling "defective" chips with a few bad pixel pipelines as lower-end chips with those pixel pipelines disabled.
This isn't just a recommendation, it's a requirement.
As in: Promise to only ship unaffected configurations, or we're not going to ship you any parts.
But a number of boards already do this so they can offer more than two 6 Gbps SATA ports.
Some manufacturers are likely to offer motherboards with a discrete controller on the motherboard to offer additional ports. Manufacturers have been doing this for ages. My file server from 2006 has two SATA ports from its NVidia chipset and 4 from an on-motherboard but off-chipset Silicon Image controller.
In fact even before the flaw was announced I believe a number were offering this simply so they could advertise more than two 6 Gbps SATA ports.
It's simple - The manufacturer needs to commit to a situation where there is NO way a user can connect anything to the affected ports. Which is what Intel is requiring them to do.
Most low to midrange laptops are in this category - They have only two SATA devices (one hard drive, one optical drive), and no physical provisions for adding another. These laptops could contain a defective chip and it would not make ANY difference because there is no way to connect to the affected SATA ports. (Higher-end laptops support dual hard drives or eSATA and we won't see this with SNB unless they fall into the next category...)
A manufacturer can also produce a motherboard that uses the chipset SATA for the first two ports and an offboard controller for any additional ones - Manufacturers were probably doing this already in order to offer six 6 Gbps SATA ports instead of 2 6 gig and 4 3 gig ports. Users with a configuration like this also will not ever be affected by the issue.
Also, if you read things in more detail, a single cube doesn't replace that cabinet. An array of cubes does.
One thing that is bothering me is their incredible power consumption reduction claims. The bulk of the power consumption of a cell tower is in the power amplifiers used to transmit - Due to the extreme linearity requirements and high peak-to-average ratios for CDMA and OFDM signals (Remember, UMTS uses a CDMA modulation scheme even though it isn't part of Qualcomm's CDMA2000 protocol/modulation suite), efficiencies in the high teens are considered pretty good (Although over the past five years I wouldn't be surprised if they've broken into the 20s). To reduce power consumption as much as they claim, they would have to achieve a significant advance in power amplifier efficiency.
Not counting the power consumption claims issue, the rest of it is quite interesting - someone finally deployed a fully distributed phased array antenna + software defined baseband solution outside of an academic research lab environment.