Sandisk Flash Based 32GB HDD for Laptops

[andy04]

Sandisk has launched a 32GB Flash based HDD. Available only to manufacturers. I wounder how fast it is... They say its its gonna cost few hundred $s more.

But its finally out... Soon it will be fast and cheap, maybe by the end of this year all laptops will have them!

I wounder how long it will be b4 it matches the capacity of magnetic HDDs...

 

[willtriv]

We can all dream, but I think it still has a long way to go. I do imagine that mechanical storage will be phased out in the future (long term), but the biggest problem is capacity. Electronics seem to have a faster growing rate of speed than space. There were studies that showed typical hard drive speed increase over the last 10 years has been fairly sluggish with regards to speed vs capacity, but the capacity grows quite quickly. Maybe they will both have their own roles in the future of computing.

Does anyone know the power consumption of the new 32gb flash drive compared to a 30gb 2.5 in drive?

 

[Goi]

Samsung already have these, and I believe they can squeeze more than 32GB in a 2.5" form factor since they already have 32GB in a 1.8" form factor. Speed wise it's limited by the ATA66 interface, and is maxing out at over 50MB/s read and 30MB/s write. Access times are sub ms so that's an order of magnitude faster than rotational HDDs. With another consumer brand like Sandisk entering the playground, I guess we can expect prices to fall

btw power consumption is MUCH lower in SSDs.

 

[wearetheborg]

flash based storage can be written to only a limited number of times. How does this drive get around that problem ?

 

[willtriv]

Are you saying ipod nano's have a limited amount of times you can erase and refil the memory? I've never heard of such a thing, I've seen people use usb flash drives for upwards of 5 years. I guess this isnt the same as running postgres with 1200 transaction a second on an ssd though.

 

[andy04]

ya, thats seems to be a bit unrealistic. even though there might be a limit but that would go well beyond the normal lifetime of the product. All products have such limits...

 

[wearetheborg]

Originally posted by: willtriv
Are you saying ipod nano's have a limited amount of times you can erase and refil the memory? I've never heard of such a thing, I've seen people use usb flash drives for upwards of 5 years. I guess this isnt the same as running postgres with 1200 transaction a second on an ssd though.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_memory

"Another limitation is that flash memory has a finite number of erase-write cycles (most commercially available flash products are guaranteed to withstand 1 million programming cycles). This effect is partially offset by some chip firmware or file system drivers by counting the writes and dynamically remapping the blocks in order to spread the write operations between the sectors, or by write verification and remapping to spare sectors in case of write failure."

For ipods, it makes no difference. But for OS operations when things are being swapped out etc, I'm not at all sure if 1 million cycles is good enough.

 

[Goi]

They get around the limit by wear leveling algorithms. Any decent NAND flash controller will have some sort of wear leveling algorithm that spreads the reads and writes across the entire NAND flash array. The MTBF of these SSDs are actually higher than comparable 1.8"/2.5" HDDs. The Samsung's is 1M while the Sandisk is 2M hours. Regular laptop HDDs usually do 300K hours.

 

[andy04]

Originally posted by: Goi
They get around the limit by wear leveling algorithms. Any decent NAND flash controller will have some sort of wear leveling algorithm that spreads the reads and writes across the entire NAND flash array. The MTBF of these SSDs are actually higher than comparable 1.8"/2.5" HDDs. The Samsung's is 1M while the Sandisk is 2M hours. Regular laptop HDDs usually do 300K hours.

I am guessing that 1M = 1 million
in that case - wow!! thats really interesting to know.

 

[RaiderJ]

I think the biggest benefit will be improved battery life. Maybe we'll get a 10 hour laptop?

 

[Ruptga]

Here's DT's article about it
http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=5568

It says the drive pulls .4W when active (normal laptop HDD pulls 1W) and the drive doesn't use any electricity when it is not being accessed.

"When it comes to performance, the SanDisk SSD Ultra ATA 5000 offers sustained reads of 62MB/sec and can complete random reads at 7300 IOPS (512-byte file size). The drive can boot Windows Vista Enterprise on a notebook in 35 seconds and has an average access time of 0.12 ms."

Sounds to me like it takes a regular laptop drive, rips its legs off, lights it on fire, and kicks it in the head a few times. Granted this going to add about six hundred dollars to the final cost of the laptop, but what do you expect for the latest and greatest? I'm just hoping that in two or three years there'll be an 80GB version that only adds a hundred bucks to the final cost, I could deal with that.

 

[Goi]

Yup, 1M = 1 million. I'm really excited about SSDs as well. I hope they take off in a couple of years...They can only get faster, bigger and cheaper